Lesson Description: After learning the basics of using Roblox Studio and scripting, students take their skills further by starting a more complex project, the adventure game. They'll plan out elements of their game, create a virtual world, and setup basic gameplay components like keeping track of player items.
Lesson Objectives
Practice pre-production by planning out elements of a game and creating them in Roblox Studio.
Demonstrate knowledge of variables and functions by creating a script to keep track of player information.
Skills and Concepts
Game Mechanic - An action players do in a game, like run or collect. Games are made of multiple game mechanics.
Pre-production - Planning out projects, such as by drawing sketches, before creating in a software like Roblox Studio.
Note that students don't need access to computers at the start of this section.
Lead students through the lesson: Create the Map, stopping before the section: Creating the Environment.
As students draw their starting area, keep in mind the following.
Areas drawn should be achievable in scale of what a student can do in a week - such as a house with a front lawn or a simple forest vs a detailed city block. This helps focus students and they can always add more when finished.
Drawings don't have to be complex - simple symbols like circles and squares are enough.
The name of the leaderstats variable must be "leaderstats". Without this, the script won't know to create a new leaderboard.
Handout: Adventure Game Reference helps students keep track of variable names. This is especially useful if they replaced default variable names, like "Gold" with something of their own, like "Rubies".
Remind students to build everything using parts, not by using the Toolbox. Using the Toolbox may introduce unexpected issues into their games.
As students work on their project, help them keep in mind a reasonable scale of what they can accomplish by the end of the sessions.
If students have ambitious goals (I want to build three different worlds in my game), remind them to focus on their goals for today's current session. Have them write down their additional ideas on the game design document.
Set strict expectations as to how much time students can spend working on their starting area. They can always continue in later sessions.
Students can spend more time building out their starting area using the terrain tools or adding decorative parts.
If students are unclear what to add, ask questions about what objects they'd expect to find in that themed world (E.g. If you were on a moonbase, what would you see? How can you build that using parts?)
Students can add more than one type of item to harvest. Just remember that each item follows the same organization in the Explorer and has a BoolValue named CanHarvest set to true.
