‘How To Allow More Young Scripters To Start Off Easily’ by Arjun Goel
I would first appreciate all the people who have taken time to educate young aspirant game scripters on the Roblox platform.
My Issue
Moving forward, I’d like to start off by saying that as a young developer myself, learning scripting is a very draining and complex process. This is majorly because there isn’t a defined path for young developers to follow and actually use their own knowledge to make their own custom creations. When I joined the Roblox community in late 2020, I tried to learn scripting but it wasn’t easy. I faced many challenges and eventually didn’t pursue scripting. As mentioned above, there wasn’t a clear path to follow and develop custom logics, moreover the only way for a young aspirant scripter to learn is via YouTube, some of these videos are very long and don’t give full information, thus it is a very draining process to learn how to script on Roblox currently.
I thus feel there are more young modellers / artists / builders compared to actual scripters.
My Solution
An Official Roblox text scripting course is the perfect solution to all the above listed problems. Roblox has already published many articles to learn scripting however they aren’t published in a cohesive, step by step manner.
My recommendation is that of a text course because watching videos repeatedly is tiring whereas you can easily refer to elements of an article easily.
This is a very reasonable demand in my opinion, moreover it is only beneficial for Roblox to implement since this will allow more and more developers, both pre-existing and aspirant, to come to the metaverse.
Please let me know your thoughts on this, thank you for reading!
The problem about learning a scripting language for example lua is, there isn’t a path to follow. You need to understand how things work. For example if Roblox would do such an article which contains step by step what to do everyone would have the same exact game. People need to be creative. If they understand how it works, they can use it. Of course they might not know how to execute something, but then they can search that specific thing up. At least one person must’ve encountered the same issue before.
Additional, scripting isn’t easy to learn. That’s correct. But there doesn’t have to be any step by step guide in my opinion. There is many many tutorials which people can look up, even for just some small things if needed.
If you for example don’t understand how data storing works, there is many tutorials on youtube or on the devforum which you can read or watch.
Scripting or programming was never anything you have to follow, you need to learn and do your own thing the way you like it. If you want to recreate something, there isn’t any point to do so. It already exists. You don’t follow something to achieve it, you do your own thing.
I don’t really agree with the fact that Roblox needs to create another scripting course.
Roblox already has one, it’s on their developer site and it teaches you some basic fundementals on programming (thats literally all you need to know to try and get a start)
The developer API handbook explains a lot of things in depth, and when I started out as a scripter, I frequently used it a lot
Young programmers have to hunt for good tutorials. I remember the first tutorial on youtube I found was absolute rubbish. Although it may be time consuming, it’s really rewarding to find a good youtuber. I found one recently, and I’ve used some of their code in my games.
New roblox games wouldn’t have variation. A lot of them would be templates due to limited programming borders (e.g every game would be an obby if it was shown in a popular course)
Even though I’m mainly a builder, I still program a lot. Programming is difficult, which we all can agree upon but it really comes down to motivation and planning. If you can take the 4 above points into consideration and put your idea into fruition, your dream will become true. Over the past 2 years I’ve been developing, I’ve experienced this myself.
I believe a game of sorts is one of the best ways to get new scripters to learn things, theres no exact course for learning things but you can however teach people the basics of lua and how to use services e.c.t.
The API is and most likely always will be an extremely valuable source but for some people (especially the younger people) its not always easy for them to understand the information given to them due to the wording or even just the way its presented as a basic wiki sheet which is why many turn to videos to learn.
Now im not saying there’s anything wrong with watching videos to learn but its limiting many new scripters as they are taking on other peoples scripting styles and methods which is a bad habit to do as I’m sure we all know people have their own ways of scripting things.
The best way to attract and develop new scripters is to first get them interested and make learning fun. For Roblox which runs games it would be easy enough to develop a game where players have to complete scripting puzzles to escape. With this players would try to memorise what you give them in order to improve at the game, they will learn the basics of scripting without even knowing.
If people need to learn, there are plenty of sources. ROBLOX API, Roblox Developer Articles, Youtube, even some ROBLOX games give tutorials, and if you’re looking for just lua in general, then you have lua.org, Lua Tutorial, etc etc.
I think there are more young modelers, artists, and builders compared to scripters because of the complex nature of scripting itself. You need to memorize these words, you need to know how that links to this, you need to know how to identify errors, how to debug, etc etc, whereas visual tasks such as building give you a visual sight of your creation(s) and what you are working on, which helps you process it, work on it, and understand it, not because it is harder to learn scripting than it is to learn any other art that is used on ROBLOX.
This also doubles with the fact that visual stuff isn’t as demanding of memory and understanding, due to the fact creativity is something that is just in our brains and is taught to us very early on.
As other people on this thread have said, there isn’t just YouTube for people to learn. Personally, as a (very) young scripter, I’ve learned by checking out free models and going on the dev hub to learn what they do, and using the dev hub for examples of code. There really isn’t a need for videos in general.
(Although this may not work for everyone, as I’m more of a math-and-memory oriented person, so I was able to stick with scripting since the age of 9)
Imo, the best way to make progress in scripting is not through videos in the sense of watching people print, script functions, loops, etc. The problem with this, is you have to interpret how each of these things work universally, where as the videos only cover what can be done in limited scenarios.
So my advice, is to do a project. Then every time you want to do something and don’t know how, only then look up a video to learn how to do that specific thing. You’ll be forced to apply that material in a way that eventually suits your specific need after trial and error, and the process of doing so will give you a better understanding of how arguments can be applied universally. Overtime, you’ll fill in your gaps in knowledge as you require to script different things. This is how I’m learning, and I’ve had considerable growth in my learning curve this way.
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