When to use OOP in Roblox Development

Most Roblox developers treat OOP as the solution to almost everything. This isn’t necessarily wrong, but it isn’t always the best choice.

Impacts of using OOP in the wrong cases:

• Unnecessary complexity: generates excessive code that becomes hard to maintain.
• Performance overhead: metatable usage, and frequent method calls can become expensive in systems that update constantly.
• Overengineering: simple problems often end up with unnecessarily complex architectures.

So, when should you really use it? Use OOP when you need to:

• Reuse code: use it when you need common behavior (e.g. CollectionService instances)
• Configurable systems: useful when objects need customizable behavior.
• Lifecycle management: great for systems that need creation, updates, and cleanup logic.

This isn’t bad

local DamageCalculator = {}
DamageCalculator.__index = DamageCalculator

function DamageCalculator.new(weaponName: WeaponName, damageMultiplier: number?)
  local self = setmetatable({}, DamageCalculator)

  self.damageMultiplier = damageMultiplier or 0
  self.weaponName = weaponName

  return self
end

export type self = typeof(DamageCalculator.new(...))

function DamageCalculator.getDamage(self: self)
  ...
end

But in this case, a simple function is often enough

local function calculateDamage(weaponName: WeaponName, damageMultiplier: number?)
  ...
end

This doesn’t mean OOP is bad. In many cases, it’s the right tool and can greatly improve organization, reusability, and maintainability.