As a (newbie) Roblox developer, it’s currently extremely hard to make a dream game that you want and know how would it work.
Roblox Studio is clunky for me, with a lot of menus in menus, and not sure what does every single button do.
Building is relatively easy, but the easy part is only using free models, for which you’ll game get extremely criticised.
But scripting? Lua is in my opinion one of the hardest programming languages, not everyone knows what does “SurfaceAppearance” or “DataStore” mean, including me.
While Roblox’s slogan is “Powering Imagination”, the current way has you spending months on Roblox/YouTube tutorials to actually know what it’s all about, and not to mention that you don’t even know where to start learning.
While yes, you do know what does “print(“Hello world!”)” mean, you cannot make a game only using this one thing.
My suggestions?
Add interactive tutorials to Studio, with “do it yourself” lessons and not just boring text.
Organize the tutorials in the Developer Hub to chapters, to know where to start and how to continue.
Do not make users reliant on YouTube tutorials to learn Roblox, as YouTube has ads and these can be sometimes inappropriate to children.
If Roblox is able to solve this issue, it would greatly help me with development and I would try to make my dream game. It’s just too hard currently to understand it.
To some degree I must agree with this feature request.
There used to be a window dedicated to tutorials and links to the Developer Hub which made things a little easier to research stuff, but this has since been removed which is a shame. As a long-time advanced developer on Roblox, I found the developer hub references useful.
The Developer Hub itself is difficult to navigate to, although I think the tutorials on it are much easier to grasp and are better explained than they used to be.
However, I believe a lot of confusion comes from the layout of Roblox Studio itself, especially the menu system.
Take for example, the ‘Model’ tab:
The word ‘model’ doesn’t really mean anything to someone who is brand new to game development, and the contents of this tab furthers the confusion.
In this tab you have:
Tools
Rotate / Move numbers
Materials
Physics
Graphics
Services
Collisions
Scripts
Its quite a mess of different tools, some of which do not relate to 3D modelling itself.
Physics, scripts and effects shouldn’t really be apart of this tab, and just fill out space that could be used to give a cleaner UI experience.
It is confusing to look at
It is annoying to find the correct tool consistently ('is it in model or home tab?’)
As part of providing newbie users with a better introduction to Studio, I feel that the User Interface of Roblox Studio’s Layout should also be considered in this process.
Split tools into simple to understand - meaningful tabs, such as ‘Build’ or ‘Insert’, ‘Script’
Allow developers to pin frequently used tools to the Home page
Provide an introduction state to Studio, which can be re-taken in a ‘Help’ tab
Add a search bar (like Visual Studio) to allow developers to search for tools, references and tutorials derived from Developer Hub, Object Browser, and possibly even the Developer Forums.
Roblox Studio has many ‘Template’ places which are very good in themselves, however these can be extremely overwhelming to new comers. Even I get confused when noseying around these places
As a last thought, perhaps Roblox could build in some challenges to studio, either as Place examples, or a dedicated window.
This would include tutorials and challenges similar to Lua Learning or Kata Codewars.
I don’t feel it’s the job of roblox to go out of their way to spoon feed every single aspect of game developent to you, or how you would go about “making your dream game”. Making a successful game or your “deam game” is not something that just happens when you learn how to develop for the first time, but it takes an immense amount of time, practice, and repeated failure to learn what works and what doesn’t on the platform. Success cannot be taught, and it is up to you to find the passion to go out and get started. Many developers have been on roblox for many years and still haven’t been able to make their “deam game” with the success they want, and it’s because success is difficult, nobody can teach you how to be successful other than yourself. Sure, you can be handed the tools that will make your road to success easier or swifter, but success is ultimately up to you.
And honestly, roblox provides plenty of tools for getting started developing on the platform. Immediately upon launching studio for the first time, you will see the tutorial window in the top left corner of your screen:
Upon clicking “Learn now”, the user is sent to a “Learn Roblox | Studio Basics” page on the Developer Hub. This page provides a plethora of tutorials for getting started on developing such as utilizing basic studio tools or getting started with scripting. There are even pretty advanced tutorials on the Developer Hub, such as Network Ownership or Understanding CFrame.
tl;dr: Roblox has already gone out of their way to provide countless Articles, Videos, and Recipes that are made not just to help you learn but to become proficient at development on the platform. As for being able to “make your own successful dream game”, this cannot be taught and is up to you to utilize the tools that roblox has provided and learn how to find success on your own.
There’s no scenario on any platform that would allow for a complete newbie user to download the studio and instantly be able to make their “dream game”. If you compare Roblox studio to any other engine it’s easily one of the most simple and basic layouts.
There’s the dev forums, youtube, the Roblox Wiki, and many other tutorials and ways to learn. Success doesn’t come easy, it takes work and effort on your part to learn and practice.
