My Approach To Making Roblox Games

[00:00:00]A lot of thought goes into starting development on a new Roblox game well before studio even opens. Today, I'm going to walk you through a rough outline of the entire process I go through and breaking it into two parts, the pre-development phase and the developmental phase.

[00:00:14]The first and most important step before you even open studio is figuring out what your goals are as a developer.

[00:00:19]As a general piece of advice for life, start with overarching goals.

[00:00:23]Why are you getting into making Roblox games? Are you hoping to make this a career beyond Roblox? Are you doing it for money? Are you trying it because it sounds fun or are you committed to it because you know it's fun? You can have multiple reasons, which can all be weighted differently.

[00:00:38]I suggest you take some serious time to think about this because having this clarity can greatly impact your success.

[00:00:44]I'll give you cliff notes on my reasons and maybe that'll help you discover yours.

[00:00:47]I've played Roblox since 2011 and want to give back to my 6-year-old self who's always loved video games. I want to work for myself and my own creative ideas because I think that's easier than clocking in at a job. I love learning new things and watching my ideas come to life. And I'm in my third year of university for computer science and these games are good for my portfolio and building relevant skills to the market. Everyone has different reasons and I hope me sharing mine can better help you understand yours.

[00:01:12]After figuring out exactly why you want to make Roblox games, you need to figure out what your goals are on a per project basis. This changes drastically over time and also is very different for everyone based on skill set and experience. For my first project, my goal was to publish a playable game while learning the absolute highest layer of several different skills Roblox game development has to offer such as UI, building, scripting, etc. On my current project, I'm learning fusion while focusing on making money for future projects by doing something that has proven to work instead of being innovative. I've made many passion projects in the past which have unfortunately not grown successful, but I'm okay with that because I know I've gotten better at my craft. It's a cycle of balancing what you want to do with what you need to do. Your timeline is based on you, not what propaganda you've been fed through other developers, creators, and communities.

[00:02:03]Now that you know why you're developing and what you want to get out of your project, it's time to come up with a game idea that can help you meet those goals.

[00:02:11]Start by picking a genre. Tizzy made a really good video about finding game ideas, and I don't want to repeat stuff other creators have already said, so I'll give you some cliff notes as major takeaways. Think about your target audience. Check if the game has been made on other platforms other than Roblox. Confirm that this game hasn't already been made on Roblox. See if the concept is proven to work. Is your game easy to make content on?

[00:02:34]Is it a market fit? Like, do people actually want this?

[00:02:37]Is the timing of it good? You're not beating a dead horse or doing something while it's oversaturated. And do you actually want to and think that you can make this game with your current standing? You should already know what the marketing looks like for your game before creating anything, as in your title, icon, and a couple of thumbnails.

[00:02:54]Come up with a game idea you won't abandon after a single night of the development.

[00:02:58]Once you've got your game idea, it's time to consider scoping.

[00:03:02]Scoping is gauging the boundaries and deliverables on your project. People of all experience levels love to mess up project scoping.

[00:03:09]You should have an extremely clear core loop and checklist of what requirements need to be reached for your game to be ready for release.

[00:03:17]This helps you determine if your project is something you can actually take on.

[00:03:21]Another big piece that goes into this is determining who you are working with, what the budget looks like, how soon you are aiming to finish the project, and if you have to pay for anything like thumbnails, models, and how much time or money that might take.

[00:03:34]99% of developers think they can get something done quicker than they truly can.

[00:03:39]Now that you know exactly what it is you plan to work on, there's a relatively structured way I tackle the development process of making a game. I obviously start with, you know, making the group, managing permissions, and And I'm working with others, make the Roblox place, blah, blah, blah. You guys already know how to do that. One tip I can give you to make this process faster for future projects is to make a [music] template place file of how your starter project should look, so you don't have to recreate everything and need to copy stuff over upon starting new projects.

[00:04:06]I have a framework that I've created over my year, which has many useful module scripts and my ideal script structure that I'll use across all projects, like monetization configs, badge configs, asset ID holders. It also has my preferred lighting settings, service structure, and again, so much more.

[00:04:23]Once you find a system that works nicely for you, save it and reuse it. You'll save a ton of time starting future projects.

[00:04:31]After you've initialized everything, I would heavily suggest making sure you have most of your assets ready, especially if you're not making them.

[00:04:38]It's okay to have placeholder assets, as long as they're semi-close in resemblance to what you hope to have in the final product.

[00:04:45]There's nothing more annoying than being ready to set up a system and not having the models, the images, the sounds, and other assets ready.

[00:04:54]It's important to start your game by building out the core systems your game is going to run on and making them feel perfect. For example, if you have a simulator about chopping lumber, you want to make sure the chopping, the collecting, [music] tree regeneration, and other relevant systems like this are down first. You can identify core systems because [music] usually other systems are relying on these in order to even exist.

[00:05:16]There's no reason to make a seed shop if you don't have an inventory to put the seeds in or a plot to put the seeds on.

[00:05:22]My next piece of advice is slightly contradicting to what I just said, but always try to work on what you feel like working on.

[00:05:29]You don't need an entire map built in order to establish your systems, but if you really want to build, then just [music] build.

[00:05:35]If you're working on UI and suddenly you got a headache from scaling and positioning, go script some other system and come back to it.

[00:05:42]As you get deeper in projects, this will become less and less of a choice, but when you're just starting out and overwhelmed by the amount of work you have to do, literally just do whatever sounds fun.

[00:05:51]A lot of the times what sounds fun is what you're already good at, but once you gain a plethora of skills, you'll be able to bounce around, which lets you sit at your computer and develop for 15 hours a day without realizing you haven't eaten yet.

[00:06:03]As you develop your game, you'll realize that maybe some systems you don't want to make, you can't afford, they take too long, or truly just don't seem useful to your core loop. It's okay to iterate on your idea, as long as you aren't straying too far away from what works or what the original scope of the project was.

[00:06:20]It's very common to become developer blind, which is this concept that you played and developed your own game for so long, you can no longer tell what a new player would experience while playing your game.

[00:06:30]This is easier said than done, but it's important to keep a new user lens because many pieces of your game may not be as intuitive as they have become to you.

[00:06:38]Everything you've done up to this point has led you to an MVP, which is a minimal viable product. You've created the bare bones of your game, which means it's fully functional in its current state, but is missing satisfactory elements. This is the stage where you add in those pieces such as visual effects, sound effects, particles, animations, and all that good stuff.

[00:06:57]You found good placeholders to use while early in development, but now it's time to find and create those perfectly satisfying effects.

[00:07:04]After my game feels polished and [music] I'd consider it's ready, it's time for a final round of optimization.

[00:07:10]Optimizing your game can be easy or difficult depending on the nature of it.

[00:07:14]I could talk for hours on how to optimize performance in your game, but since this is more of an overview approach of my thought process and implementation process, I won't get into those specifics here. I'll leave this section with this message. The last thing you want to do is miss out on players because their device cannot handle your game when it should be able to.

[00:07:33]Take the time to learn the useful developer tools and optimize your game the right way.

[00:07:38]Finally, we have testing the game. Of course, you test your game throughout the entire development process looking for bugs, but by now it's time for a real test session done by other users.

[00:07:48]This is when it's useful to get your friends, developers, family members, or whoever to test your game out before you launch it. It's crucial that you do testing for many different circumstances, including but not limited to simulating multiple players in a single server, simulating a server that has a very long lifetime, simulating bad network connection, simulating rejoins, weird timings, different screen sizes, different device and input types, a free-to-play play through versus a paid play through.

[00:08:16]When testing your game, you should be trying to break it. Testing the game should also guide you on balancing your game.

[00:08:22]Every single time I swear my game is ready to be published, I do a testing session with other users and realize I have a couple more necessary days of development.

[00:08:31]And that's pretty much my broad approach to developing Roblox games.

[00:08:34]Obviously, a lot of these topics I could go very into detail on, but I figure I'd ramble and provide a basic outline while dropping random pieces of advice. I could also talk forever on how to handle updating your game, but I think that would be best for a separate [music] video.

[00:08:48]Thanks for watching. I hope this was helpful and good luck on your projects.