Tutorials or Experience?
Background
Tutorials and resources are very handy when you don’t exactly know how to execute the behavior. However, not all tutorials or resources are available to puzzle together any game. As you can see, I, as a programmer, has been programming for only 5 months and yet still have capabilities of one-year-experience.
Tutorials & Amateurism
Most beginners have chosen to watch videos of specific tutorials. Every tutorial found can be useful but sometimes have its caveats(using deprecated features). Most tutorials here were for the most basic understanding and perhaps even user-friendly.
Of course, all tutorials ranges in difficulties. Some are easy to do while others being nerve-wrecking, and perhaps a hassle, to create.
Instead of picking up a tutorial, I chose to work with experience using the resource I have acquired and learned. After learning the API, I could easily script some system in 2 hours, excluding the time of debugging and inactivity.
Experience At Its Best
The thing about experience is that it can be very rewarding if you do it without tutorial. For my part, I usually browse the API reference for my programming. I already skipped the basics, which is consists of the following parts:
- “Conventions”
- Basic constructors
- Operators
- Globals
- Classes – className of objects
- Loops
- Functions
- Replication
In the next depth, we have these:
- CFrame
- Tables
- Metatables
- OOP
- and more…
How Did I Start? – The Personal Experience
Prior to Lua, I learned Python. However, both coding patterns are vastly different and they don’t use the same API. All programming, if not, most of them, has many similarities. Generally speaking, it is powerful to understand the most basic things around programming before you can proceed diving into the depths.
Eventually, I used scripting for fun creations. Especially doors, mechanical things and so on. How I made them were by planning or visualizing the intended behavior for the object(which is how I also actually write codes around DevForum without Studio). Time by time, I slipped into the #development-support:scripting-support, for the best practices in certain fields in programming.
In summary, I could tell that programming is made out of computer language reading and writing. With some logic, you can crack most of the problems.
Challenging the Depths
For now, the most challenging task to perform in Roblox’s Lua(aka RBX.Lua), is to program a complete game system. This requires a lot of knowledge and great visualization or great planning with flowcharts(which I always do before I program a large system).
This Is Hard
If you’re having difficulties, DevForum and other developers are willing to provide you some help in this subcategory of #development-support, for all kinds of technical issues.
Pressure and stress are bad factors after working. Make sure you take regular breaks for the greater good of your health. If it’s causing a lot of stress or is too hard to read, consider using the method of mine; creating a flowchart or arrangement described below:
Flowchart Creation Components
I favor the use of flowchart whenever the system is a messy chunk of code.
- I/O
- Inputs
- Expected output(s)
- Processing
- Gates
- If statements
- Filtering
- Sanity checks(replication)
Sources & Resources
https://devforum.roblox.com/ – your best site to ask help but also acquiring some resources
https://scriptinghelpers.org/ – site dedicated towards scripting assistance
https://developer.roblox.com/ – a hub and library of packed API references and tutorials
https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCp1R0TBvgM7gj0rwTYULmSA – @Alvin_Blox’s channel, packed with useful tutorials – this is an example YouTuber who provide Roblox scripting tutorials
Questions?
Feel free to drop by my PMs if you have questions regarding scripting.