Create a Roblox obby with AI
An obby is an obstacle course. It is the easiest genre to start and one of the hardest to get right: everything rides on how readable each jump is and how the difficulty is paced. A failed obby is not one that is too hard — it is one where the player cannot tell why they fell.
What makes a good obby
The player must see where they are going
Every next platform should be visible from the previous one. A jump into the void toward something you cannot see is not a challenge, it is a coin toss. Use bold colours and a clear contrast between walkable ground and decoration.
Difficulty climbs in steps, not on a slope
A stage introduces one obstacle, repeats it two or three times with variation, then moves on by combining it with the previous ones. The player learns, then proves they learned. Piling up novelties without ever reusing them tires people out instead of hooking them.
A checkpoint rewards, it does not console
A checkpoint after every jump removes all stakes; one every fifteen jumps removes all desire to continue. One stage, one checkpoint. Reaching it should feel like winning something.
Playable with a thumb
Most Roblox players are on a phone. Platforms must stay wide enough for an imprecise jump, and nothing important should sit under the player's thumb.
The systems to write
- Checkpoints — Remember each player's stage on the server and respawn the character there.
- Traps and moving platforms — Kill bricks, platforms that travel back and forth, floors that vanish.
- Saving — Recover progress on return, with a DataStore written on an interval and on leave.
- Visible progression — Current stage, best time, fall counter: the numbers that make people retry.
Common pitfalls
The respawn position is stored on the character.
The character is destroyed on every death. Keep the stage in a server-side table indexed by UserId and reposition on `CharacterAdded`.
`Touched` fires the checkpoint several times a second.
Walk up to the model, check it carries a Humanoid, and add a short per-player debounce.
Everything is lit to the maximum to look cheerful.
An overexposed scene erases platform edges. You want light and contrast, not white.
What Nemesis builds for a obby
Nemesis lays the course out stage by stage in Studio, writes the checkpoint service and the save system, places traps and moving platforms, and gives every action a touch button sized for a thumb. In a complete production it also takes screenshots, measures exposure and contrast, and corrects the lighting when the scene is washed out or too dark. Then a short playtest runs in Studio — the character runs, jumps and heads for the checkpoints, the console is read — and the errors found go back for fixing.
Visual direction enforced by the quality check: bright but controlled: readable platforms, visible sky, bold colours.
Frequently asked
How many stages for a first obby?
Around ten finished, tested stages make a good first playable version: the end of the course decides whether the player comes back. A full obby goes much further — the benchmark Nemesis follows is 30 to 100 stages of rising difficulty, added once the first ones hold up.
Can an obby be built without writing code?
The course itself, yes. Checkpoints that survive death, saving, and a leaderboard need scripts — that is exactly the part Nemesis writes, in readable Luau you can edit afterwards.