If your team already ships games on other engines or platforms, most of what you know carries over to Roblox. A few fundamentals work differently, and learning them first saves rework later. This section collects what you need in your first weeks on Roblox.
A few terms come up everywhere:
- Game: The overall project that players join. A game is a collection of places, and services like data stores, analytics, and in-game purchases are scoped to it.
- Place: A discrete scene or zone within a game, such as a lobby or a level. Each server runs one place.
- Studio: The editor you use to build places, write scripts, and upload assets. You edit one place at a time.
- Cloud-first: Places, assets, and scripts are saved to Roblox by default, rather than to files on your disk.
Key differences from other engines
- Cloud storage: Studio saves your places, assets, and scripts to Roblox rather than to files on your disk, and your team edits them together in real time with Team Create. If you want Git and other file-based tools, see Compare file-based workflows.
- Multiplayer by default: Every game runs on Roblox servers with a client-server model, so where you place an object or script determines whether the server, the client, or both can see and run it.
- Built-in physics: Parts simulate physics automatically without extra components, and you connect them to each other with constraints.
- Luau: Scripts use Luau, a fast, gradually typed language derived from Lua.
- Materials instead of shaders: Roblox doesn't support custom shaders, so you build materials with SurfaceAppearance and MaterialVariant and create effects with built-in materials and instances.
- Automatic quality scaling: Roblox adjusts rendering, lighting, and streaming to each device, which lets the same game run on phones, consoles, and PCs.
Onboarding by role
Engine comparisons
Team workflows
- Compare file-based workflows: Use Git with Roblox, from Script Sync to fully managed Rojo, and set up dev, stable, and production environments.
- Collaboration: Edit places together in real time with Team Create.
- Groups: Own games and assets as a team, and manage roles and permissions.
- Packages: Version and reuse content across places and games.
Next steps
- Speed up development with AI. Most professional developers will want to use their own AI tools and agent harness, and connect them to the Studio MCP server so they can build and test in Studio. Assistant is Studio's built-in alternative.
- Learn how players find and play your game in Discovery.