Learning to create games with Roblox

Ryan — Sat, 07 Oct 2023 09:14:14 -0400

I'm a lifelong video game enthusiast. My brother and I cut our teeth on Atari 2600, Commodore 64/128, and NES games, eventually learning to develop our own in BASIC, QBasic, C (long live MUDs!), and FreeBASIC (a modernized, open source QuickBASIC derivative).

For all that I enjoyed games, including many plays through Super Mario 3 or youth group battles in Starcraft and Descent, I never got too sucked into any one game. I own hundreds, but I've actually completed very few. (And despite playing dozens of roguelikes, Brogue is the only one I've beaten.) Instead, I always tended to prefer the experience of making them - learning to reproduce certain mechanics, trying new concepts, riffing on themes, and working within constraints.

In short, the best "game" to me was the experience of making a game, and sharing my works in progress with friends was as fun to me as actually completing a game.

All that leads to the point of this post: I recently decided to learn how to make games in Roblox, the global gaming phenomenon that I've heard about over the years but somehow never even looked at until last week. A friend from the QB / FB forums had recently published one there and I wanted to check it out, and then of course, having experienced his, I then had to try my hand at making my own.