Roblox EP1 Your first game: install Roblox Studio and build a scene you can play

This series takes you from zero to your first Roblox game: an obby (an obstacle course you run and jump through) that really plays, with checkpoints, lava floors and a finish line. Every episode has steps and code to follow. This first one writes no code yet; it gets you comfortable with the tools, because every later episode uses this same screen.

The steps in this series follow Roblox’s official documentation (Creator Hub) as of October 2026. Buttons in Studio may move slightly as it updates, but every name stays the same.

What Roblox Studio is

Every game on Roblox is made with the same program, Roblox Studio. In it you can:

• Build the scene: floors, walls, stairs, trees
• Write code in Luau (a language developed from Lua)
• Press Play and try your own game instantly
• Publish it for the whole world to play

Installing

1. Sign up or log in to a Roblox account at roblox.com
2. Go to create.roblox.com and press Start Creating; the site offers Roblox Studio to download
3. Install it, open it and log in with the same account
4. Studio’s home screen offers templates. Pick Baseplate, a plain flat floor, ideal for starting from scratch

Studio also has a Classic Obby template with a ready-made obby. Open it as an example if you like, but in this series we build everything ourselves so every piece makes sense.

Getting to know the screen

Open Baseplate and you will see the 3D world in the middle and panels around it. Three matter most:

Panel	Used for
Explorer	a list of everything in the game, arranged as a tree, like folders on a computer
Properties	the properties of whatever is selected, such as size, colour, position
Output	messages from code, and errors; you will use it constantly from EP2

If a panel is missing, open it from the View menu (or the Window tab in newer Studio).

Camera controls you will use a lot: hold right-click and drag to turn the view, W A S D to move the camera, Q and E for down and up, the mouse wheel to zoom, and select an object and press F to fly the camera to it.

What a game is made of

Explorer shows several top-level entries. Learn just these five for now; the rest come up in later episodes:

Name	What it is
Workspace	everything in the game world you can see and bump into: floors, stairs, characters
Players	the list of players in the game right now
Lighting	light, time of day, sky
ServerScriptService	where code that runs on the server lives (EP3)
ReplicatedStorage	where things shared by the server and players’ devices live (EP3)

Your first scene: three steps

1. On the top bar, press Part; a box appears in the middle of the scene
2. In Properties, find Size and set it to 8, 1, 8 (8 wide, 1 tall, 8 deep): a floor slab
3. Find Anchored and tick it. This matters a lot; see below
4. Pick a colour in Color, and rename it in Explorer to Step1 (double-click the name)
5. Press Ctrl+D to duplicate, then use the Move tool (Ctrl+2) to drag it higher and further away. Repeat for three steps, named Step2 and Step3

With default settings a character comfortably jumps up to about 6 studs (about 7 at most) and across about 8 studs at the same height. Start with 3 studs up and 6 across, then make it harder.

Keep things tidy. Select all three steps in Explorer and press Ctrl+G to group them into a Model named Stairs. A scene with hundreds of parts becomes much easier to navigate, and later the code will find things by name.

Everyone’s first trap: Anchored

Untick Anchored on Step3 and press Play (F5). The step falls to the ground the moment the game starts.

Roblox has real physics. Every part that is not anchored falls under gravity, collides and rolls. That is great for a ball or a crate you want to push, but floors and stairs must always be anchored.

If your scene falls apart when you press Play, check Anchored first.

Testing the game

Button	What it does
Play (F5)	spawns you as a character; really walk and jump
Run (F8)	the game runs without a character; useful to watch physics and code from the camera
Stop (Shift+F5)	stop and go back to editing

One caution: anything you change while playing is lost when you press Stop. The scene always returns to how it was before Play. If you edit during play by mistake, redo it after stopping.

Saving your work

Use File → Save to Roblox and name the game, for example My First Obby. It is stored in Roblox’s cloud, opens from any computer, and nobody can see it until you make it public (covered in the publishing episode). Press Ctrl+S now and then.

The AI helper in Studio

Studio in 2026 has a built-in Assistant. You can type in plain words, such as “make 10 stairs, each one higher”, and it builds them; the latest version has a planning mode that shows the task list for you to check before it acts.

It is useful, but do it by hand first until you understand. If you do not know what Anchored or Explorer are, you cannot fix things when the AI gets them wrong. It is the same principle as in the series on coding with AI: a person must understand enough to check the AI’s work.

Try it in 10 minutes

1. Open Baseplate and build the three steps above, all anchored
2. Add a narrow plank (Size 2, 1, 8) as a bridge to walk across
3. Press Play and walk from the floor to the top step. If a jump is too far, adjust and try again
4. Save to Roblox

Common mistakes

• Forgetting Anchored, so the scene drops when you press Play
• Editing during Play and losing it when you press Stop
• Leaving everything named Part, so code later cannot find anything
• Placing steps further or higher than a character can jump

Next episode

Our scene still does nothing. EP2 writes the first Luau code: a floor that changes colour when stepped on, a lava floor that sends you back to start, and a floor that vanishes if you stand on it too long.