Personal project · Solo · Roblox Studio
New Life: DarkRP
A first-person city roleplay game with a looter-shooter at its heart. Pick a job, earn your money, and chase rare gear where every item is rolled.
- Role
- Designer & developer
- Team
- Solo
- Engine
- Roblox Studio, Luau
- Started
- September 2026
- Status
- In development
01 // Why
Why I made it
I started making games by running Garry's Mod DarkRP servers. New Life rebuilds that game for modern Roblox.
Roblox servers are matchmade with no staff online, and most players are on phones. So the server rules that staff used to enforce had to become mechanics the game enforces itself, and everything had to work on a touch screen as well as a keyboard and mouse.
It's also where my loot box research meets a real game. Crates show their odds, the upgrade wheel's slices are the true odds, and a crate's glow tells you its rarity honestly before the reveal.
02 // How
How I built it
Shooting feels instant but can't be cheated. The shooter sees hits straight away, then the server checks fire rate, ammo, range, and line of sight before any damage lands. Every message from a client goes through one rate-limited networking module, trap remotes catch exploit tools, and a movement check pulls back speed hacks and teleports.
Every item saves how lucky each of its rolls was rather than its final numbers, so its stats are worked out from that luck and the current balance. When I rebalance, every existing item moves with it and keeps its place. Saves are session locked, so items can't be duplicated across servers.
The 85 guns are balanced by time to kill rather than by hand. Each gun has a target time to kill for its rarity, and its damage is solved from its own fire rate, clip, pellets, and reload, so every gun keeps its real-life feel without one clearly beating the rest.
The code is organised like Garry's Mod addons, one folder per system, kept in Git and synced into Studio with Rojo. Systems talk through Garry's Mod style hooks, so analytics and the server dashboard plug in without touching the systems they watch, and every money change is tagged with where it came from.
I built my own tools too: an admin panel modelled on the one I used in Garry's Mod, an owner spawner that makes any item with chosen rolls and grade presets, a photo mode, and test dummies that strafe so slows are easy to see.
03 // Media
Gallery
04 // Items
Rarity, tier, and grade
01
Rarity
What the item is, fixed for life and shown by its colour, from Common up to Legendary. Rarer guns hit harder, and Legendary guns only come from crates.
02
Tier
How far it's been upgraded, from T1 to T6. Each upgrade adds a gem socket and better stats, so a maxed gun can compete with the next rarity up.
03
Grade
How lucky its rolls were, from F to SS, shown as a metal badge. SS is the top 0.1%, about 1 in 1,000.
05 // Systems
What I built
01
Jobs and economy
Jobs ported from my old Garry's Mod server and paid on the in-game clock, money printers that thieves empty and police seize, and items you can put on the ground for sale at your own price.
02
Gun Dealers
Player-run gun shops. Dealers buy shipments at a discount, set their own prices, and sell to other players. Most guns can only be bought through them.
03
Weapons
85 guns based on real firearms across five rarities, each rolling its own damage, recoil, accuracy, fire rate, and clip size.
04
Upgrading
A prize wheel whose slices are the true odds. Every upgrade rolls its own stat boost, and a fail only costs money.
05
Gems
14 gems that burn, freeze, blind, or disarm a target, fire a second bullet, boost stats, or save a weapon on death. Each one has a defensive side in shields too.
06
Crates
Bought with in-game money only, with the odds always shown and a free daily crate. The case cracks in the colour of your best roll, an honest tell, with no rigged near misses or pressure tricks.
07
Progression
Levels 1 to 100, 36 perks in six categories, and 11 keystones that trade a big strength for a real drawback, like Glass Cannon and Vampire.
08
Combat zones
Safe zones, kill-on-sight zones, and arenas. A fight follows two players until a minute passes without a hit, and new players are protected for their first half hour.
09
Movement
Source engine movement rebuilt with Garry's Mod's own numbers, so you can air strafe and bunny hop, capped at 1.5 times your run speed.
06 // Design
The details
01
Rules as mechanics
In Garry's Mod, every job description ended with lines like "Raid: Yes / Mug: No" for admins to enforce. Here they're flags on the job, and the server enforces them itself.
02
Risk you choose
Dying loses your hotbar and the shield you're wearing, but never your inventory. Stashing gear mid-fight takes two seconds that any hit cancels, so players decide what to carry.
03
The new life rule
After dying you can't go back to where you died for three minutes. The spot shows as a red box only you can see, with a countdown.
04
A money sink in every sale
Player sales pay a 5% tax, and only sales over £10,000 earn XP, so trading cheap items back and forth isn't free XP.
05
Dealers sell most guns
Only 25 of the 76 shop guns are open to everyone. The other 51 are Gun Dealer only, so most players buy their guns from other players.
06
Bonuses that can't snowball
Every percentage goes through one master stats file and adds together before it applies, so +50% and +50% is +100%, not 2.25 times.
07
A map bigger than it is
The city is generated from a written plan in Python, and roads between districts bend through tunnels, so you never see how small it really is.
08
Fair nights
Nights are dark but readable, so nobody wins a fight by turning their brightness up. The time is worked out from the server's clock on every screen, so the day costs no network traffic.
09
Built for phones
Most Roblox players are on phones, so every action has an on-screen button, and action buttons only appear when they apply.
07 // So far
What's in it
- 85 guns based on real firearms
- 14 gems
- 5 shields, from Ion to Antimatter
- 36 perks and 11 keystones
- Levels 1 to 100
- An admin panel and owner dev tools
- Two-player tests run on two local clients
- The city is a greybox for now, and guns have no 3D models yet
Contact
Like what you see?
I’m looking for gameplay and systems design roles. Email is the quickest way to reach me.