Publishing Experiences and Places

Experiences on Roblox are made up of individual places, comparable to scenes in Unity or maps in Unreal Engine. Each place contains all components for that portion of the experience, including its specific environment, parts, meshes, scripts, and user interface.

While an experience can consist of many places, each experience can only have one starting place that all users load into when they join. From within any place, you can teleport users to another place.

Publishing a Starting Place

By default, publishing a new place creates a new experience. New experiences begin as private and are only accessible to you and members of your group with the correct permissions. When appropriate, you can release the experience to the public.

To publish a place as the starting place of an entirely new experience:

1. In the Studio menu bar, select File → Publish to Roblox. A contextual menu displays.

2. In the contextual menu, fill in the following fields, most of which you can update later in the Game Settings menu.

   • Name / Description — The experience name and a description that describes what a potential player should expect. See metadata best practices for guidelines.

   • Creator — The creator you'd like to attribute as the creator of the experience.

   It's highly recommended that you create a group and publish a new experience under the group's account, not your personal account. Even if you're a solo creator, this allows you to expand your team over time, recruit playtesters, and operate as an independent studio.

   • Genre — The genre that best describes the experience.

   • Devices — Each applicable device type that you want to support. The default options are practical for most new creators.

     

3. Click the Create button.

Once an experience is published, you can access the Game Settings menu, which contains Studio-level settings and customization options for monetization, character appearance, and more.

Creating Additional Places

After you have published a starting place to create the overall experience, you can add additional places through the Asset Manager.

To create a new place within an existing experience:

1. In the View tab, select the Asset Manager icon. The Asset Manager window displays.

   

2. Navigate to the upper-left corner of the Asset Manager window, then click the ☰ icon. A contextual menu displays.

3. In the contexual menu, select Places. The starting place displays with a spawn icon.

   
   

4. Avoiding the thumbnail and name of your starting place, right-click in an empty region of the window. A contextual menu displays.

5. From the contexutal menu, select Add New Place. A new place displays with a placeholder name of [New Place].

   

6. Right-click the new place, select Rename, and enter a more descriptive name.

7. When you double-click the new place, a new Studio session opens for editing the new place.

Releasing to the Public

New experiences begin as private and are only accessible to you and members of your group with the correct permissions. When appropriate, you can release an experience to the public as follows:

1. Navigate to the Creator Dashboard.

2. If you published the experience under a group account, select the group in the left column.

   

3. Hover over the right-hand corner of an experience's thumbnail, theb click the ⋯ that appears. A contexutal menu displays.

4. From the contextual menu, select Make Public.

   

Your experience is now public. To ensure that it's available to the largest appropriate audience, ensure you also generate Experience Guidelines for the experience.

Linking to Experiences

After you make an experience public, you can copy its link from the Creator Dashboard and share it with others via social media or similar.

1. Hover over the right-hand corner of an experience's thumbnail, theb click the ⋯ that appears. A contexutal menu displays.

2. From the contextual menu, select Copy URL.

   

3. Share the URL with others. When they follow the link, they navigate to the experience's main page that features a button they can click to access the experience.

   

You can also share an experience directly from the Roblox app:

1. Open the Roblox app on your mobile device.

2. Locate the experience, typically under the Continue header on the home screen, and tap its tile to open the info screen.

3. In the lower-left corner of the screen, click the ⋯ button and select Share to open your device's sharing options.

   

   

Experience Guidelines

Experience Guidelines provide information on the experience's main page about what kind of content the experience contains so that users can make informed decisions about what they interact with. Roblox uses this information to recommend experiences on the Home and Discover pages based on each user's appropriate age group and regional content policies.

Each Experience Guideline has two components:

• Age Recommendations – Indicates which age group an experience is suitable for based on child development research and industry standards. For more information, see Age Recommendations.
• Content Descriptors – Indicates what type of content is within an experience, such as realistic depictions of blood or paid item trading.

For instructions on how to generate Experience Guidelines, see Experience Guidelines.

Allowing Copying

By default, all private and public experiences are locked so that you or your group are the only creators who have access to edit its place files. However, if you want to allow other creators to be able to download an editable copy of your experience for their own creator process, you can uncopylock the experience. This is particularly helpful when you create templates or reference files for open use.

To allow users to download an editable copy of your experience:

1. Navigate to the Creator Dashboard.

2. Select the thumbnail of the experience you want to allow users to copy. The experience's Overview page displays.

3. In the left-hand navigation, select Places. The Places page displays with place thumbnails for that specific experience.

   

4. Select the starting place for the experience. The Basic Settings page displays.

5. In the left-hand navigation, select Permissions. The Permissions page displays.

   

6. Under the Basic Settings section, enable Allow users to download a copy of this Place.

   

7. Click the SAVE CHANGES button. Your experience is now uncopylocked, and creators can download an editable copy of it from the experience's main page.

   

Reverting to Previous Versions

Roblox automatically retains saved versions of each place for version control and backup purposes. If you need to revert to a previously saved version:

1. In the View tab, select the Asset Manager icon. The Asset Manager window displays.

   

2. Navigate to the upper-left corner of the Asset Manager window, then click the ☰ icon. A contextual menu displays.

3. In the contexual menu, select Places. All of your place files display for this experience.

   

4. Right-click the desired place and select View History. The version history window opens.

   

5. Locate and select the version to revert to, then click the Open button to launch a new Studio session for the selected version.

Updating Experiences

After you publish an updated version of an experience to Roblox, players aren't immediately removed from the old version of the experience. Instead, you have a few options for how quickly you transition players to the new version. All options have advantages and are appropriate in certain situations.

The first option is to do nothing. If you take no action, players transition to the new version of the experience as the servers running the old version eventually empty and shut down. This option is nondisruptive, but your player base might be playing different versions of the experience for a prolonged period of time. If you recently published a major update, having players on the old version can be undesirable. This approach is best for minor updates.

Restarting Servers for Updates

The Restart Servers for Updates option is the best choice for most updates. When you choose this option, Roblox performs the following actions:

• Stops matchmaking to servers running the old version of the experience. Servers running the latest version are unaffected.
• Starts replacement servers.
• Shuts down old servers as their replacements become ready.
• Prompts players to rejoin the new version of the experience. If they choose to rejoin, all players on an existing server connect to the same replacement server.

Depending on the number of servers to replace, this process can take up to six minutes. Most experiences update in less than one minute.

To restart all servers for updates:

1. Navigate to the Creator Dashboard.
2. On your experience thumbnail, click ... and Restart Servers for Updates.

Shutting Down All Servers

The Shut Down All Servers option immediately shuts down all servers and removes players from the experience. This option is highly disruptive: if players rejoin the experience, matchmaking does not keep them together. As such, Shut Down All Servers is best for after you've fixed a game-breaking bug or other situations in which you don't want players on the old version for even a short duration.

To shut down all servers:

1. Navigate to the Creator Dashboard.
2. On your experience thumbnail, click ... and Shut Down All Servers.

Alternatively, select File > Game Settings > Other in Roblox Studio. Then click Shutdown.

Metadata Best Practices

Your experience's name and description create an important first impression and contribute to how easily users find your experience through Roblox's dynamic discovery systems.

Experience Name

All experiences should adhere to the following best practices for naming:

• Keep the name consistent – Renaming an experience too often reduces the chances that users can find it using a previous name.

• Avoid spamming – Frequent repetition of words or phrases may result in demotion of your experience.

• Use decorations cautiously – Decorating the name with one or two well-placed emojis isn't harmful, but misplaced or excessive decorations can confuse users who quickly want to identify the experience.

• Avoid unrelated text – Adding text which is unrelated to the core name, such as a current version release or the latest updates, can negatively affect the discovery and recognition of your experience.

  Quest in Fantasyland

  [⚡WEAPONS UPDATE] Quest in Fantasyland

  

  Entire title visible to players

  

  Title pushed out by update note

Experience Description

A well-written description promotes the genre and unique qualities of your experience while also providing the best context for both users and Roblox's dynamic discovery systems.

• Summarize your experience – Summarize what your experience is about in the first sentence, as this is your opportunity to present the most accurate impression of its genre and content.

• Provide keywords – Include all keywords that may be relevant to your experience. This makes it easier for users and Roblox to understand the themes and genres presented in your experience.

• Avoid spamming – Avoid repeating keywords or adding irrelevant keywords. This may result in demotion of your experience.