Managing Projects with Roblox Studio

Creating Projects

To create a project:

1. Open Roblox Studio.
2. Click a template from the Studio start screen.
3. After making any change, you can save the project from the File menu:

   • Save to File - Saves the place you are currently working on to disk as an .rbxl file.
   • Save to Roblox - Saves your place to Roblox servers as the default starting place for your project. When choosing this option, Roblox prompts you to define project settings, so it can properly manage your project in the cloud.
   • Save to Roblox As... - Saves your place to an existing project, as an additional place in that experience.

Defining Project Settings

Project settings tell Roblox how to manage components of your project in the cloud. These settings are only available after saving your project to Roblox. To define project settings:

1. In the menu bar, select the Home tab, then click Game Settings. If you haven't saved your project, you are prompted to do so.

   

2. Fill in the required fields for the Basic Info tab and click Save. This unlocks more tabs to define other project settings as described in Game Settings.

Cloud-Based Assets

In Roblox, assets such as images, meshes, and audio are stored as cloud-based assets, so you don't need to bundle local copies into a saved Studio experience. Each asset in the cloud is assigned a unique asset ID from which multiple experiences can utilize them.

See Assets for details on instances, assets, and their association in Roblox.

Publishing Projects

Beta

When you're ready to release an experience to a wider audience for testing, you can release it to the public, although beta testing should still be an essential part of your development cycle. Because you're not able to determine which countries have access to an experience, which limits the ability to run beta tests in smaller markets, consider these alternate strategies:

Under the paid access model, users must pay an upfront fee in Robux, the platform's currency. This limits your user base, allowing you to test and iterate with smaller server fills, although the test results you gather may not reflect performance among a wider audience.

Full

When you're ready to release an experience to the world, you can release it to the public under its final name with a complete description, icon, and other promotional imagery. For guidance on release names, descriptions, and promotional materials, review metadata best practices, experience icons, and promotional thumbnails.

World Building Practices

The following tips will help you build your world in a more efficient and polished way, ranging from how you create your project to how you can approach level design in Studio.

Understanding Scale

A representation of the user can help designers understand the scale of their world and accommodate size-sensitive areas like hallways or doors. To insert a character model for this purpose:

1. In the menu bar, select the Avatar tab, then click Rig Builder.
2. Select one of the rigs to insert it into your experience. While building, position the rig near key areas to better understand the scale of a construction.

Grayboxing

Grayboxing is a level design process where environments are built with placeholder art. Once a level is created, it can be playtested and evaluated for gameplay, scale, and visuals. Final art assets can then be produced to replace the graybox assets.

Studio's Toolbox and solid modeling tools are perfect for grayboxing when designing and building your experience. Notice the usage of grayboxing in the Roblox showcase The Mystery Of Duvall Drive.

Parts and Meshes

Objects in an environment typically consist of parts or MeshParts. Before building a section of an environment, consider whether that component should be a part or MeshPart.

• Parts are built-in shapes such as blocks, spheres, and cylinders that can be used as-is or combined using solid modeling. Use parts for grayboxing or simple architectural elements like walls and floors.

• MeshParts are imported 3D assets used for complex architectural objects and props. They also support SurfaceAppearance, which permits advanced graphic options such as normal maps.

In the following image, parts were used to construct the walls, floors, and railings. All other objects like candles and bookshelves are MeshPart objects. For more information, see Meshes and External Modeling.

Applying Materials

For greater visual polish, it's recommended to change the default Plastic material of parts. Even a simple switch to Concrete adds a minor level of visual noise and detail without impacting the color. See Materials for information on setting alternate materials and creating your own custom materials.

Snapping and Alignment

Always make sure that objects are aligned to the grid at the start. Position and size values should also be set at common increments of 1 or 0.25. If objects are not aligned, or if sizes are inconsistent, small irregularities such as gaps in walls are likely to appear.

Packages and Assets

Packages are sets of reusable objects defined by a developer that can be easily modified and updated across multiple places. For any large project, packages are highly useful. They offer the following benefits when building:

• Packages can be used as asset kits, allowing developers to duplicate a set of objects as needed. If an experience also has multiple places, asset kits can be reused between places to provide consistency.
• Packages make it easier to update assets. For instance, a package can include a tree that's duplicated many times in an environment. If a developer needs to make a change, such as swap textures for the tree, it can be updated once in the package instead of for each individual instance.
• Packages make grayboxing quicker. A package can start with graybox assets, and eventually be replaced with final art assets. When assets are replaced, they retain all original positions and orientations.

Graphical Features

Roblox is consistently adding new features to the engine. You can find news of the latest features in the DevForum Announcements section.

Additionally, Roblox showcase experiences have documentation on how the latest features are implemented. For instance, Beyond the Dark Showcase and The Mystery of Duvall Drive outline best practices such as asset packages, modular building, and more.

Using Plugins

Many developers use plugins or third-party integrations to assist in building processes and managing their projects, some examples of which are outlined here.

Building Plugins

The following tools are commonly used to create geometry more easily or to help you build environments faster.

• Brush Tool — Allows developers to "paint" sets of objects to create relative elements like forests or ground cover.

• Resize Align by Stravant — Resizes objects so they align with another object. Great for structural and architectural work, such as making walls, hallways, and ceiling.

• Reflect by Stravant — Reflects models over a chosen plane.

• Archimedes by Scriptos — Creates arches or circular structures using parts.

• Sun Position Plugin — Sets the sun position by clicking on the skybox.

• Terrain Save and Load — Copies and pastes terrain from one place to another.

Efficiency Plugins

These tools are commonly used to facilitate managing larger environments through speeding up some frequent processes, such as finding and selecting parts.

• Selection Plugin — Allows for the selection of multiple objects with the same name in the Explorer or Game Editor view.

• Part Picker — Picks all parts that meet a search criteria. For example, all models with a specific mesh ID, or all parts with the concrete material.

• Power Selectors — Makes selecting parts much quicker and easier. Select parts using circles or rectangles. Parts can be selected even if they're in models or folders.

• Particle Emitter Emit() — When a particle emitter is selected, this displays a button that emits particles. Useful for testing particle bursts.

Performance Tools

The following tools are used by some builders to test and manage performance considerations.

• Mesh Optimization Tools — A plugin that provides some helpful tools for optimizing the geometry and physics of TriangleMeshPart objects (MeshPart/UnionOperation). It also visualizes collision volumes.

• Render Settings Plugin — Makes it quicker to edit Studio and Client quality levels to simulate different settings seen as an end-user on different devices.

Project Management

Rojo is beneficial if your team wants to use external version control systems or text editors. See External Tools.