Today, a typical dream for some teenagers is to make money playing video games, but a different approach is to make money from building one. Senior David DiPaulo-Gross has been able to develop his own Roblox game, Roblox Pro League, and was lucky enough for user interest to rise through TikTok.

Despite playing games for his entire life, DiPaulo-Gross’s interest sparked in Roblox game development eight years ago after having no previous interest.

“What got me into making games on Roblox was my cousin and he’s a bit older than me, but he really was into building,” DiPaulo-Gross said. “I saw him making [games] and I was like, ‘Oh, I want to be creative too.’ So that really got me into Roblox Studio.”

After brainstorming with his friend for potential game ideas, DiPaulo-Gross saw Roblox Pro League as a concept he could connect to.

“I’ve had a lot of business ideas, but none of them have done as well,” Dipaulo-Gross said. “I know I liked [this one] and obviously I wanted to finish it instead of working on something I think other people will like, but I didn’t like it all. I have more incentive to finish it and I just felt more connected.”

After taking inspiration from games like CS:GO and Rainbow Six Siege, DiPaulo-Gross put his ideas into motion.

“It started off with me building an arena and then I had to make the gun and then get the scripts for the gun and then fix any bugs that there were,” he said. “Then I just started polishing and it was like a pretty long process, but then it just started getting better and better.”

After working on his game for a year, DiPaulo-Gross felt confident that it would succeed.

“I always started ideas and never really finished them,” DiPaulo-Gross said, “But I had the idea of like, ‘You know, what? This time’s going to be it and I’m gonna actually push this game out and promote it and make sure people find this.’ Before, I would never finish games and would be like, ‘Here’s an idea,’ and try to make it and give it a couple days and give up. But this time I fully went through and obviously it went well.”

With his long-lasting dream of having a successful game, DiPaulo-Gross finally achieved it after his game hit 500 consistent players and over 1.6 million plays overall.

“Since I’ve been wanting to make a big game for eight years, it made me really happy once something finally worked,” DiPaulo-Gross said. “I was like, ‘There’s no way my game could get that many players,’ but then I realized with promoting and developing my skills, it eventually got there.”

DiPaulo-Gross has been able to use YouTube and Discord to assist in developing his game script.

“I developed my building skills a lot and I was always focused on building, but then I realized to make a game work, you have to know how to code and script,” DiPaulo-Gross said. “So I was like, ‘Okay let me try to learn how to do that’ and that would really push your game to make it a functional game.”

Initially starting his Roblox development in Digital Game Design teacher Ronald Barranco’s game development class, Barranco has had front-row to the birth of DiPaulo-Gross’s game.

“I have been very proud to see David’s development, and the fact that he stuck with Lua programming to make his own Roblox games has been very impressive,” Barranco said. “I use David as an example to my other students of what you can do when you dedicate yourself to something. I hope he sticks with it and makes lots of successful and entertaining experiences for his players.”

With the availability of AI, DiPaulo-Gross has been able to use it to advance the speed and functionality of his games.

“I feel like [AI] will change jobs a lot,” DiPualo-Gross said.  “You have to know more about how it works and how to tell it what to do like perfectly instead of actually coding and just typing everything out because It makes everything ten times more efficient. A script that might take you like five hours to make, it just made in like two minutes. Like it’s a very different process. Over time, it’s gonna get way better and to a point where nobody will ever really have to code normally again. ”

Seeing a future in technology, DiPaulo-Gross plans on becoming a software engineer.

“I did want to [be a game developer] and then I realized it would be more realistic to do software engineering.” DiPaulo-Gross said, “So, what I’m doing is, I’m going to Utah Tech in the fall to get a four-year bachelor’s degree in software engineering and then I want to go down to California to get a job.”