Very pleased to announce that the Developer Onboarding team has now launched a totally new first-time user experience for learning the fundamentals of game development on Roblox Studio!
The DevHub’s old ‘Quick Start’ page was great at showing you the ropes and getting you to your first basic game quickly, however, it stopped short of providing a linear progression beyond that. We noticed that developers who struggle with self-directed learning or feel overwhelmed by the wide range and varying complexity of content were likely to give up on learning how to develop on Roblox
With this project, we wanted to present a designed progression with consistent content that gives you an understanding of how to actually get to the point where you can make a great game from the beginning of your journey! The new onboarding experience is intended as a ‘one-stop shop’ for new developers to learn the basics across the major disciplines.
In total, we’re launching with 26 courses across 11 different categories of Roblox development, with plans in place to fill out a further 30+ courses in the months ahead! We’re particularly keen to focus on the coding side of the progression going forward and to develop more advanced materials to deliver on the target to provide everything a new developer would need to create a great game.
The only thing about the design is that I’m concerned of it sticking out like a sore thumb compared to the rest of the DevHub.
One addition to the courses I’d love to see is mini-practice problems at the them. I don’t remember where I saw this specifically, but I swear one of the articles on the DevHub or some other place had this all the way at the bottom. This would help get the info into practical application instead of having a 100% read-through system.
Another thing to add is conceptual topics, such as global/local environments (and environments in general), OOP, healthy coding practices, etc. Right now, most things are example-based, like creating a niche contraption. I’d like to see more general courses as well.
Overall, this is a great start! I can definitely see this leveling out the learning curve.
When I first started messing around in Roblox studio, one of the first sites I went to was the Wiki. There, instead of just mindlessly using the terrain tool, I learned how to position parts and such. Thus, I can attest to the usefulness of providing articles for beginners- and after shifting through some of these articles they seem really well made!
This article on terrain for example- so useful for the beginner! Most people don’t recognize that there is an axis to draw terrain on, which really confuses them. Whereas the official article has in-depth detail, I’m glad this takes you step-by-step: It’s the first of it’s kind on the Developer Hub!
Oh, I remember when I shifted through many Youtube videos created be people who really didn’t know what they were doing when I first wondered how to add lights to my world… this article is concise and would have aided my journey back then! At the time I was unfamiliar that you could add lights to parts- having an area with just the basics is wonderful. I just used free model lanterns. Speaking of which…
I am so glad that this article mentioned free models. This will most likely help remove the stigma that free models are some backwards black-market that Roblox never acknowledges- when in fact, it is right there, smack-dab in the center of the article itself! I use free assets, and I am definitely not ashamed. I am not capable of creating my own audio and such- let the users know about this too!
I also love that all articles are new and updated, as previous beginner tutorials (as you might know from my many Developer Hub topics and replies) were outdated in their content. Hooray!
I cannot see what further articles Roblox makes. Perhaps it could be just the thing to get my friends to pick up Roblox studio.
This is great. I’m a dev who struggles with learning on my own so maybe I can now get into coding!
I was scrolling through the Studio Basics category and I see some free model usage. I’d recommend not advising that. You could say something like, “You can use them for now, but you’ll learn how to make your own models later.”
This is really cool, as a beginner studio user myself this is much handier than having to find a random article or looking things up to figure out a solution. The display is also awesome as well. THANK YOU ROBLOX
As a little thing to correct, on the fist modelling lesson when they are showing you how to make a gear, I think it skips some steps since it doesn’t show how to make the actual gear shape
I actually really like this! I don’t code or model myself but I think this will be a great way to help me get the basics of them!
I also really like the UI design on the website!
i probably know too much about the plugin api cough QWidgets cough
I’d love to see some tutorials for external frameworks such as Roact and Rodux, because we all know what the documentation is like for those frameworks.
I am very happy to see this addition. The old quick start section, in my opinion, was a mess. When you are a beginner, the developer hub seems hard to navigate (it’s hard to know where to start), and once you are finished with the quick start, you are pretty much just left there with a million questions. I think this will help a lot of new Roblox users get started while improving programming education in general, and I definitely think this was a smart addition after Roblox going public because hopefully, this will be an attractive benefit of the Roblox platform.
I think it would be a good idea if there was an easy way to access this page from the education hub.
Does Roblox plan on expanding this to advanced topics? I think that even if you don’t have educational content for every topic, even having more topics with a “Coming soon” label will be beneficial to many new developers as I have noticed that a big problem is that they don’t even know what to try and learn.
Could the building section possible show short videos showing how to build each step? People who are new to studio sometimes have a hard time visualizing how to build and finding out where the tools are.
I don’t know how to feel about the encouragement of using free models. It can be good for new players to learn, but its also full of stolen content. Hopefully something can be done about this problem.
Although articles covering plugin development are definitely much-needed, I do not feel that they would fit in a tutorial for learning the fundamentals and then extending past that. Plugin development isn’t the easiest, so I feel as if they shouldn’t go into the Roblox Studio Onboarding experience. It may overwhelm. Don’t get me wrong- I’d love to see the articles, just not in this area.
This is amazing. The new user flow for Roblox dev has been so bad for such a long time, I’ve had people I’ve urged to try out developing on Roblox take one look at the DevHub for beginner tutorials and get confused and frustrated and give up very fast. This is an extremely important improvement.
Will there be a focused effort going forward to keep these courses up to date and using good, reasonably scalable practices?
