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If you’ve logged into ROBLOX anytime in the past couple days, you’ve noticed Murder Mystery. It’s been sitting at the top of the Popular games list, at times hitting roughly 5,000 concurrent players. Based on a popular Garry’s Mod game, the premise is simple: you spawn in a world populated by civilians, a single sheriff, and a killer. What’s the catch? You don’t know who the killer is. It could be anyone.
We got the chance to have a chat with the developer, Nikilis, about this breakaway ROBLOX hit that quickly became the biggest game on ROBLOX — before he was finished making it.
Here’s how the game works: if you’re the killer, it’s your job to stealthily take out every player in the map while avoiding detection. If you’re the sheriff, it’s your job to find and eliminate the killer. Making things more interesting, every person in the game looks approximately the same and leaves colored footprints, which can be used as clues. There’s a social aspect that’s refreshing — chatting is of paramount importance, as players are constantly predicting who the killer is, and sometimes more importantly, where he is on the map.
Murder Mystery isn’t Nikilis’ first brush with fame — his Trucking Tycoon is a popular title that has been played over a million times. But both the exposure and sheer number of place visits Murder Mystery has received (about 150,000 visits in two days) was certainly unexpected, particularly because the game is only partially completed.
I massacred everyone when I finally got a chance to play as the murderer.
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“I have a lot of people in fan groups, but I didn’t expect this to happen. I was testing the gameplay mechanics with a few friends, but they actually weren’t that interested,” he recalls. “So I sat in a server by myself, and posted the link on some my group walls. I finally got one server full and decided to go to bed. When I woke up, there were thousands of people playing the game.”
As mentioned earlier, Nikilis found inspiration for Murder Mystery while playing a Garry’s Mod game, which acts as the baseplate for the mechanics. That baseplate is currently the core of the game, but there are still loads of features and changes on the way. The game’s surge in popularity is unlikely to diminish soon.
Even as just a baseplate, Murder Mystery is an extremely enjoyable experience. It’s coded in a way that makes the game feel almost unnaturally smooth, and the way gameplay collides with psychological elements makes it unlike most ROBLOX experiences.
“I’m glad it got so popular after I had at least finished the core gameplay mechanics,” says Nikilis. “It’s got all the basic gameplay elements I needed. Now I have to try and make the game more unique and stray from the game that inspired me a bit.”
He goes on to list a bevy of features he’s planning on implementing: an official shop where you can buy perks and change the way your knife looks as the murderer. More game modes, including a mode where everyone is a murderer (thus making a literal representation of the word deathmatch), as well as a mode that includes more than one murderer. He’s also planning on giving users the ability to alter their appearance and faces. Oh, and he’ll be adding more maps to supplement the three existing ones. I told him that one of the truly great parts of Murder Mystery is how the chat system is used as a core mechanic.
Examine scenes of murder carefully. Here, we can deduce that the murderer is wearing either a blue, yellow, or pink shirt.
“I planned on chat being a core feature, because everyone is given a random name. People keep telling me to change the chat system or remove it, but I think it’s best the way it is. Dead players can’t talk, which forces the murderers to work quickly. The people who are murdered can’t give anything away.”
When asked about the actual development of the title, Nikilis made a shoutout to user GigsD4X, who created a ROBLOX tool set that was vital in developing the title. It’s basically an all-in-one tool that combines many core elements of building, like resizing, moving, and changing object color.
“I’m not so great at building,” says Nikilis. “But these tools made it so much easier.”
Already a DevEx veteran, Nikilis has converted over a million ROBUX into real-life cash, which he’s saving for future endeavors. He’s also working to determine what sort of Game Passes he can implement that maintain the game’s balance — a difficult task to accomplish, as he doesn’t want to alter the core gameplay mechanics.
In closing, I asked him what makes the ROBLOX version of Murder Mystery even better than the original. This was his response:
“My favorite fundamental change is that everyone can see everyone’s footsteps, rather than just the murderer. This means the murderer has to be even more careful. There’s a lot to come — the game sort of exploded when I wasn’t finished yet, so I’ll be adding more features really soon.”
We look forward to it.
[Editor’s note: I don’t think I’ve ever written the word “murderers” so many times.]
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A mere two months after launch, Murder Mystery has amassed more than six million visits, a stunning accomplishment that has made it a fixture at the top of the ROBLOX game charts. In that time, it has only been bumped from the top slot a few times, which is all the more impressive considering ROBLOX has millions of active users creating high-quality content all hours of every day. Murder Mystery is a phenomenon unlike any other — a surprise hit even to its creator — with serious staying power. What keeps it at the top? And who is Nikilis? Mysteries indeed.
It was only a day after Murder Mystery got the top spot that we wrote about it the first time. He offered then that there were several updates he was planning on making — a store, modified weapons, a way to change your appearance — all ideas that have now been implemented, in addition to even more features he hadn’t thought of at the time.
“I think what’s kept Murder Mystery fresh is the concept of the game itself. It’s really simple and addicting, and players want to stay in the game long enough to actually become the murderer,” he tells me.
It’s worth the wait. Being the murderer or sheriff can take several rounds (your chances heighten the more you play), but, once you’re playing the role, there are few games on ROBLOX that make you feel so powerful. This is why players spend an average of over 20 minutes of playtime per session. (The game peaked in the last two weeks with 83,000 hours of playtime in a single day.)Becoming the murderer is a blast, and there’s something strangely compelling about isolating an innocent from the group and stealthily taking them down. Equally gratifying is defeating the murderer as the sheriff — deciding based on contextual evidence to shoot the right person is rewarding. On the flip side, it can be devastating when you shoot the wrong person (my bad!).
We had a look at Nikilis’s Developer Stats over the last month, and wow. Those weekend spikes are intense.
It helps too that Murder Mystery has been receiving constant and consistent updates. Building upon an already-solid foundation has garnered even more interest from players, particularly those who were curious about recent updates, like Developer Products. Murder Mystery was one of the first ROBLOX titles to have a functioning store with consumable products in it, the day the feature was released.
“Developer Products work too well,” Nikilis told me with a laugh. “I haven’t added any items to my shop since the release, so my game fell off the Top Earning sort. I think a lot of my players are recurring players who either can’t afford to buy things, or have bought everything already. If the latter is the case, then I need to add some updates to get back on the Top Earning sort.”
Nikilis is far from finished with Murder Mystery. He has a lot of goals — he wants to expand the use of the in-game currency he’s created, give players the ability to transfer purchased items between accounts, and even wants to rewrite the source code of the game with a framework that make it easier for him to add new features.
Roblox Murder Mystery Become Murderer Every Time Hacking
“I wasn’t as good at scripting when Murder Mystery released as I am now,” he says. “Just to put people at ease, this doesn’t mean you’ll lose any of the items you currently own in my game. No data will be lost.”
A crazy part of this story is its unexpected success. Murder Mystery started out as one big iterative experiment. He had no intentions of his game becoming the smash hit it is today. Every step that lead to the eventual creation of Murder Mystery started as an experiment.
“This was my progress: ‘I wonder if I can make a random name and coloring system, that would be cool,'” he recalls. “‘Oh it works. I wonder if I could add footsteps, that would be a cool. Hey, works too. I wonder what would happen if I added a knife, and so on.”
Murder Mystery’s success wasn’t accidental, but it wasn’t anticipated. Nikilis is a 16-year-old Canadian and, unlike many successful ROBLOX developers, he isn’t set on pursuing game development. For now, it’s a hobby — one that happens to be very profitable. He’s stashing his earnings from the Developer Exchange program to put toward a car or college tuition.
Will he be the first developer to earn enough ROBUX to cash out at $10,000 per month?
The story of Nikilis and Murder Mystery speaks volumes about what can be done with the ROBLOX infrastructure. Nikilis originally posted this game to his fan group for testing, went to sleep, and woke up to thousands of concurrent players. This just goes to show what can emerge when an interesting idea, a solid work ethic, and ROBLOX’s robust infrastructure collide.