I gave this game a try last night, it was amusing all the different types of games you could potentially play, I was wondering who developed each one. It seems you can build your own games (game modes? unsure of the term for Roblox) and earn some income on it. I had no idea it was done in Lua, might give it a shot to see what is possible.

Please check out Roblox Studio [1], the free Win/Mac IDE for creating and publishing games on the platform.

Also look at the developer site [2], where you can find documentation, tutorials, and an awesome, active community in the developer forum [3].

[1] https://roblox.com/create

[2] https://developer.roblox.com

[3] https://devforum.roblox.com

(disclaimer: I'm an engineer on the Roblox Studio team)

After having read this HN post this morning I went ahead and installed the studio, it's pretty damn nice, there's a bit to unload for me mentally but I love the whole thing so far, you can test within the IDE and switch between user / server which seems interesting. I'm currently teaching myself Godot so I can make some games on my time off but this seems like an even easier approach given that a lot of graphics are already available plus the user base. I guess now I have to learn how this all works, and what kind of games most users like so I can try to make something interesting and different.

Thanks for the links, so far from what I can see Roblox Studio is pretty good!

https://techcrunch.com/2020/07/28/roblox-jumps-to-over-150m-... Roblox has 150m users. will pay 250m to devs.

2020 dev conference talks are now avail https://developer.roblox.com/en-us/resources/rdc

Roblox is essentially a full on game engine and store now, comparable to Unity + Steam with free, automatic cloud hosting and matchmaking. There's a lot of daily users, and the top earners on the platform make multiple millions of dollars from it.

I first learned programming due to Roblox. It's really easy to pick up, and you can make almost whatever type of game you want. I honestly believe that highschool programming classes should universally use it for introducing how to code rather than Javascript or Unity.

The way I see it, Unreal is eating Unity from above, extending down, and Roblox is eating Unity from below, developing awesome new technologies. Gotta be hard being Unity :-)

Roblox has tons of innovation. It has a volumetric/voxel based lighting system. It has networked rigid body dynamics built right in. It lets you take your avatar between each game, keeping your look. And you can late-join any game -- you don't need to be there "at the start."

Some games have tens of thousands of moving pieces, yet load reasonably quickly. Check out the tornado in Natural Disaster Survival for a good example!

I've played this a lot back when Roblox was still brand spanking new. It's absolutely a lucrative area if you can manage to make multiple game-modes with people buying your in-game items for RBux (RBux is the premium currency roblox, which can be used to extend your developer membership or be redeemed to cash). Those big game modes out there with a lot of traffic are actually making real decent money. The game is played by millions of kids willing to spend money on cosmetics/advantage on game-modes. If I recall, I think it was 2017, Roblox rewarded $200k to a young developer for his work on a DayZ Roblox clone.

Roblox is like a game engine that you can script in Lua, plus the servers to run the engine for you. The barrier to entry to make a game is relatively low -- making an obstacle-course game requires almost no coding, for example.

My son spends his life on Roblox. If you're ever after beta testers? ;)

Hmm, that's a good idea - connecting interested kids directly with Roblox developers and letting them play around in/QC alpha-stage worlds.

That would teach the value of iteration, failing forward and how to deal with imperfection at a very early age.

Of course reality is not a vacuum and there would be a lot of noise though :)

Ah man! I'm just starting to learn, so if I get far enough along maybe I'll write up a blog post and submit it on here documenting my concept, still unsure what I want to do currently though.

I've been playing with Minetest instead, because it is easier to work in isolation without a Roblox server. Can you run a Roblox server in single player mode?

Yes, and you can run a local server as part of the test functionality in Studio.

Thanks! I'll give it a try this weekend. I tend to isolate, so social gaming is not my comfort zone, which is why I like to play Minetest on my local machine by myself. I do play with my kids in the same game on one computer though, so there is hope ;)

There's also roblox-ts: a fork of the TypeScript compiler that compiles to Lua with Roblox's runtime.

https://roblox-ts.com/

There is a typescript for lua: https://github.com/teal-language/tl

Is it actually a TS for Lua or does it use the annotations to improve performance?

It transpiles to plain Lua, so presumably it doesn't improve performance.

https://github.com/teal-language/tl/blob/master/docs/about.m...

No, literally TS. It compiles to plain Lua, doesn't add any language features apart from types, has an equivalent strict mode and uses .d.tl files just like .d.ts