Read on Twitter
ok Roblox is just too big to responsibly ignore as a gamedev. downloading their editor tooling, I wanna see what enables kids 9-12yo to create complex games
so far just trying to play a game is so unintuitive? the website experience is so opaque it's borderline hostile. all games suggested to me cost some currency of which I have 0
lmao at those laconic patch notes I already love this
what do any of these icons mean? what am i supposed to do?? there is so little handholding, big 90s games and flash era vibes
my job is now "ice cream"
this girl approached me with a shopping cart and i am now stuck in it, she controls where i go, i can't escape
with 2-3 clicks in unlabeled menus i now own a treehouse mansion and I have a child (???) following me around
just vacuuming the streets with Lazlo Junior
some guy in a yellow sports car honked at me because i was in the way
ok this was a wild ride but I get it. this one game is basically Sloche. really amazed at the versatility of the systems here (gui, inventory, equippable items, permanent ownership, pets, mounts). let's see about the editor that powers those...
Disappointed, seems like a pretty traditional engine editor structure. Not at all approachable. I'm presuming the people making games with this are adults & probably professional gamedevs used to Unity/Unreal/Godot already.
some interesting UX choices though... I'll post what I find
the "default" move tool is a surface cast, which is a bit unsettling for someone used to an axis based transform but arguably very intuitive for a human
the axis based move tool has an amazing snapping detection that has no right being that good, it's almost humiliating for professional engines
their approach to materials/texturing/coloring is also extremely intuitive
"parts" seem to be the basic building block, with a whopping 4 options: box, sphere, wedge, cylinder. these get combined in the hierarchy into more complex shapes. no BSP/CSG, yet super versatile. most builtin "models" seem to be made of these simple parts.
ok I said "builtin" but I misunderstood, this panel is actually much cooler. It seems to be a live online marketplace of user uploaded content, complete with preview, that you can just drag & drop in your scene. Models, images, sounds, etc.
The effects menu is another "semantics over form" approach to creating objects, love it. As a user I want to create an Explosion or a Beam, not a particle system. (I can't actually get any of those to work though but it's the intent that matters)
hahaha the Terrain editor is just voxel/SDF out of the box. Makes you realize how archaic it is to work with heightmaps in 2021.
and a "default" terrain offers options to generate by biome (again: semantic), with a lovely checkbox for "Caves", and spits a texture mapped / noise generated starting point that's actually decent.
Where the editing experience falls short though is scripting, behaviour and logic, with completely opaque properties and no particularly good metaphors. "Archivable"? "ServerScriptService"? Should we expect a 9-12yo child to understand these?
But all in all, I definitely take this tweet back. The Roblox editor removes *so* many friction points that traditional engines impose on their users in such obvious ways that they make Unity/Unreal feel like the stone age. https://twitter.com/lazlobon/status/1385748937366249474
