Every game on Roblox, from the obby a ten-year-old built in an afternoon to the experiences with millions of players, was made in the same free tool: Roblox Studio. You can have something playable today. Building something people actually return to is a different and much longer story, and it is worth being honest about that from the start.
Get Roblox Studio
Studio is the official, free creation app. Download it from the Create section of the Roblox website, sign in with your normal account, and it opens to a menu of templates: flat baseplates, obbies, racing setups, and more. Pick a simple template to start; an empty baseplate is fine once you know your way around.
Studio runs on Windows and Mac. You cannot build games on a phone or tablet, even though you can play them anywhere, which is covered in what devices can play Roblox.
Learn the four core pieces
Studio has a lot of panels, but four things carry most of the work:
- The viewport, the 3D space where you move, scale, and rotate parts.
- The Explorer, a list of everything in your game, organised as a tree.
- Properties, where you change a selected object's colour, size, behaviour, and more.
- The Toolbox, where you can drop in free models and assets made by others.
Spend your first session just moving blocks, anchoring them so they do not fall, and walking through your scene with the play button. That loop of build, test, adjust is the whole job in miniature.
Add behaviour with Luau
Static scenery is not a game. To make things happen, like a button that opens a door or a points system, you write scripts in Luau, Roblox's programming language. This is the part that takes real time to learn, and there is no shortcut around it. Start tiny: a script that changes one part's colour when touched teaches you more than copying a thousand-line system you do not understand.
Roblox's own Creator Documentation has structured tutorials, and they are the most reliable place to learn rather than random copied code. Treat scripting as a skill you build over months, not a box you tick.
Test, then publish
When you have something worth sharing, use File then Publish to Roblox. You give the game a name, description, and an icon, and choose whether it is public or private. Publishing puts it on the platform under your account, where friends can join the way they would any game, as explained in how to add and join friends.
Publishing is not the finish line. The first version of anything is rough. Real progress comes from watching people play, seeing where they get stuck or bored, and fixing that. Plenty of successful creators rebuilt their game several times before it clicked.
Earning from it is possible, not guaranteed
You can earn Robux when players buy passes, items, or features in your game, and top creators do convert that to real money through the DevEx program. But most games earn very little, so build because you want to make something, not because you expect a paycheck. The honest economics are part of how to get Robux. If you want to study what works, look at the biggest Roblox games by players and notice how much depth sits behind the ones that lasted.
Just start small
The single biggest mistake new creators make is starting with their dream game. Do not. Make a working obby, a single mechanic, one clean idea you can finish. Finishing something small teaches you more than abandoning something huge, and it gives you the one thing every good creator has: a thing that actually works, in front of real players, ready to improve.