Who are you, and what do you do? What do you like to do outside of work?

My name is Maciej Lech. I am a Roblox game developer, and I am known as @sleazel in the community. I have developed two major games on the platform, including one moderately popular one known as “Crazy Stairs + VR”. I mostly focus on scripting in Luau (Roblox’s fork of Lua) and build my games from the ground up. Roblox does get a bad reputation among developers (much of it earned), but the engine is great, multiplayer works out of the box, and they host your servers for free.

I treat Roblox development as a hobby. Working with engines like Roblox or Unity allows solo developers to make games that still look and feel great. While I have nothing against collaborations and big studios, I think some of the most unique games out there are made by one person. And I have always preferred working alone anyway.

I am currently a single dad, and one of my kids is severely disabled. I started programming as something I could do from home while still taking care of my son. While Roblox developer payouts are not great, I still find it crazy that I can support my family doing what I love.

I myself do not play many games anymore; I think the last one I played was Robocop: Rogue City, mostly due to nostalgia. I miss the old adventure games, like Monkey Island or Discworld. I think I may make a puzzle/adventure game myself in the future.

My other interests are twisty puzzles (Rubik’s cube variants) and fantasy and sci-fi books.

I used to cycle a lot when I was younger, but I switched to trail walking so I can go out with my son more. He seems to like it a lot, and there are a lot of beautiful trails in England!

What hardware do you use?

I have a metal frame desk with a monitor riser. I am a big dude, so my desk is big too. I need space for all those coffee cups!

I managed to grab the Omen PC (OMEN 40 GT21-1004na) as a bargain one day. It has NVIDIA GeForce RTX 4070 Ti graphics, and the processor is Intel Core i7-13700K. My previous five-year-old Ryzen 5 could not keep up with local multiplayer tests.

Other than the PC, there is nothing too special. I have three 1080p 75Hz Huawei monitors, two Edifier speakers that have seen better times, and a standard Logitech mouse. The coffee warmer is extra handy if I do get into a scripting trance.

I have a very comfy chair from a UK-based company called Slouch. I can sit on it for a prolonged amount of time, and it is ten times better than my previous IKEA one.

And what software?

I have always been a Linux fanboy, but unfortunately, Roblox Studio does not support it. Even if I managed to run it on Penguin somehow, the almost weekly security updates would likely break it, and I wouldn’t be able to do any work. Windows 11 it is.

For programming, I use Roblox Studio. I tried to use extensions like Rojo (which enables GitHub for Roblox), but since I am a sole developer, I found it rather daunting to use. I am perfectly comfortable with programming in the studio directly. Besides, Roblox autocomplete (Intellisense) has become much better recently.

I am also scripting and maintaining a chatbot for my Crazy Stairs Discord community. It is written in Python, and for that, I use Visual Studio Code plus GitHub for version control, as the project is slowly being taken over by one of the fans.

What’s your keyboard setup like? Do you use a custom layout or custom keycaps?

Like I mentioned before, I am a rather big guy. When it comes to typing on standard equipment, I usually have to hunch my back, as my arms are naturally farther apart than those of an average person. I have always found programming uncomfortable just for that fact.

My first attempt at alleviating that was to get the Microsoft Natural keyboard, which was the biggest one I could find. It helped a lot; my posture was better, and I learned how to touch-type QWERTY on it. However, it was far from perfect; I found the left-hand stagger to be idiotic. While the right hand followed the stagger more or less naturally, the left-hand fingers (which do the majority of work in QWERTY) have to curl in a very uncomfortable way. Especially on the bottom row.

While I knew the stagger is a relic from the mechanical typewriters, I have wondered what I could do to make it better. I found some answers at the One-Hand Keyboard website.

It explains something that is known in the alternative layouts community as an angle-mod. Reluctantly, I re-learned QWERTY with this angle-mod, and it helped a lot. But I was not satisfied. The top row on the left-hand stagger was still very weird, and it caused my fingers to push on each other while typing “W,” “E,” and “R.”

It still blows my mind that the majority of people type like this. I decided to say goodbye to the stagger once and for all and bought a Moonlander.

Since that was quite the investment, I decided to go all the way with this. I have ordered blank caps (sculpted) and switched from QWERTY to the Colemak-DH layout, which I have used before on the Microsoft equipment. It took me a big chunk of the summer of 2022 to relearn typing, but it did pay off big time. Not only do I find typing much more comfortable right now, but I also learned how to touch-type symbols and numbers, and to navigate from the home row. (I was only touch-typing letters on my old equipment).

I have since made some modifications to the Colemak-DH to be slightly better for writing in Polish (my first language), without damaging the benefits of typing English too much.

What would be your dream setup?

I would definitely upgrade my screens to 4K, maybe slightly larger. I was thinking of one giant one, but the price and fragility (especially with my kids using my PC sometimes) are probably not a good mix. Roblox has recently uncapped the 60FPS limit, so 120Hz would be nice too.

Making multiplayer games requires coding local and server scripts at the same time, and getting two vertical monitors just for that has sped up my work a lot. Therefore, a fourth screen (maybe above) would not hurt. You can never have too much display space when it comes to coding.

I could also use new speakers, maybe with an extra woofer. The Edifiers have served me well over the years, but it is time to retire them. I cannot imagine coding without some nice ambient music in the background.

The PC itself is good enough, and I have no plans to upgrade it anytime soon. Multiplayer testing is mostly an issue with available display space right now, and not the performance.

The desk is pretty worn out by this point, so I might get a new one. Probably even bigger!