Building your own roblox social deduction game script is one of the most exciting ways to dive into Luau programming because it focuses so heavily on player interaction and logic. We've all seen how games like Among Us or Town of Salem took over the internet, and bringing that kind of tension to Roblox is a great way to build a community. The beauty of this genre is that you don't need fancy graphics or high-octane physics; you just need a solid script that handles roles, voting, and win conditions without breaking.
The Foundation: Setting Up the Round Logic
Before you even think about the map or the cool kill animations, you have to get the round system right. In a social deduction game, everything revolves around the state of the game. Is it "Waiting," "In-Progress," or "Intermission"?
Your main script, likely sitting in ServerScriptService, needs to manage a loop. You'll want to create a table to keep track of players who are still "alive" and another table to store their assigned roles. When the round starts, the script picks one or two players to be the "traitors" and the rest to be "innocents." Using math.random is the simplest way to do this, but you should always check that the player count is high enough before the script starts picking roles, otherwise, you'll end up with a one-player game where everyone is suspicious of their own shadow.
A good way to structure this is by using a module script for your game settings. This keeps things clean. If you want to change the round length from five minutes to ten, you shouldn't have to dig through 500 lines of code. You just change a single variable in your settings module.
Assigning Roles and Hidden Information
The core of any roblox social deduction game script is how it handles information. The "traitors" need to know who their allies are, but the "innocents" should be completely in the dark. This is where RemoteEvents come into play.
When the server decides who is who, it needs to tell each client their role. However, you can't just fire a broadcast to everyone. You have to use FireClient for each individual player. You tell Player A they are an innocent, and you tell Player B they are a traitor.
The trickiest part is showing the traitors who their teammates are. You can handle this by sending an additional list of names only to the players assigned the traitor role. On the client side, your local script can then put a red outline or a special tag over fellow traitors' heads. It's all about making sure the server is the "source of truth" while the client only sees what it's allowed to see.
Tasks and Objective Logic
If the innocents don't have anything to do, they'll just stand in a circle and stare at each other. You need a task system. In your script, tasks are essentially just a list of checkpoints or interactions.
You can set up ProximityPrompts around the map. When a player completes a task, the script fires a RemoteEvent back to the server. The server then increments a "TaskProgress" variable. Once that variable hits 100, the innocents win.
It sounds simple, but you have to be careful here. If you don't validate the task completion on the server, a clever exploiter could just fire that RemoteEvent a hundred times a second and win the game instantly. Always make the server check if the player is actually standing near the task and if they haven't just finished it half a second ago.
The Voting System Mechanics
This is usually the part that gives developers the biggest headache. A voting system requires a timer, a way to track votes, and a way to handle ties.
When someone reports a "body" or calls a meeting, the roblox social deduction game script needs to pause the main round timer and move everyone to a designated meeting area. You'll need a temporary table to store the votes: something like local votes = {}. Every time a player clicks a button on their UI to vote for "Player X," the client tells the server, and the server adds one to that player's count.
Don't forget the "Skip" option. Sometimes no one has a clue who the bad guy is, and forcing a kill every round ruins the balance. Once the timer hits zero, the script compares the numbers. If Player X has the most votes, the script sets their character's health to zero or moves them to a "Spectator" team.
Handling the UI and Feedback
UI might seem like a secondary concern, but in social deduction, it's everything. Players need to know how much time is left, who is dead, and if they have any tasks left.
Since your main logic is on the server, you'll spend a lot of time syncing StringValues or IntValues located in ReplicatedStorage. For example, if you have a Status value, the server updates it to "1:30 remaining." On the client, a local script listens for changes to that value using the :GetPropertyChangedSignal("Value") event and updates the screen text accordingly. It's much more efficient than having the server constantly spamming the client with UI updates.
Keeping the Script Secure
We have to talk about security because Roblox is full of people who love to poke holes in scripts. In a social deduction game, cheating is a total game-breaker. If a traitor can see who everyone else is because of a poorly written script, the fun disappears instantly.
The golden rule is: Never trust the client.
- Don't let the client tell the server "I just killed this person." Instead, the client says "I want to interact," and the server checks if that player is a traitor and if they are close enough to the target.
- Don't store the list of roles in a place where the client can read it (like a folder in
Workspace). Keep that data in a private table inside a server script. - Use
RemoteFunctionssparingly. They can hang your server if a client doesn't return a value. Stick toRemoteEventsfor most of your communication.
Polishing the Game Loop
Once the basic "kill and vote" cycle is working, you need to think about the "End Game" state. What happens when the traitors win? What happens when everyone leaves the server?
Your roblox social deduction game script should have a cleanup function. This function resets all the variables, clears the task progress, respawns the players, and moves them back to the lobby. If you don't clean up properly, the second round will be a mess of leftover UI and dead bodies from the first round.
Adding a "spectator mode" is also a huge plus. When a player is voted out, change their DevCameraOcclusionMode or let them fly around as a ghost. It keeps people in your game even after they've been eliminated, which is great for your player retention numbers.
Wrapping Things Up
Writing a script for this kind of game is a marathon, not a sprint. You'll probably spend more time testing the voting logic with friends than you will actually typing the code. But there's nothing quite like the feeling of watching a group of players absolutely lose their minds in a chat box because your script worked perfectly and the traitor managed to frame someone else.
Focus on the logic first, keep your code organized with modules, and always prioritize server-side security. Once you have the core loop of roles, tasks, and voting down, you can start adding the bells and whistles like custom animations, sound effects, and complex maps. Good luck with your project—maybe I'll see your game on the front page soon!