How to properly Update a game?

Hi, what is the best way to manage a published game with updates, test stuff and make changes? I don’t know: Having the real game’s place and a testing one, making changes in the testing one (to not accidentally click on publish to roblox in the real game’s place) and when everything is fine, should I copy and paste script by script and all the changes to the original game?(it seems dangerous)

Or just from the testing place I have to publish to roblox TO; the real game?
Maybe the best way is have one unique real place, make changes being careful with “publish to roblox” and when I want to test something just publish it to another random testing place?

Thank you :heart:

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You can click “publish to roblox as” to update your game.

If you want a test game, save a duplicate using “Save to Roblox to…”

If the players dislikes the update, you can revert to older verisons.

You don’t need to copy script by script, just publish it to the original place and you can overlap.

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I guess just pressing Save to ROBLOX, then press Publish to ROBLOX, but that is how I update my games and everything is loaded in correctly.

If you want a test place, you would want to press Save to ROBLOX to…, if that is what you want.

Or downloading it with one of the ROBLOX extensions and publishing again.

EDIT: I didn’t explain about the Save to ROBLOX to… what I mean here is that you can copy the place and just change the name of the place, and other things.

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Alt+Shift+P is probably my fourth most-used keybind, close behind Copy, Paste Into and Duplicate.

Always always use a test place. It has so many benefits. If it’s within the universe of the main game you can even use the same asset paths and DataStores (though I also add logic to use a test store if the place ID matches my test place).

This has the added benefit of only needed to publish once when putting it on the live game, so every version on the website is 1 update, so a rollback is as simple as selecting the one before, not having to spend ages working out which date and time is the correct one to revert to.

I also make use of version numbers and build numbers as Roblox has failed to publish or has published to the wrong place before and the version number is by far the quickest way to determine whether it saved and if not what version it’s on. Useful for update-specific bugs too, especially if you don’t want to restart all of your servers and end up with a mix of up to date and older versions live at the same time.

In my main game my datastore is

local myDataStore = DataStoreService:GetDataStore(“DataStore”)

And in my test place if I use the same key DataStore is not working, the game don’t load correctly and fails

Screenshot_1

But if I change the datastore key to a random one everything perfectly load as a new player. So what I have to do? Make all the updates and patches in the testing place with a random datastore key and when everything is ready, the final step is use the “DataStore” key from the real place, and publish it to the real game? I’m pretty scared of data loss of the players

There shouldn’t be any issues relating to using the same key (except of course the potential to overwrite data if you mess something up in your code).

I’d recommend using a different key in your test place, however any issues with loading data should probably be fully debugged and corrected to prevent further problems down the line with an unhandled bug.

From what you’ve shown it seems like your main game might be using the store a lot and hitting its limit already, and you’re simply seeing the effect of your store usage being throttled. You’ll seriously want to look into that.

I usually just do “Publish to Roblox To…”

Because it allows you to create a new game, or overwriting your own place.

Hey sorry for bumping this, I have a question, how can I use a test place and publish as without losing the data from the original place? if I use the same datastore script with no changes on it will it still use the same data from the original place?

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Yeah but with this new audio privacy update around, this just makes this 100x more tedious than it needs to be.

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