Climb The Giant Man Obby: Part 9

As you might have seen already: I finished my Obby! It’s been out for a day and a half now, and it seems to be going down pretty well! roblox.com/games/65744753…

So, I thought I’d come back and wrap up this thread. It’s been really nice, documenting the process like this.

Hmm, I’ve been trying to think of a nice way to sum the whole project up, and I’m not sure where to start. AMA, I guess?

There were a few things that I wanted to do (like moving platforms, a lot of things with physics) that felt like swimming against the current. After a while I decided to stick to things that the engine was reliably good at.

That sounds critical of Roblox Studio, but it’s not really meant to be – the engine is super fun to work with, and that’s a big part of why I got so carried away with this project in the first place. (But yeah: there are a few wonky edges)

I didn’t know this was a thing. It looks really nice actually, lol

Feature I most enjoyed: just manipulating parts in Roblox Studio feels *really* nice. You can just drag parts around in the editor and they raycast-collide with the scene in sensible ways. It makes it feel like playing with a lego set.

Feature that needs to be improved: The Toolbox is amazing, but it’s genuinely overrun with viruses and I don’t know how they let it get so bad. That whole feature really needs some attention.

Yes! The really nice thing about learning a new tool is that everything you do inspires new ideas. I’m definitely going to be doing more things in Roblox. (after a little break)

(It’s also inspired a lot of thinking that I hope to take to future non-roblox projects!)

I’ll probably do a big thread of Roblox games I love at some point, but a few that I think are really interesting are: Jailbreak, Tower of Hell, Eg!, Scuba Diving at Quill Lake, and Marble Mania.

Thank you! I have three commercial games, and picking up any of them is more than enough to support me <3 I’m fortunate enough that those games do well enough to pay the bills, and that I can therefore spend some of my time on freeware projects

I have a lot of disjointed thoughts about roblox and monetisation, but I figured, at least at this point, it was more constructive for me to put a pin in that and focus on just making a nice free thing

I did try to think about how I might put some Roblox products in the game, but I couldn’t think of anything I liked. As someone who makes a living from “premium” games, I’m coming at this from a very different perspective and tbh I don’t even know where I’d start

(I particular, I really don’t like the idea of charging for level skips, or anything that fundamental to the player’s experience of the game)

Maybe? Definitely not no. The Roblox tools are really nice.

Sort of tangentially to this question: something I discovered quite late in the process is making your own Roblox plugins, and just how easy and powerful that is. I made my own “Stairmaster” plugin for placing the steps at the opening challenge!

Roblox Plugins are incredibly simple – they’re *just* scripts that you can attach to buttons in the main UI, so you can easily make your own custom tools to do whatever you like inside the editor. developer.roblox.com/en-us/articles…

The last time I used Unity was 2011. I’ve only really taken a quick look at Godot. I’ve never used Unreal. It’s possible that the reason I enjoyed working with Roblox Studio so much is that it’s my first real encounter with a modern 3D game engine.

Very hard for me to judge, tbh. There seems to be a fairly short list of Roblox plugins that people commonly use. The real appeal is that you can just make your own, fairly easily.

Both questions worth answering here: the tools to make and play roblox content are completely free – up to a point. Once you want to upload assets like sounds or textures, they charge a small moderation fee. I was also charged for creating badges.

I probably spent somewhere around ~700 Robux in the end, which works out at about $2.50. (Whoops, sorry, that’s actually very badly off, brain misfire. It’s closer to like $10.)

As for the other question: Yes! It’s a little hard to find examples of this, but you have full control over characters, cameras, shaders, everything you’d expect in a 3D engine. You can make Roblox games that look nothing like Roblox, if you like.

There’s a great thread here of Roblox “showcases”, where people make visually impressive Roblox places: devforum.roblox.com/t/the-great-li…

Yes, interestingly, you can just straight up charge for Roblox games! I’ve only actually seen one game that does it, but it’s apparently hugely successful.

Ok, yes: this is sort of a big question. The number one thing to say here is that Roblox makes multiplayer game design more accessible than *anything* else I’ve ever played with.

By default, Roblox just sort of magically handles server replication, and if you’re making a certain type of game, you basically don’t need to worry about networking at all. That’s kind of amazing!

But it’s not perfect – even for an Obby, you do need to think about client versus server code a fair bit if you want things to feel good. In the end, I moved almost all the code in Giant Man to be client side.

Once you get your head around how it’s structured, Roblox’s approach to multiplayer code is pretty sensible. I banged my head against things a few times, and I think there are some things that could be clearer, but for the most part it’s very nice to work with.

It’s worth repeating: there’s basically nothing else out there which makes multiplayer game design so accessible. It’s really the big thing Roblox has going for it.

Ok, I think I can safely wrap up now – thank you for the questions! I consider Climb the Giant Man Obby a very successful side project, and I am very glad to have spent time making it!

As a first Roblox project for learning the ropes, I think an Obby was a very good choice. But a huge part of the appeal of Roblox for me is the multiplayer stuff, and it’s a bit of a shame that there isn’t more of that in the Giant Man.

So whatever my next Roblox project is (probably not for a while), I’m excited for it to explore something with a more explicit multiplayer focus!

That’s it, THREAD COMPLETE! (thanks for reading, all <3 )

Bonus: Advertising the Giant Man Experience ->