As a Roblox developer, it is currently too hard to navigate to and edit the sub-places of my experience. For every experience that I work on, we have a dedicated staging sub-place for in-development features, bug fixes, and pre-deployment testing. In order to open this staging sub-place, there are two options from Roblox Studio that we can take:
Option 1:
- Open the starter place
- Open the Asset Manager widget
- Open the sub-place
Option 2:
- Select the Experiences tab
- Select the Group Experiences sub-tab
- Select the group associated with the sub-place
- Make sure that you’re using the list view in Roblox Studio (you can’t access sub-places by any means otherwise), located in the top right
- Open the drop-down of the specific experience in question (subject to a very miss-clickable, small dropdown arrow button)
- Open the sub-place
Let’s take the website approach:
- Open your browser
- Open Roblox
- Open the create page
- Select the appropriate group
- Find your game and open it’s analytics page
- Go to “Places”
- Don’t click the three dots that let you remove the sub-place from the experience and/or shut down all servers, click on the title/icon of the sub-place to select it
- Click the three dots that are located to the right of the name of the sub-place in the Create Dashboard - find the Edit button in the menu opened by those three dots and click it to edit your sub-place.
The cons of these options:
- Option 1 uses all of my machine’s resources because it is opening a very large place file that then has to be used to open another very large place file.
- Option 2 takes just a long because of the roundabout nature of Roblox Studio’s design.
- The website approach is clearly the worst of all of these in terms of navigation design, I hope it’s obvious to see why.
Each of these options take about the same amount of time for any developed experience, generally, due to the loading speed of Roblox Studio vs. the number of different pages that have to be accessed in the Creator Dashboard. I wish this wasn’t the case, but I guess the argument could be made that you can bookmark the configuration page for your sub-place on your browser, but that is impossible if you’re using Roblox Studio primarily, obviously.
This website and Roblox Studio are something that I’ve used for my career for at least 8 hours every day for the last 5 years. Can I just have a button in the dot menu of the “My Recent Experiences” page that takes me to the opened dropdown list of all sub-places for an experience?
The amount of hidden menus, dropdowns, variance in buttons, and methods for modifying an experience, starter place, and sub-place are astounding. It isn’t uncommon to employ the use of multiple sub-places in the workflow of developing an experience, but the lack of attention given to these features and users that do use sub-places as safeguards, stagings areas, and places for feature development beyond pushing to prod is frustrating.
If Roblox is able to address this issue, it would improve my development experience because I wouldn’t have to sit through at least 30 seconds of load/navigation time just to open my primary working space for an experience. The last time that the DevForum’s search functionality returned this topic’s discussion to me after searching for it was here, in 2020.