There are many misconceptions about video game creation that people sometimes take for granted. One of the biggest ones is that video games can “easily be put onto other consoles and PC.” After all, “It’s all the same code, right?” Except, it’s not. If you pay attention to things like patch notes, you’ll notice that the teams have to break down the patches for the systems they’re on, and note specifically what each version is getting. It can be quite a chore. To that end, the creator studio teams within Roblox face this same problem when making games and worlds for people to try out.
Yes, the games/worlds are all in the Roblox universe, but the game itself is played on PC, mobile devices, and even on consoles. That means you have to map out the game and its control scheme, among other things, to fit those devices, and that can be a laborious task. Thankfully, the dev team is here to adjust things so that it’s a little easier for creators to do what they need to and then move on to the next task.
As detailed by their newest blog post, they’ve added new features to help with input functionality:
“We’re thrilled to bring you our new abstract Input Action System (IAS)! This new approach to input provides you with several new instances you can use to connect to input actions and arrange bindings across platforms at edit time. Those, combined with contexts, allows you to easily configure and edit an input system in your game and make sure that it’ll work on any device.
This is a huge step toward our broader goal of seamless cross-platform development. IAS removes the need to hardcode bindings and monitor specific input types for each piece of hardware to ensure they triggered the intended actions. Additionally, we now enable intuitive remapping of inputs during runtime depending on which input devices are detected.”
You can see why this is such an impressive feature and how it will help teams, big and small, in the future. Sure, it’s only in beta right now, but it’s still a step forward toward easier game creation. That’s something that the dev team has been building up for a while now. They want things to be seamless, easy to do, and easy to put out. After all, the bigger and more fun the game gets, the more likely that people will try to come in and attempt to bring their own ideas to life.
