ROBLOX’s 2014 thus far has been labeled by some in our community as the “year of the developer.” And barely five months into the year, it’s not hard to see why. Our Client, Studio and Web teams have been working hard to churn out integrated game development features that make it easier for ROBLOX’s content creators to build great games and ultimately reap the benefits of their successes.

Between allowing developers to better monetize their games, make bigger games, track down bugs, and do all of the above more efficiently than ever before, the state of ROBLOX game development has taken dramatic strides forward in the last few months.

Script Modules

Script Modules essentially allow you to create and save libraries of code, and share them between scripts. The benefits are myriad: your code can be broken into smaller pieces and shared (rather than replicated), your code is better organized, and you save time hunting and fixing bugs, to name a few.

• Documentation: Wiki

Plugin Support

With enhanced plugin support, it’s much easier to publish, download and install ROBLOX Studio plugins. Whereas plugins previously resided on third-party websites and had to be installed manually, developers can now publish the plugins they write straight from ROBLOX Studio, and other developers can download and install them automatically with just a few clicks within Studio. Browse the Plugins section of the developer library to see how you can customize Studio for your needs.

• Documentation: Wiki

Developer Stats

Developer Stats allow you to see traffic to your game and the behaviors of players. There are two charts: Traffic by Day and Traffic by Hour. These let you analyze the flow of traffic into your game over a rolling two-week period, and both charts include an average-playtime metric that indicates how long the average person is playing your game at a given date and time.

Animation Editor

The animation editor plugin gives you fine-grain control over each limb of the standard ROBLOX humanoid, allowing you to move the legs, torso, arms and head individually. This lets you define how avatars move and respond to input in the games you create. We recently observed Davidii using the animation editor to create unique character movements in his League of ROBLOX game and, once you play it, you’ll understand how much custom animations can contribute to the gameplay experience.

• Documentation: Wiki

IntelliSense

What is it? Auto-completion scripting! When you’re coding, simply start typing. If IntelliSense recognizes what you’re typing, it will automatically give you options to try that fit within the word parameters.

FilteringEnabled

FilteringEnabled is a property that prevents exploits. By enabling it, you prevent object replication from the client (the machine the player is running on). This means that if the client tries to add parts or manipulate the properties of existing parts, the change will not propagate to the server or other players.

• Documentation: Wiki

Developer Products

Developer Products are the ROBLOX equivalent of microtransactions. You can use this feature to sell items – such as inventory goods, perks and abilities, stat boosts, and game-specific currency – in-game for ROBUX. Developer Products have quickly proven to be one of the most popular and effective means of monetizing games on ROBLOX.

Massive games (and teleports and data persistence)

This year, we redefined the meaning of a ROBLOX game. What was once a singular place can now be a network of places, all existing within a single game. That means developers can now create games of massive (see: infinite) scale, and tie things together with upgraded data persistence and fast teleports from place to place.

• Documentation: multi-place games | DataStore | teleports

Developer Console

The developer console allows game creators to monitor their games, both locally and on the server, to track bugs that occur. The console records messages even if you are not logged into your game. When you enter your game and open the console, you will see messages from before you joined.

• Documentation: Wiki

All of these features supplement ROBLOX’s robust infrastructure: an integrated development environment, multi-platform support, and a global cloud of multiplayer game servers that auto-scales to hundreds of thousands of concurrent players. ROBLOX is one of the easiest and most opportunity-rich platforms on which to prototype and release games, giving developers the fuel they need to create the engrossing experiences they envision. We’re only continuing to make the fuel more potent.