Roblox Development (What I've learned Part 2)

For my second project, I wanted to focus more on level design and make a more relaxing game. I started with the basic idea of using the official tutorials to make a glider tool that players could equip to fly around. After researching into it to see how others had done it and how to control the player's velocity I found that some more specific tutorials were out of date and no longer worked so I created my own method that detected when you were holding the glider and falling, which then limited your downward velocity to 5 for a more gradual fall. Building out from the glider concept I decided to make a game called Glider Island where the player has to scale up an island that by collecting power up rings.

To focus on level design, I planned out the whole structure of the island in advance on a grid map as I planned to build the island out of cubes for speed and accuracy. I used different colours for the height levels as that is an important part of keeping certain areas inaccessible at the start so the player can gradually climb. The plans had a lagoon, archways, small islands, a shipwreck, rivers and waterfalls to explore. To decorate the large areas, there would be smaller details like palm trees, rocks and boats.

Before the main shape of the island had been placed, I started work on the rings to collect, deciding on three types of rings, energy, jump, and speed which are yellow, blue, and red respectively. The initial plan was that for each 10 rings you collect in a category, the stat would be boosted. The energy stat would be used to increase the amount of time you can glide before you get tired and stop, with the player starting with 100 energy that drains when gliding and steadily refills when not. The jump stat would boost the height of your super jump ability that lets you glide from higher, activated with a clickable UI button for mobile and a key binding for PC. The speed stat would increase your movement speed, but also the glider can move at up to double your movement speed, allowing for further distances. These three stats let me design ways to climb up such as rocks to super jump up, or a distance to glide over into a higher section.

When making these rings, I encountered some issues when thinking about how things would work locally on each players screen and on the server. When a player collects a ring, I wanted it to be transparent and unable to be collected again by them, however with this code being run on the server, the rings were only collectable once by one player and then no other players could get the same ring. Learning to run code on the client's end was essential for the experience I wanted and learning this now has expanded what I can do in future game projects.

I am continuing to work on the game, adding in more rings and methods to climb higher up the island but after having others test it I have decided to make some changes such as allowing the payer to get stronger quicker. This adds to the initial excitement as collecting 10 rings is a lot before you see any increase in power. I will also be adding in sound effects and visual effects for collecting rings to make players feel more rewarded and eager to collect them all. My Lua has improved and I feel more confident just opening a script and getting started trying to build something new. I plan to polish and finish this game, then either move onto new Roblox projects or experiment with other ways to improve my game development skills.