Yes, I’ve searched this topic and what I’m asking is completely different.
So, everything else talks about planning a game and getting it into alpha and beta and stuff, but I want to know what you guys do to create a game specifically. You make a new place, see the base plate and you’ve got a plan ready to go, so now do you build everything first and then do the scripting, or do the GUI’s in between. What order is it done, is what I’m asking. What gets done first, second, third, and the final thing.
Programming is typically done first, using placeholders and blocked out maps, levels, etc. Then, builders and the likes come in later and fill everything out.
First off before I even start building I come up with what I wanna design and it’s concept, then I hop onto studio, get my blueprints ready (if I need any) and get to work.
I prefer to work on the build itself in a separate baseplate, while I work on scripts in another one. Sometimes I feel like scripting and sometimes like building. If you do only one, for like 1 week non-stop, you will eventually get bored of it and like I sometimes do, abandon the project.
Once both scripts and game are ready, I transfer the scripts into the base plate of the game and finally work on thumbnails, final touches or whatever it’s missing.
Short story long, 2 baseplates for the game and scripts, then fuse them all together and finally work on the exterior aesthetics.
Hope this could help you, or at least that’s how I do it.
Best of luck with whatever you’re gonna do!
It’s very important to map out each step of the development process, and then map out those individual steps to be specific once you get to them. Generally, you’ll want to focus on creating and perfecting the core of your game prior to creating multiple levels or other game systems. Try to keep polish towards the end of the game-making process. Many games fall apart because developers don’t understand how to be their own managers/bosses. For me, if I ever feel like I’m in a phase of aimlessness while developing (where I struggle to think of things to do or how to execute them), it helps a lot to switch my brain to “manager mode”, where I make a list of specific tasks for myself based on what I know has to be done.
Moreover, rapid development and testing are extremely helpful, as feedback is very precious when it comes to making a game. Test often, collect feedback (not just from your own friends), tweak and create more things, repeat. Testing frequently with diverse groups of players is important as you’ll figure out if your game needs to be changed earlier rather than right before release. Don’t make the common mistake of spending months making a game only to realize that you’ve accidentally been making the game for yourself rather than the average player. As a developer, it is impossible to 100% put yourself in a player’s shoes, so it’s best to just get actual players to do it for you.
To sum everything up: I try to be very thorough with my planning and testing. Intuition of what to plan and in what order to make things (un)fortunately comes with experience. Generally, though, making a game is already hard enough on its own, so it’s just important that you get it done in the first place, regardless of what your own unique process is like.
If you would like testers (people to join and try to suggest new things and find bugs), I suggest using the ROBLOX QA tester group. It is very helpful. You can also post here asking for testers to give you feedback.
Play Count
If you are simply searching for more people playing your game, you could find Discord servers where you could advertise or host an event on your game and have the server members join. You can purchase advertisements or sponsorships, too.
I would advise that if you are looking only to improve your play count, you should develop your game enough to ensure good ratings through gamenights or ads. Seeing as how it is in pre-alpha, I find that unlikely.
This is the general framework I’ve been following for my recent projects, It’s been extremely effective for me. I used this style of planning for both sno day and eg, along with an unannounced project currently in the prototyping phase
Concept Phase
You gotta come up with an idea before you can make something! This phase is where I take the disparate soup of game concepts floating around in my head and try to piece them together into a cohesive idea for a game.
Planning
Charging right into creating systems and prototypes sets me up for a messy project at best, and failure plus a lot of wasted time at worst. The best way to avoid that pitfall is to create a design doc! This is where I take that idea I came up with in the concept phase and plan out how it will be a game. You should generally state your intent, gamefeel, audience, systems required, and a roadmap of content. The goal is to create an outline you can refer to throughout the project to ensure you stay on track.
Prototyping, building an MVP
Once you have your design docs in place you can start workshopping the systems and ideas you’ve laid out. The goal at this point is to make a minimum viable product. That is, the very minimum of content and features your game needs to be itself. (You can actually apply this MVP perspective to many individual portions of your project!) Plan things as simply as possible and build out from there. Aim to iterate on your ideas as quickly as possible, finding out what ideas are fun and which don’t work in practice. If you stick to doing things simply, it wont be much work and time lost if some mechanic or feature ends up not being condusive to the main idea of the game. During this phase I create prototypes of the core systems that will make up the game, and then hook them together to create my MVP. While your priority should be creating the core of your game quickly and simply, try to write code you’ll be happy working with well into the project. The goal is to create an MVP you can polish and turn into your final product
Production
After I’m satisfied with my prototype I start refactoring what code needs to be cleaned up, and polishing+improving mechanics/features using insight attained from the prototyping phase. This phase should be where you add the majority of your games content. After reaching an acceptable level of polish the game is released.
Addendum: Idk how I forgot to mention this in the beginning. If you’re wondering what systems and tasks to prioritize, it doesn’t really matter what you get started in first so long as you’re working to that minimum viable product. I tend to start with scripting the core game play systems and ui, then the map, then i polish and enhance from there
Since I both build and program, I usually build first then program them. In which order you create features in your game in depends on what your game is and how it is organized.
In my way, I like to get Ideas moving by building something random first. Once an I idea pops up from it, I continue to build it up from there. I then script or change anything to make it fit the idea better. Not really the best steps but its personally the steps I take when making a game.
I usually try to get most of the game idea in my head done as simply as possible at first just to get a working prototype.
E.g. Use random buttons on the screen instead of an actual ui, or use a simple baseplate and a few bricks as buttons instead of making a full fledged map straight away.
I guess in this sense I usually get the parts of the coding that are necessary for the game to work first, even if it’s super inefficient to begin with. Once I have a working prototype of what I’m trying to achieve I will then go and improve each part separately, including other aspects of the game such as the ui ans building. This is assuming the idea for the game seems to work well and is still enjoyable to play.
I also find it useful to structure my code into different functions from the beginning and work on individual parts first. I think using this approach means I am more motivated to keep working on the game because I see different aspects of the game being completed over time.
Only once the main parts of the game have been completed and are working I will begin to add extras such as the ability to buy with robux, or begin to improve the ui with little additions such as Tweening.
I first write down things I need to get done, not neccessarily detailed but enough to know what I’m supposed to do. If it’s a basic shooting game, either the guns or maybe a script assigning teams will be the first I’d do as it’s what makes the game playable already.
Buildings, unboxing, inventory & leaderboard is not neccessary to have a playable game so I would do that afterwards. To be honest, I often make leaderboard scripts first just because that’s easy & quick for me to do & I like having stats.
I don’t always have full plans on a game, I get more ideas during the development of a game which turns it into a more complete experince.
In my way, I like to get Ideas moving by building something random first. Once an I idea pops up from it, I continue to build it up from there. I then script or change anything to make it fit the idea better. Not really the best steps but its personally the steps I take when making a game.
lol I do that too… although I try to do them in steps but sometimes I just “don’t feel like” doing something so I do something or two out of order.
I can speak from past developments, and all I can say is that you HAVE to plan out what your game is about, and to probably plan and execute development.
Usually, without even noticing, working on games makes me fall into these steps: 1. Thinking of ideas
What I do is give time off of working on things and think about what I want to make. I also want to think about what the game is about, what the core mechanics will be, and thinking about how I can actually take those ideas and script them. 2. Scripting parts of the game
Now that I have a basic idea of the game, I will begin scripting core parts of the game. For example if it is a shooter, I would begin working on first person, bullets, reloading, and other core mechanics. Sometimes when I’m bored I like to do other things that aren’t necessary at this stage, such as skins or leader boards. 3. Building core parts of the game
At this stage, I begin building important things, like for example gun models or maps. At this stage I mostly just build things that need to be made first so that the game actually has okay builds. 4. Making the UI
Since I have the scripts and builds nearly done, I begin working on the UI system. This will be for things like making a menu, ammo UIs, player lists, or a vote map system. 5. Remaking/Upgrading parts of the game
Since I’ve finished most of the stuff in the game, I now work on remaking things that might be buggy, broken, rushed, laggy, or unoptimized. This stage is mostly about making the game feel a lot smoother, and fresher. 6. Adding other features
This stage pretty much continues on even if I go to the next stage, because usually there should always be something to add. For example, in this stage I could be adding crates, skins, hats, gun skins, maps, or guns. These features aren’t necessarily important to the core game, but it adds some more things to it that can be useful. 7. Preparing the game
Once I get to this stage, I begin making other assets for the game like thumbnails, videos, gamepasses, or anything to make the game ready. In this stage I also advertise the game to get more attention to it. 8. Release!
If I’ve finally gotten to this stage without losing motivation (which happens a lot) I release the game and advertise it a lot to get visits. This stage also usually is paired with stage 6 because after the release I usually add other game features.
This response was probably the closest to what we see in the professional software development world, but maybe organized a bit differently. This comes from traditional software or product development. Developers for large consulting companies tend to work only on the coding, the concepting, designing and planning typically come first before developers start on it:
CONCEPT DEVELOPMENT
DESIGN & PROTOTYPE
DEVELOPMENT
POST-PRODUCTION & FOLLOW UP
There are multiple tasks involved with each of these phases. You can look this up. We are also interested in organizing some game writing & development workshops, where we will be discussing this in depth, if you’re interested join our group and drop me a message:
As a professional software developer for many years and ex-creative director, I would agree with everyone here who focused on the point that you need to develop an idea first, and you shouldn’t ignore that.
What you are asking is more focused on the development process, that comes after you already have developed an idea or concept. The steps you take and the order you do them in will depend on several things: are you working alone or on a team? How do you like to work? When you developed a concept, did you focus a lot on the “world” in which your game will exist, on the characters, or on what will happen in the game (functionality)?
In our game development, there are times where we have started with the a terrain, then developed scripting, often in an empty base plate, just to try out some functionality. In a couple instances, when we have a concept for a level, we have asked other builders to create something while we were scripting on our end.
Actual development can be flexible that way, especially if you are working with a couple of other people or a team where different people are focused on different things. Look up “Agile”, it is kind of the popular professional process where teams decide what they want to work on as they go along (instead of a strict plan put together by a manager).
Please check out our group, we will be sharing tips on coming up with game ideas and how to execute those ideas, hopefully we will put together some workshops if there is interest:
I would build the models then script it, then build the ui’s then script it. the best way is to build models then ui’s and then script it so you know how you will set up the code.
