Starting as a 12-year-old playing Jailbreak on Roblox, Hriday Agarwal evolved from a casual player into a respected creator featured in one of the platform’s notable games. Receiving his first Developer Exchange (DevEx) payment at merely 15, he has completed projects with clients worldwide and contributed assets to widely played titles.
His experience reflects how Roblox can shift from a pastime into a professional career, though the transition often requires navigating technical hurdles and cultivating new skills. Many get tripped up trying to elevate their creations beyond free assets, which is where understanding 3D modeling tools becomes critical.
Before diving into development on Roblox, it’s useful to unlock Roblox Studio, explore community-made templates, and familiarize yourself with Blender since custom asset creation is a key skill Hriday highlights. Starting simple and building iteratively helps smooth the learning curve.
Q: What got you interested in level designing and 3D models? Was there a specific game, map, or moment during the pandemic that made you realize you wanted to build worlds rather than just play in them?
Hriday Agarwal’s entry into level design and 3D modeling was largely serendipitous. During the pandemic, he accidentally launched Roblox Studio instead of the game itself, which introduced him to the platform’s creation tools. A friend showing him a basic obstacle course built using a default template made the idea of designing games tangible and inspiring.
Soon he moved from relying on free models to making his own assets, taking influence from games like Jailbreak where map design significantly shapes gameplay. This exposure led him to explore Blender, sparking a deeper interest in 3D modeling and environment creation.
I started with basic obstacle courses using free toolbox models, but soon became more interested in creating the environments and assets myself. Games like Jailbreak were a big influence because the city, roads, buildings, and different locations were fundamental to how you actually played. Eventually, seeing developers use their own custom assets led me to Blender, and that curiosity gradually turned into level design and 3D modeling.
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Q: You started Roblox as a hobby and turned it into a freelance career. How did you make the jump from experimenting in Roblox Studio to mastering professional 3D tools like Blender?
Shifting from Roblox Studio to Blender was a gradual process rooted in curiosity and community guidance. Hriday sought advice from developers on Twitter about acquiring customized assets, which introduced him to Blender, a free and powerful tool. Starting with the well-known Blender donut tutorial, he honed his skills largely through trial and error, leveraging YouTube tutorials and experimentation.
Freelance projects accelerated his learning curve by demanding practical problem-solving rather than following formal courses, leading him to develop extensive modeling experience across thousands of assets. Despite this progress, he notes ongoing learning remains essential due to Blender’s complexity.
Like most people, I began with the famous Blender donut tutorial, and after that it was mostly YouTube, trial and error, and a lot of pressing random buttons to figure out what they did. Control Z was probably my best friend during that time. Freelancing is what accelerated that learning. Every new project forced me to make something I hadn’t made before, so instead of learning Blender through a structured course, I learned by solving actual problems.
Over hundreds of projects and tens of thousands of models, those small lessons gradually built into the skill set I have today. Even now, I wouldn’t say I’ve “mastered” Blender because there’s always something new to learn on it.
Q: As a young Indian developer who has worked on prominent projects, which game or project holds a special place in your heart, and why?
Jailbreak holds a special place in Hriday’s career, representing the game that initially sparked his enthusiasm for Roblox development. Though not his largest endeavor, its significance is personal: he won a community contest that resulted in his design—the Beach Ball Rims car accessory—being added to the game as a seasonal reward.
This achievement symbolized a full-circle moment, connecting his early gaming passion to actual creative contribution, alongside forming a direct relationship with the game’s creators. It exemplifies how impactful early favorites can become pillars of a creator’s journey.
Years later, I entered one of Jailbreak’s community creation competitions, and my Beach Ball Rims car accessory was selected as a winner and added to the game as a seasonal reward. Getting to see something I designed inside the same game that started my Roblox journey was a real full-circle moment.
What made it even more meaningful was eventually getting to know asimo, one of Jailbreak’s creators, and being able to talk with him about my work and having my creation in the game. It may not be the largest project I’ve worked on, but it’s definitely one of the closest to my heart.
Q: When designing for games with hundreds of millions of visits, how much does player feedback influence your level layouts? Have you ever had to completely redesign a map based on how players interacted with it?
Player feedback is integral to Hriday’s design process, shaped by his background in design thinking and UX studies. He adopts an iterative approach, involving player input continuously instead of only after map completion. This includes gathering initial concepts, refining assets, and adjusting levels based on usability and workflow insights.
Rather than wholesale redesigns, most issues are resolved incrementally via iteration, which improves environment clarity, navigation, lighting, and overall player experience. This proactive engagement helps ensure environments remain player-friendly even in games with massive user bases.
From gathering concepts and analysing a game’s existing style to modeling, texturing, and detailing, I regularly take feedback and get go-aheads before moving forward. I also try to bring my own observations from games I’ve worked on or seen succeed in the past.
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Sometimes that means suggesting changes to a layout, but it can also go beyond modeling into UX flows, lighting, navigation, or how clearly the environment guides a player. Because of that constant feedback loop, I rarely reach a point where an entire map needs to be completely redesigned. Usually, problems are caught earlier, and the environment evolves through smaller iterations as we learn what works for the players.
Q: You’ve managed clients across more than 30 countries while living in India. What advice would you give young Indian creators looking to break into the global freelance gaming market?
For young Indian creators aiming at the global freelance gaming market, Hriday emphasizes documenting all work thoroughly. Preserving early projects, even if imperfect, helps showcase progress and build a compelling portfolio. Sharing creations widely, especially on platforms like Twitter, helps attract feedback and professional connections.
He advises seeking mentors and collaborators with more experience to accelerate growth and recommends maintaining genuine passion as clients respond best to authentic enthusiasm. This approach empowers freelancers to establish worldwide reputations while honing creative and technical skills.
Hriday: My biggest advice is something I repeat constantly: DOCUMENT YOUR WORK. I still have my first Roblox games and Blender projects saved, even though some of them are genuinely embarrassing to look at now. Having that record lets you see your progress, build a portfolio, and show people how your skills have developed over time.
Then, post your work. Twitter was especially important for me because it put my work in front of developers around the world. Ask for feedback and actively find people who are smarter and more experienced than you. With social media, it’s easier than ever to put yourself in those rooms and learn from people who have already done what you’re trying to do.
Most importantly, enjoy the process. People can tell when someone genuinely cares about what they’re creating, and in my experience, clients appreciate working with people who bring that passion to the project.
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Q: You’ve mentioned that your creative roots started long before Roblox with LEGOs and robotics kits. How did those hands-on experiences shape the way you visualise environments and 3D spaces today?
Hriday credits hands-on building experiences like LEGOs for developing his spatial visualization and creative imagination from an early age. Such play taught him to break complex shapes into fundamental components, a skill directly applicable when visualizing and constructing 3D models.
Robotics further informed his understanding of how individual parts interconnect, which translates into thoughtful game environments where assets, lighting, and layouts must harmonize. His approach aligns with emerging AI-driven 3D modeling methods that similarly consider objects as assembled building blocks.
If I look at a car, for example, I might see four cylinders for the wheels, a cube forming the main body, then another cube scaled and shaped to create the slanted upper section. Making my own LEGO creations growing up developed that kind of spatial thinking and creative imagination without me really noticing it.
It’s interesting to see how this way of thinking connects with where 3D creation is heading with AI. Roblox’s Cube 3D Foundation Model essentially works with 3D shapes as building blocks, using 3D tokenisation to generate objects and, over time, more complex scenes. That idea of breaking something down into its individual shapes and then bringing those pieces together feels quite familiar to me as someone who has always approached modelling visually.
Robotics took it a step further because I started thinking about how separate components actually work together. That translates into game environments too, where the assets, lighting, layout, and overall visual style all need to work together rather than exist as separate pieces.