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by philjohn 2039 days ago
My daughter did that at first - now she has a private server where she and her friends (all 9 years old) build their own games to play with each other. They all build 3D models in the world builder, and even some Lua scripting to alter mechanics.

It's a pretty neat way of getting kids into game dev.
2 comments
worldsayshi 2038 days ago
That's awesome. Feel like there's a new revolution of user created virtual world building unfolding. And the kids today are surfing the wave.

Dreams, Vrchat, Roblox, neosvr and probably many others...

I hope there will be much more innovation in this space because it feels like powerful interactive content could be created in much more user friendly way than with lua scripting. Is it finally time for a visual programming language revolution?

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yalogin 2039 days ago
Can you please tell me more about the private server and how you set it up?
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nomel 2038 days ago
The owner of a "place" (game saved from the editor to the Roblox cloud) can set the permissions for who can participate in the live, collaborative, editing environment (invite basis), and who can play it (public, friends, or editors).

The only problem with the collaborative editing (which is very very cool) is that it's really easy to click and delete/move/duplicate huge chunks of the game without realizing it. But, if you save often, the built in version control is really nice.

It's pretty neat though, except for the marketplace is absolutely filled with assets that contain malware. A script can be linked with any object in the game, used to give the object life. But, that script has nearly global control.

I think the scripting and standard libraries would really benefit from a huge overhaul, but it's pretty neat. There's quite a bit of friction getting started though. Much of it isn't intuitive, with magic undocumented names required, and you'll usually find well meaning, but very beginner, game developers providing colorful information in the forums.

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HomeDeLaPot 2039 days ago
If I had to guess, they're using the "places" that every user gets allocated. You can have a bunch of them, but only so many active at once. Maybe you can adjust the privacy settings for a place to allow only your friends. Roblox does all the hosting and provides the IDE (Roblox Studio) and everything. All the games on Roblox are somebody's "place" that they've made public and developed into a fun game.

This is from my own experience >5 years ago, so it could be outdated.

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philjohn 2038 days ago
https://en.help.roblox.com/hc/en-us/articles/205345050-How-d...
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