I am Ellie, a Roblox developer. A couple of months ago, I have started expirementing with Rojo and getting to it since many people have recommended to begin using this extension on VSCode. Despite many people telling me to change, I still don’t understand why I should use Rojo (its benefits for generally making a game).
I mainly have two questions in this post.
What are the benefits of using Rojo and the extensions that support it (Wally, Aftman, Zap, Selene Lint, etc.)?
I have seen some of my friends use other languages with Luau using Rojo such as Typescript in their projects, but what do their purposes serve? (answer if familiarized with the situation)
I’m mainly just looking for an answer to question 1.
Rojo is super helpful for Roblox devs, especially if you’re coming from a web dev background—like if you’re used to working with TypeScript and React!
It lets you code outside of Roblox Studio (like in VS Code), in your own IDE, which means you get all the nice things like autocompletion, linting, and better project organization.
Plus, you can actually see your changes more clearly, use Git for version control, make branches, and collaborate like you would on any other software project.
It was probably developed / advocated for by people who did not start their dev career on ROBLOX
Me personally I didn’t enjoy using rojo. Mainly because of the fact it lacks intellisense of the entire game besides whats in your json file, which for starters can be confusing to setup.
It just seems too unintuitive for me. Though there are pros to it, like package importing from git and other stuff which is neat. I just like having my intellisense of the entire game file I’m working on.
In the end it comes down to personal preference, if you like using it stick with it, if you don’t, switch back to studio.
I have built a strong bond with VSCode over the years, and have gotten myself used to the plugins and the keybindings. I would say one of the biggest reasons I would use Rojo over traditional roblox studio is the variety of extensions you can download. Being able to publish my code on Github is an essential for me. Wally is also pretty useful and there is currently no roblox studio equivalent. I don’t always want to open the bulky Roblox Studio, especially on my slower laptop. VSCode gets the job done and is light weight, so being able to synchronize all my progress instantly is awesome.
Being able to code from VSCode just feels like home.
It’s really just personal preference, there is kinda no situation where you should or should not be using VS code & Rojo. However, generally when projects get really big & have loads of devs on the same systems, it can be easier using Rojo as you can publish code to Git for version control, etc. Many prefer it because they are used to it’s keybinds and plugins and have used it in environments before Roblox scripting so it feels appropraite.
I prefer Roblox script-editor as I find myself interacting with the Explorer a lot and I work solo on smaller projects.
I did meet a person who told me their productivity increased when they quit using Rojo, so in the end, I believe also personal preference is the key factor.
