Next Steps into Scripting

Hey! Over the past couple months, I’ve been getting surprisingly well at scripting and game development. I’m currently an intermediate scripter and I’ve been getting used to the language. I’ve recently run into a problem though, I’ve stopped learning. I don’t know if this is just me but I seem to be stuck at intermediate. I understand that most people would just say “Practice, practice, practice”, but I’ve already been doing that for a couple of months now and still only getting very minor improvements. I’m hoping that one day I could be advanced enough to get a job in scripting or developing. I was wondering if anyone knew the next steps for me to take so that I can more quickly learn and advance towards advanced level scripting? Any advice would be greatly appreciated!

Also, for any highly experienced and advanced scripters. What did you do to get to the level you’re at now? What challenges did you face and/or how did you overcome them? Is there any kind of “Secret sauce” that would help any aspiring game developer grow?

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Hey there!

The one thing that helped me learn was simply just to challenge myself to make something that I didn’t fully know how to make. That way, you can keep yourself busy and learn something new.

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I would also like to see a response to this subject as I feel like it is important to address.

I feel like the next thing to do would be to make games with the experience you have and you’ll realize that you need to learn, for example, how to make a gun reloading and shooting.

You could also check out the developer docs. Read all of the different components that make scripting work to see if you should learn it.

I also agree with @b_dnd on what they said above. I recently started making a new game to learn new things. Trying to push yourself to the limits is always great.

Thanks :heart:

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Download ProfileService by loleris and dissect it until you know how it works and understand most of the choices he made :smiley: . Finding good references to dive into is probably second to finding a good tutor/class.

The way I learned scripting on Roblox is that I had a goal. A big one. I wanted to code an entire game, knowing next to nothing of the API.

My game needed animations. So I took time to learn how to do that - how to make my own animations using the animation editor. How to play them in game. How to make a custom animation controller using CFrames (because I am such a noob I didn’t know animations don’t replicate in studio team create); that led me to first having to learn about CFrames. During just this portion of development I learned a lot of things that I wouldn’t have known to search up or “forcecully” learn. They just came up as skills I needed immediately.

I learned a lot more than that just looking into animations. As I dove deeper, I needed UI - how to use the UI in Roblox, sizing/scaling based on device, good design practices (still bad at those), etc… And there’s always those UI animations, they are annoying at first but eventually it got easier.

There’s also the backend too - data handling (datastores), processing network traffic with server-side validation, security, etc… These are all critical things you might need in making a game (for most games, anyways).

I know people say, start off in small projects. That’s fine, I do that too - I make a test place whenever I try to implement something new for my game. If I make UI, I tinker with it in a separate place. If I want to learn how attachments and physics works, I make a separate place for that and play around. The goal is still there though - the only reason I am learning those things is that they might be able to solve my problems or help me progress.

It doesn’t hurt to learn for learnings sake but I think having a direction is much more powerful than aimlessly choosing some arbitrary path. I encourage you to have a large goal, and instead of taking it on all at once, consider the smaller steps required to get there and fulfill those. You’ll find that gaps in your knowledge will slowly fade away, and you’ll be learning relevant info.

I also like to read up on what people are doing here on the forum, help out a bit, etc… it gets you in the environment and helping others is often a great way to help yourself, too. There are great people here to learn from, but I especially enjoy reading the older posts where more serious development practices are discussed (the ones you don’t often see these days).

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Thanks to everyone who responded! I’m glad that there is such a massive community that would be willing to help another person in need! I will look into these recommendations to further better myself as a developer and scripter.

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