Roblox Development (What I've learned Part 1)

After a recommendation to check out Roblox for game development, I had a look into the various types of games people made. One style that appealed was obstacle courses (obbys), so for my first game I decided to go with that. I started with the default obby template and found the treadmills interesting and used them to build my own obby I called Treadmill Mountain.

As I worked on this game, I continued with tutorials that I was recommended and considered how to implement them into it. I learned how to make blocks that toggle on and off with a timer, blocks that fade away when touched, blocks that kill when touched. All three of these types were put directly into the mountain to make the climb tougher and have more variety as it gets steeper. Some other things I learned from the official tutorials were adding a score and a leaderboard that shows all the current players, and I learned how to more efficiently used code on certain blocks.

As an example of this, the original treadmill block I used held a script, but when I created another treadmill for it to function it also needed a copy of the script. Rather than having 100 copies of the same script I instead made one script that would then apply the treadmill code to every block that was in a folder I made, also allowing for better organisation. This also meant if I wanted to change things later for all the treadmills, I only needed to alter one script. I used this system for my other new blocks in the mountain.

Not all my code came from the official Roblox page, many were found by searching forums and YouTube for more specific results. I wanted hazards for the player to dodge while climbing so learning how to spawn an object and to give it a random position in a certain area was vital, leading to the creation of the lava balls. They also interacted well with the fading blocks as they cause them to disappear too. I also wanted to give the first player to reach the finish one point and then teleport all players back to the start so that everyone had a fair chance for the next round. To ensure that everyone knows who won, I learned some UI code to make the players name display on everyone's screen.

With all these features in place, I felt my first game was mostly complete. I considered adding other obstacles and more types of blocks, but I didn't want to make the course too long so that it could be a fast action-packed scramble to the top using reactions and planning. From my first look at Roblox, it had shown itself to be well designed for quickly making multiplayer games in a way that other game engines would require lots of setup and knowledge. Coding for Roblox uses the programming language Lua which I had not previously tried. It is designed to use very few commands so it is relatively simple to learn but learning syntax for communicating with different properties in Roblox was key to tying it all together. By the end of my first project I felt more comfortable with it and prepared to code ideas all my own.