Recently I thought of a question, and this question was made while I was working on programming something. My question is–is it possible to make a small game on Roblox even if you are a beginner programmer? I am basically a beginner programmer since I have not created everything yet but I am getting there, I started learning Lua July 15th and spend 2 hours everyday just programming something.
But my question is, is it possible that I could maybe work towards making a simulator game to make things more interesting? I know the obvious answer is to try and figure out but I also know that making a game takes long and I want to make sure I have my facts straight. I know of some friends who have made their own small games that actually did better than I expected (but nothing extraordinary, maybe a couple hundred players playing consistently), and they said they’ve been programming for a year.
Maybe I am learning too slow, or maybe I am not learning efficiently enough for whatever reason. It is hard to keep focused on the small day-to-day things you program for example I’m working right now on a typing indicator and a player-AFK indicator (nothing that’s considered extraordinary of course), I believe I’ve been working on it for 4 days (went to Time tracking activity app and turns out I’ve spent 2 hours 7 minutes since December 26th [had a vacation to Daytona Beach in the middle of the week]. Come to think of it, if it’s taken me this long to get to where I’m at with this typing indicator, it seriously goes to show how my mindset has affected my performance of working on it. Then again those 2 hours does not consider the other amount of time I spent looking around/searching scripting related things which might not even be a lot).
So maybe I am a noob if it’s taken me 2 hours so far to make a little typing indicator, although my question still stands because with that fact that I just stated personally I feel like that doesn’t entirely eliminate the possibility that I could work on making a game. And honestly, the reason I want to work on a game is because I think it would be much more motivating for me to do rather than to just come up with ideas every here and there and just program it. I want to know with basic knowledge of making datastores, an inventory, and generally other things you would see in a game, if it is possible to make a game.
Specifically also if anyone could give me input about my question pertaining to me (I know this might turn into a discussion thread but I’m not asking for other people but rather myself since I want to do this), like based on my posts on devforum what I’ve been working on. Preferably I would appreciate more actual logic-responses instead of moral-support weird-giddy cringy support responses such like “You got this,” with nothing more than a single thought on the matter, then again I’m not the one to decide who responds and how they respond, but I will say that I am more genuinely interested in the logic, planning, and the original question of it. Can this be done? I want to do it.
You know and I just want to say. My first dream of doing all of this was to make like two games, one which was a fighting game and one which was an MMORPG. But I kind of already knew that I wasn’t going to be able to do them from the start after a few months although it was a sad realization. The reason I wanted to learn to program was because I knew I wanted to make games, I’ve tried and have before, but my main reason was because I thought I could do what someone else is doing better, and I still do believe I can and my end goal is to still do that. It’s just a matter of developing the skill to do that, of course I don’t want to go into my passion project with a lack of knowledge of programming so I want to be very well equipped and prepared so that it can be an amazing game, I don’t imagine I’ll be able to do it for maybe 2 or 3 years but this is just a guess and it really depends on the progress that I make.
To the question itself (“is–is it possible to make a small game on Roblox even if you are a beginner programmer?”) - Yes, definitely!
You can totally create a game as a beginner scripter/programmer, just start of with something simple, if you don’t know how to do something, search it up, and learn something new doing so.
You mentioned a simulator, which in my opinion would be a great start. There are a bunch of tutorials for making simulators in case you get stuck, and it is in general quite a simple game type to make. A simple simulator game is easy to make, but there is so much you can add to make it interesting, as your experience and knowledge grows, you can improve it and add cooler and cooler things.
And you were talking about your friend’s games saying:
but nothing extraordinary, maybe a couple hundred players playing consistently
Well, I think a couple of hundred players playing one’s game consistently is actually quite “extraordinary”, although there are games with hundreds of thousands of players, creating a game that has hundreds of concurrent players is no easy feat, and I would consider that game successful.
In my opinion, creating a game is a great way to practice, rather than just creating systems and assets. Making an entire game will teach you… well, everything you need to know to make an even better game!
Even if the first game one creates usually is very simple and perhaps not that great, it will for sure teach you a lot, and the next game you make will be a lot better.
(Although I’m a noob here, I have plenty of software development experience on other platforms.)
The key to becoming effective is to have a goal, a.k.a. a “driving problem” that you want to solve, which will keep you focused and actively learning.
You can have several “driving problems” simultaneously, of course, with some of them fairly large in scope (build and deploy a game that does X, Y and Z), while others are more narrowly focused (I need to monitor A, B and C in my server script so that I can do D, E and F). The large-scope problems will then drive you to handle the narrowly-focused ones, and you will learn what you need to learn to make each of those happen.
That’s a method that I’d call “just-in-time learning”. As long as you have the basic coding foundation (and it sounds like you do), then studying programming in general becomes less and less productive, while targeted learning in order to figure out how to ‘do something’ or to fix or craft a workaround for a bug, or to improve performance of something that you previously coded, becomes the most powerful type of learning.