Add pre-publish step with build scripts for experiences

As a Roblox developer, it is currently not possible to have automated build steps of the experience that should be executed before publishing / studio running the experience (unless you use third party workflow such as rojo).

Changes done by the build-steps should not affect the “working file” in Studio, it should only affect the output that is run in studio / published to Roblox.com. In ideal case there would be a fail / success state of the tasks too so they can be used for validation/testing of the experience.

If Roblox is able to address this issue, it would improve my development experience because we could customize the workflow to make development easier.

Examples:

  • Allow 3D-artists to have their working file assets in the workspace and have a build step that deletes the assets on run/publish to make it have no impact on the actual experience
  • Perform compute intense tasks and store the values, we have a manual step to bake the bounds for folders and then use those bounds for highlighting stuff for the player. But don’t want to calculate the bounds in runtime due to performance.
  • Move assets to replicated / server storage while allowing them to be easily accessible during the development
21 Likes

This would be great. I have building stuff in my game and have to remember to re-lock the map every time I finish working on it. Would be nice if I could just leave it.

This would also theoretically allow me to publish an entire code framework and insert it into the correct place right before the game publishes. Then I never need to mess around with updating it manually or with packages, it’s always correct automatically. This would facilitate multi-place games.

2 Likes