Few of us would prefer to tell the whole ROBLOX community we’re working on a new game. Similarly to why established software development companies such as Microsoft, Bethesda, and ROBLOX don’t immediately announce new projects as soon as they’re started, we don’t want to announce to the whole world that we’re working on a new project because it may be scrapped or delayed (remember CSG?), and because the public harasses the developer(s) as soon as they’re aware the project exists. I don’t think any developer can argue that projects should always be announced to the public as soon as they’re started, but that’s the current situation on ROBLOX, albeit slightly more subtle.
Right now the current situation is that as soon as a developer starts publishing assets for their game, people can see those assets in their inventory. Uploading a blank thumbnail to a place will prevent people from seeing what’s inside, and making the name something obscure such as “Project A” can prevent people from determining what the project is, but they still know it’s a new project and they still know when you’re working on that new project. Even with your follow settings set to “None”, every single account on ROBLOX can see what you’re working on in Studio – if it’s a hidden group place that’s not on your profile, anyone can still see when you’re working on that place.
Working offline isn’t an option because even when ROBLOX converts games to physical files (which I assume will let you test assets in your game without actually publishing them), there are still features that require the game to be published to the site such as DataStores. This means that the game has to be published to the site in some way, shape, or form. Creating an alternate account to host the game on is not a viable option because part of the development process costs money (uploading audio, making sure developer product purchases work, etc) which the alternate account wouldn’t exactly be in abundance of. It’d also be a nuisance to constantly switch between that account and your main account. The place could be hosted on a separate group (other than your main game group if you have one) with “Show games on group page” set to false, but you’d have to pay 100 Robux just to create that alternate group, and you might not even have BC to do that or not enough group space regardless of whether or not you have BC. The result of this is that the game must be held on your main account or main game group. To accommodate this, specific games should be able to be hidden from profiles and group pages.
Once players can no longer see which place we are working on (preferably “Online - In studio” would never show which place you’re working on) and we’re able to hold games on our profiles / primary game development group without them being seen by other players, we’ll still need a way to prevent people from seeing our assets for our yet-to-be-released game. Preferably our inventories would only show public items to people other than us, and the “Show Unavailable Items” option in the library would be removed. To begin with there’s no good reason for that to exist at all, it would prevent other people from seeing assets for our yet-to-be-released games, and it would somewhat alleviate asset “stealing” on ROBLOX (users search the library for decals/etc that are unavailable, take the asset ID, and use it in their games without permission from the uploader / owner of the asset)
With all three of those issues resolved, we’ll be able to make games without announcing their beginning to the world.
