I never though that I would be creating a game with the skills I have learned so far in my journey learning CS. I have read about the reputation of the gaming industry and it just didn’t appeal to me to get thrown in that kind of environment. Yea, I like gaming and have done quite my share of it in the past but being the game developer did not seem like it was something I wanted to do (although I would be ok with game testing). It wasn’t until over the summer where I saw my 5 year old playing a simple, small game with unknown developer that it dawn on me that game development might actually be something fun to try my hand at.

I have heard of other game development platforms, mainly Unity which I know uses C++ to develop the games. So when I looked into Roblox, I was a bit surprised with the language it was using. Roblox uses Lua, or rather a superset of Lua called Luau. It’s an interpreted language so I immediately thought of speed being a factor however it appears as the Roblox team added additional performance optimizations to make it much faster. I have not used Unity for game development but it would be interesting at this point to try it out now that I have gained some experience using Roblox.

One of the main reasons I chose Roblox was that I was able to build the game fairly quickly and easily using the tools provided in Roblox Studios. You can install 3rd party plugins and create most things you need in house. Although there are certain objects that require 3rd party tools such creating special game items, player characters, and character modifications, those were above and beyond what I needed to develop a simple game. Once I started building the levels in my game, I found that I was creating them at a much faster rate than I had planned so I had to modify my timetable a bit to account for this.

Another reason why I like Roblox is that it is free of charge. Other competitors charge for their game engine but with Roblox, all of their tools are free. Even hosting your game on their servers is free. Many games in Roblox are monetized where you can buy in-game items. Roblox makes its money by taking a piece of a developer’s earnings, similar to the Apple’s app store. So its a very user friendly way to getting developers, especially novice developers to create “experiences” on the Roblox platform.

Lastly, Roblox is very user friendly and has a robust community of novice game developers. If you look at their game library, there are thousands of games that were developed by novice game developers. You do not see this in the major gaming platforms and it is incredible to see the type of games being developed by single individuals. Many of those games are really fun! However, you can now see some bigger development studios creating games in Roblox and even big-brand companies developing experiences in Roblox since you can do more than gaming on the Roblox platform.

I think my end-goal for Roblox is to keep learning the platform and get better with developing games. This has really changed my perspective of software development as I realize and I can finally be my own “game tester.”