Getting It in Front of People
Publishing is one menu item, and four settings underneath it decide whether a friend can actually open what you made. Walk each one, in the order that stops a finished obby from being unplayable.
Publishing is one menu item, and four settings underneath it decide whether a friend can actually open what you made. Walk each one, in the order that stops a finished obby from being unplayable.
Saving to file is not publishing
Studio offers both and they do entirely different things. File → Save to File writes an .rbxl onto your own computer, where nobody else will ever see it. File → Publish to Roblox uploads the place to Roblox's servers, which is the only version players can open.
Once a place has been published, Ctrl+S saves to Roblox rather than to a file, and the distinction stops mattering day to day. Before that first publish, it matters completely: an afternoon of work saved perfectly to your desktop is an afternoon nobody can play.
A place lives inside an experience
The vocabulary from the first chapter matters here, because the publish dialog uses it and the settings live at different levels.
One level. Your obby is a place. A place has its own settings, and it is what Studio actually uploads.
The thing players search for and follow, with a name, an icon, and a thumbnail. It contains one or more places, one of which is the start place.
The place players land in. If you add more places later, teleporting between them is code you write; nothing is automatic.
The consequence that catches people: some settings belong to the place and some to the experience, and they are edited in different windows. Publishing a place does not make the experience public, and that is a common reason a friend gets an error page from a working obby.
Private by default, and what changes it
Every new experience is private. You can play it, and nobody else can — not with a link, not by searching, not by being your friend.
- 1
Publish the place
File → Publish to Roblox. Give the experience a name and a description. It is live, and it is private.
- 2
Open the Creator Dashboard
From Studio, or at create.roblox.com. This is where experience-level settings live, not in Studio's own settings window.
- 3
Set the experience to Public
Under the experience's permissions. This is the step people miss — the place being published is not the same as the experience being open.
- 4
Send the link and have someone else try it
Someone not on your account. You cannot test 'can other people open this' from the account that owns it.
The age rating questionnaire is mandatory
Roblox requires a completed maturity questionnaire before an experience can be made broadly available. It asks about violence, language, realistic hazards, user interaction, and whether you sell anything, and it produces an age label that determines who can find your experience.
Answer it honestly. It is not a formality, and getting it wrong in either direction has real consequences: understate and the experience can be restricted or taken down; overstate and you have narrowed your audience for nothing.
For a standard obby the answers are usually straightforward — an obby is not violent in the sense the questionnaire means, and a killbrick is not realistic harm. The question that most often surprises people is the one about player interaction: if your experience has a chat, that counts, and chat is on by default.
Updating a live experience without breaking it
Once people are playing, publishing is no longer a neutral act. A publish replaces the place immediately, and anyone in a server that starts afterwards gets your new version — including the half-finished thing you were in the middle of.
Safe habit
Do risky work in a separate place, or in a copy, and publish over the live one only when it plays. Studio's Team Test lets you try a build without publishing it at all.
What goes wrong
Publishing mid-edit with a part deleted, a script disabled, or an unanchored section. It is live for everyone within a minute and there is no undo button on the server.
Roblox keeps a version history for each place, and you can restore an older version from the Creator Dashboard. Knowing that exists before you need it is the point of mentioning it.
Before you publish over a live obby
- ✓Every static part is anchored — walk the whole course once in Play mode.
- ✓No script is switched off that should be on, and no debugging print is left shouting on every touch.
- ✓The spawn point is where you think it is, and a fresh player can reach the first obstacle.
- ✓You have tested with two players, not one. The debounce and platform bugs in this track only appear with company.
- ✓The experience is Public and the age questionnaire is complete, if you want anyone to find it.
Key takeaways
- Save to File writes to your computer; Publish to Roblox uploads the copy players open. Before your first publish these are completely different acts.
- A place is one level; an experience contains places and is what players search for. Their settings live in different windows.
- Publishing a place does not make the experience public. That is the most common reason a friend gets an error page.
- Every new experience is private by default, and the owner can always open their own — so test with an account that is not yours.
- The maturity questionnaire is required before broad availability. Chat counts as player interaction, and it is on by default.
- Publishing replaces the live place immediately. Anyone joining a new server gets whatever state you were in.
- Roblox keeps place version history and you can restore an earlier one from the Creator Dashboard. Learn that before you need it.
- Publish early, while the obby is merely walkable. It makes every later publish an update rather than an event.
Before you move on
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