Development history

The project has undergone many changes over the years since its inception in 2015 as the JKR Research Facility. From layout redesigns to gameplay direction changes, the project has undergone many changes both gameplay and direction-wise, and its development team would gradually expand over the years.

The Lost Potential (Late 2014 - April 2015)
In late 2014, the Pinewood Research Facility (PBRF) was opened to the public by Diddleshot, chairman of Pinewood Builders. While it was a large, vast facility, it was very barren and lacked a proper field of science meant to be "researched", as it only had a glitchy centrifuge, a suicidal train testing lab, and a trampoline.

The facility would not receive any notable updates to its lack of laboratories, and all the more it did not when on April 6th, 2015, several administrative members of their internal affairs division, the Pinewood Intelligence Agency were dismissed, prompting a series of chaos in Pinewood known as the events of 4/6. This also resulted in a hiatus in the development of the Pinewood Oil Platform (PBOP), a facility roleplay game being built for Pinewood by JKR Productions at that time by KelvinBlues1 (founder and Vice CEO) RobloxGuy6403 (co-founder and CEO), and Nood563 (Development Team).

As Kelvin decided to divert his attention towards making Isla de Eras, an island roleplay game, RG revisited the lost potential of the PBRF as a game that could have been a fully functional research facility roleplay game.

The Concept (April-May 2015)
Following the previous events, RG began conceptualizing the development of his own research facility.

One thing that he noted in mind was that most research facilities that were already made on Roblox were mere clones of the two most popular ones at the time: the Pinewood Computer Core (PBCC) by Diddleshot, and Innovation Research Labs (IRL) by madattak. Almost every clone had influences or even complete imitations of references to games in the Half-Life series and the Portal series, just as the two games had.

To make the game stand out, the research facility was designed to be similar to a Vault shelter in the Fallout series, as not many well-done Vault shelters have been made on Roblox at that time, more so one that fell into the sci-fi research facility category. Furthermore, the game lore of the Fallout series conceptualized the Vaults as fallout shelters with social experiments gone wrong, often with high disregard to human ethics and morality.

Given that Roblox would never allow such mature things on their platform, it made it even more enticing for RG to create his own spin on the Fallout vault aesthetic that not only suited the Roblox style, but was easy to make, and was unique in design.

The First Steps (May-November 2015)
Construction on the JKR Research Facility officially began around May 20, 2015 and was originally hosted on RG's profile (which currently holds an open-source, preserved copy of the JKRF in Beta 0.7). A set of hallways were placed down in preparation for the addition of labs. The first laboratory was the Food Labs, which was suggested by user Shredder914. The room housed a machine that would synthetically produce bananas onto a conveyor belt, only to incinerate them after.

The game was moved to the JKR Productions group as a group game on June 9th, 2015, and a group shout was later announced on June 26th, asking for suggestions on what research laboratories to begin with.

Further additions included a Headcrab Lab, which garnered a lot of popularity and record-breaking casualties at the JKRF with its initial visitors. It was further contemplated with a Weapon Testing Lab but was removed after some time due to glitches with the weapons. The reactor level was opened on June 28th, housing a generator resembling the. More would follow over the next few months, with the opening of the Hydroponics Lab that grows plants in abiotic conditions, and an Annoying Noob Simulator with a blabbering, foul-mouthed noob.

The level above the laboratory level was eventually opened, leading to a high ceiling Atrium, which connected to the reception waiting area, the Control Room, and the Security Office. A cargo bay was added to the laboratory level sometime in October 2015, which houses several containers and a soon-to-be-added ramp to the surface. At this point, it was evident that the JKRF was laid out in a rather confusing manner, as the main laboratory hallway was a loop that had research labs in a random order, making it confusing for visitors.

Team Building (November 2015 - February 2017)
On November 15, 2015, it was announced that the JKRF would be almost completely renovated, with a new Atrium, a new hallway system dividing the facility into two sections; the Blue Hallway and the Orange Hallway, and the alphabetical order categorization of the research laboratories. This however removed several rooms that served little purpose, such as the Security Office and the Annoying Noob Simulator, among others.

The update was released on December 25th, 2015, and JKRF development was temporarily on pause as attention was diverted to resolving bug fixes in the much-awaited and recently opened Pinewood Oil Platform, which opened on December 23, 2015.

In February 2016, oil platform development slowed down while JKRF development resumed, in which steam turbines and surface condensers were added to pave the way for the future reactor core. It was in preparation for the construction of the JKRF's Gas-Cooled Fast Reactor, which would not be informed to the public until a few months later. While JKR never had plans for a security division, one was created to avoid the scenario of a random person making one and demanding a high rank or to oversee the division as a result. Additionally, the security room was re-added to the JKRF in March 2016.

Months later, the JKRF began to form a small fanbase. One interested member named luciandean2004 (now The_Sink) found JKR and took interest after playing the JKRF a few times and getting to know the place. During the early days of the JKR Discord Server, he joined sometime in late June and approached RG with some examples of models and minor scripting knowledge that proved beneficial for the project. Sink was later on accepted as the first member of the official JKRF Dev Team.

Only days after, Sink informed his friend LouieK22 about the group and he too slowly climbed the ranks with his community support, scripting knowledge, and vouch from Sink as the second member of the JKRF Dev Team. Soon after, all three begin the final plans for the new Cargo Bay, the Surface Tunnel, and began to conceptualize the Reactor Core Meltdown in August.

For a long time, everyone was working actively on the JKRF. Development was continuous, multiple updates were released, some changes were made (such as the JKRF being released in versions instead of being updated live). To build up hype for the transition from Beta to Release, Update 0.9 was released as The Final Beta, bringing a ton of long-needed (and insanely delayed) changes to the game. But then, after a while, the development grew slow. In February of 2017, it was announced that the JKRF was officially an inactive project as everyone has lost focus and motivation.

Back and Forth (February 2017 - April 2018)
In an effort to explore new ventures and move from low-replayability sci-fi roleplay games, the JKRF development team explored the concept of a minigame lobby game under the code name Project Safehouse, where players must survive rounds of crazy research experiments inspired by the ethically questionable experiment of the Fallout series. However, development complexity increased too sporadically beyond the team's capabilities at the time, and interest in the project dwindled.

After lengthy discussions with both the community and within the administration, it was finally decided in May after a long hiatus from development that in turn of the summer and out of general boredom, the JKRF will be reactivated as JKR's primary project. It was immediately started up again, and "The Purity Update (0.10)" was the first release post-inactivity, released on May 29th, 2017.

Although significant, this period of activity soon began to fall. A large period of relatively slow development starting in March of 2018 compounded with the collaboration between JKR and Hyptek for a Minecraft server eventually pushed the decision to merge JKR and Hyptek. JKR was dissolved into Hyptek on May 4th, 2018, with Sink becoming a member of the board and other developers, such as RG (now ChromeEight) and lavafactory becoming Hyptek administrative staff by request.

Under New Management (April 2018 - January 2019)
As a result of the Hyptek merger, all active JKR projects were acquired by Hyptek and development was restarted there. From that point on, the JKR Research Facility was rebranded as the Hyptek Research Facility (HTRF).

A largely active period of what was now HTRF's development occurred between mid 2018 to early 2019. However, development soon stuttered once again as a result of a loss of motivation and the brewing internal conflict within the Hyptek administration. Each of the original developers from JKR who had joined HTRF's development team began to resign one by one until none of the original developers remained. A multitude of internal issues, summarized by the incompatibility between JKR and Hyptek's development teams combined with issues caused by infightings with Hyptek management and Hyptek developers resulted in Hyptek completely losing stability in mid 2019.

Many of Hyptek's developers split off into a new group, Plasma Inc, while the JKR developers disassociated themselves from Hyptek around a similar date between June and July of 2019. HTRF was taken down at the request of JKR's lead developers in August, and at this point, JKR entered its longest stagnant period yet.

The Pandemical Revival (May 2020 - present)
After a lengthy sprawl of inactivity post-Hyptek, the COVID-19 pandemic sparked renewed interest in the project, as on May 3rd, 2020, Sink and Chrome began to discuss a possible reactivation of JKR (and by extension the JKRF).

With the new expertise gained over the hiatus, it started with the idea that the game could be developed in Godot to avoid the restrictions found on Roblox's platform, but the idea was quickly dismissed as it would be a massive technical feat for the JKR development team to create new systems from scratch that would normally be provided on the Roblox platform. Internal discussions began, along with lavafactory re-joining the development team.

Finally, on May 11th, 2020, the JKRF was re-opened to the public. The JKRF entered a new phase of active development as a result of not only the team's new knowledge of game design and scripting but also with the additional free time gained from the online class setup as a result of the pandemic. A series of updates were released afterward including the development of a VIP server panel, player data backend (the base for game statistics, achievements, and currency), and the redesigning of many areas in the facility.

To reflect JKR moving forward as a game studio rather than as a sci-fi corporate entity, the game was rebranded as the Cobalt Valley Research Facility in preparation for the release of Update 0.13, which went live on July 25th, 2020.

Since then, updates have continued to be developed for the game with periods of inactivity, but with the constant assurance of development remaining steady from time to time.

On January 31st, 2022, after some occasional on-and-off discussion about group branding, JKR was officially renamed to "JKR Studios" to consolidate its name across platforms.

To be continued...

Extra Details/Trivia
As other minor details during the history of JKR are found out and revealed by the development team, they will be put here.

Why Was JKR Called "JKR Fish Market" During It's Shutdown Period?
Many people who were around back then may have encountered that JKR was renamed to "JKR Fish Market" for a while. Many people thought this was just random and as a replacement title since JKR, at the time, was shutdown. But actually no, it has some backstory to it.



As seen in the picture right, JKR was renamed to it's fish market name due to it being close to Alaska. Since Alaska is known for its fishing (especially with salmon), the fish market title was official.