RWBY was a long-standing concept of creator Monty Oum's for years before development began; while finishing work on Red vs. Blue Season 10, he asked series creator Burnie Burns if he could produce RWBY afterward, and Burns agreed on the condition that Season 10 was completed first.

The show's name and structure were built around a color-coding hook Oum developed, deriving the title RWBY from the first letters of protagonists Ruby, Weiss, Blake, and Yang's names and their respective thematic colors.

The first promotional trailer was produced in just two weeks and premiered right after the credits of the Red vs. Blue Season 10 finale on November 5, 2012.

Character designer Ein Lee helped Monty Oum create the cast's designs, drawing inspiration from classic fairy tale characters.

Oum was initially worried about a story centered on female characters being written by a mostly male crew, but felt the team ultimately succeeded in developing the female characters well.

Volumes 1 to 3 were animated in-house in Austin using Smith Micro's Poser software built on Autodesk Maya assets, but starting with Volume 4 the production switched entirely to Maya, with extra modelling and animation outsourced to the Monterrey-based studio CGBot.

Composer Jeff Williams has said he sometimes uses the show's lyrics to foreshadow future plot events, building songs by picking out words and phrases from the script and using advance knowledge of characters' arcs and backstories.

Jeff Williams announced his retirement from music composition in December 2022, with his daughter and longtime vocalist Casey Lee Williams taking over as lead composer starting with Volume 9, joined by her Ok Goodnight bandmates Martin De Lima and Martin Gonzales.

In the 2019 film Doctor Sleep, the character Abra Stone's room features RWBY posters and a statue of Emerald Sustrai, and Abra wears Emerald's hairstyle in a dream sequence; these references were added at the suggestion of actress Kyliegh Curran, a RWBY fan.

When the first episode premiered live at Rooster Teeth's RTX convention in 2013, all three screenings sold out.

By mid-2013, RWBY had reportedly contributed to a 9% increase in views for Rooster Teeth's official YouTube channel.

Whether RWBY qualifies as an 'anime' has been a long-running debate among fans and critics, with voice actress Lindsay Jones recalling that when the cast showed the series to Japanese collaborators, they themselves argued over whether it counted as anime.