Preface

With this practical book, you’ll get hands-on experience working in the Roblox platform.

You’ll start with an overview of Roblox development and then understand how to use Roblox Studio. As you progress, you’ll learn everything from how to program in Roblox’s Luau language, to creating games such as an obby and a battle royale. Towards the end, you’ll delve into the logistics of game production, focusing on optimizing the performance of your game by implementing good mechanics, monetization, and marketing practices.

By the end of this Roblox guide, you will have the skills you need to lead or work with a team to bring your gaming worlds to life and extend that experience to players around the world.

Who this book is for

This book is for anyone who is interested in learning how to develop games on the Roblox platform and those who are already familiar with Roblox and want to explore the best tips, tricks, and practices for efficient Roblox development.

What this book covers

Section 1: Introduction to Roblox Development

Chapter 1, Introducing Roblox Development, focuses on introducing you to the basic concepts of Roblox development, including getting to know the types of development opportunities that exist, how to make money from games, and what to expect based on earlier projects.

Chapter 2, Knowing Your Work Environment, teaches you how to use Roblox Studio. It covers basic controls such as movement and camera manipulation, interacting with instances in the Workspace, using free assets, and changing game information.

Section 2: Programming in Roblox

Chapter 3, Introduction to Luau, does not assume any prior programming experience. You will learn how to program in Roblox’s Luau language, from print("Hello world") to many other universal programming constructs.

Chapter 4, Roblox Programming Scenarios, focuses on Roblox-specific programming scenarios that those with general programming knowledge would still be unfamiliar with.

Chapter 5, Creating an Obby, is where you will learn how to apply what you’ve learned to make a simple but neat and playable game. The game type will be an obby game, and to make it, you will need to utilize variables, events, functions, and properties.

Chapter 6, Creating a Battle Royale Game, will use everything that you have learned to make a battle royale-style game. This will require you to use all that you have learned in the book while learning new skills in security and organization. By the end of this chapter, you should feel confident in producing your own games from scratch.

Section 3: The Logistics of Game Production

Chapter 7, The Three Ms, is the most comprehensive part of the book that focuses on things outside of programming. This chapter will focus on expanding your skills to make you more than just a programmer and help you market yourself, in addition to optimizing the performance of your games through the three Ms: Mechanics, Monetization, and Marketing.

Chapter 8, 50 Cool Things to Do on Roblox, will explore different ideas for games and systems, to inspire you when making games of your own. It will cover programming ideas and challenges, individual systems to add to your games, as well as ways to take advantage of new Roblox features.

To get the most out of this book

You will require the following hardware and software to implement all the exercises in this book:

Software/Hardware covered in the book	OS Requirements
Roblox Studio	Windows, macOS X, Chrome OS
Roblox Player	Windows, macOS X, Chrome OS

For a complete list of system requirements for all of Roblox’s components, please visit the following link: https://en.help.roblox.com/hc/en-us/articles/203312800.

If you are using the digital version of this book, we advise you to type the code yourself or access the code via the GitHub repository (link available in the next section). Doing so will help you avoid any potential errors related to the copying and pasting of code.

Download the example code files

The code bundle for the book is hosted on GitHub at https://github.com/PacktPublishing/Coding-Roblox-Games-Made-Easy-2nd-Edition. We also have other code bundles from our rich catalog of books and videos available at https://github.com/PacktPublishing/. Check them out!

Download the color images

We also provide a PDF file that has color images of the screenshots/diagrams used in this book. You can download it here: https://static.packt-cdn.com/downloads/9781803234670_ColorImages.pdf.

Conventions used

There are a number of text conventions used throughout this book.

CodeInText: Indicates code words in text, database table names, folder names, filenames, file extensions, pathnames, dummy URLs, user input, and Twitter handles. For example; “When a player joins the game, they need to have their data added to the sessionData dictionary.”

A block of code is set as follows:

local playersService = game:GetService("Players")
playersService.PlayerAdded:Connect(function(player)
    print(player.Name.. " joined the game.")
end)

Bold: Indicates a new term, an important word, or words that you see on the screen, for example, in menus or dialog boxes, also appear in the text like this. For example: “To create the user interface for your game, the first thing that you will need to do is navigate to the StarterGui service under Explorer.”

Warnings or important notes appear like this.

Tips and tricks appear like this.

Get in touch

Feedback from our readers is always welcome.

General feedback: Email [e-mail], and mention the book’s title in the subject of your message. If you have questions about any aspect of this book, please email us at [e-mail].

Errata: Although we have taken every care to ensure the accuracy of our content, mistakes do happen. If you have found a mistake in this book we would be grateful if you would report this to us. Please visit, http://www.packtpub.com/submit-errata, selecting your book, clicking on the Errata Submission Form link, and entering the details.

Piracy: If you come across any illegal copies of our works in any form on the Internet, we would be grateful if you would provide us with the location address or website name. Please contact us at [e-mail] with a link to the material.

If you are interested in becoming an author: If there is a topic that you have expertise in and you are interested in either writing or contributing to a book, please visit http://authors.packtpub.com.

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