Steal a Meteor

I didn't start with "I want to make a meteor game". I started by looking at what was actually working on Roblox.

What the charts said

The "Steal a ___" games were the biggest thing on the platform. The loop is simple: get something valuable, carry it home, and everyone else can take it from you on the way. Some of the games I'd looked at as inspiration were already past their peak, so copying one of those straight would have been late.

Nobody had made a meteor version. Meteors also fit the formula really well:

• they fall from the sky, so there's a natural "go grab it" moment
• rarities can get huge (I went up to 1 in 10 billion), and big numbers are half the fun of these games
• a glowing space rock looks good on a pedestal in your base

The first playable version

Phase one was the core loop and nothing else. Meteors fall, cool down and become grabbable. You pick one up with E and carry it over your head, which slows you down. Walk into your base and it gets placed automatically, then it starts earning money that you collect from a pad.

Built to be reused

I split the game into separate pieces: saving data, bases, meteors, carrying and the economy, each one on its own. That took longer at the start, but it paid off fast. My next two games, Smash a Pumpkin and Spin a Pet Fusion, both started from this core instead of from nothing.