How To Make A Loading Screen In Roblox Studio

Making a Loading Screen Doesn't Have to Be a Headache

A loading screen in Roblox is just a screen that appears while your game is loading the player in. It lives in the Workspace or StarterGui, and it's usually triggered by a simple script that shows a GUI frame before the world finishes loading and hides it once everything's ready. Most people overcomplicate this because they start with cinematic transitions or animated UI when a static image with a progress bar would do the job fine. I've seen countless games waste time on elaborate loading screen animations that break the moment you add a second server or change the load order. The simplest approach is almost always the one that doesn't cause problems later.

How To Make A Loading Screen In Roblox Studio

The core method involves two things: a GUI frame in StarterGui and a script that controls when it shows and hides. You want the GUI to exist in StarterGui so every player gets it automatically, and you want a LocalScript that listens for the character to spawn or for the load state to change. Here's the basic structure. Create a ScreenGui in StarterGui. Inside it, make a Frame that fills the screen, maybe with a background image or color. Add whatever content you want—text, a progress bar, whatever. Then create a LocalScript inside that ScreenGui and put something like this in it:

local Players = game:GetService("Players")
local player = Players.LocalPlayer
local screenGui = script.Parent

player.CharacterAdded:Connect(function()
    screenGui.Enabled = false
end)

-- Optionally hide after a minimum display time so it doesn't flash
spawn(function()
    wait(1.5)
    screenGui.Enabled = false
end)

The CharacterAdded event fires when the player's avatar finishes spawning, which is usually good enough for hiding the loading screen. The wait function there is intentional. Without it, the loading screen can flash on and off so fast it looks like a glitch. 1.5 seconds is a rough minimum that works for most games, but you should adjust based on how fast your game actually loads. One thing beginners consistently miss is that if you put the loading screen GUI in StarterPlayerScripts instead of StarterGui, it won't render properly. It has to be in StarterGui to be visible as a screen overlay. For a progress indicator, you can hook into the loading service. Roblox has the loading bar built into the platform already, but if you want a custom one, you can use the LoadAsync-style approach or just tie it to asset preloading. Most games don't actually need a custom progress bar because Roblox shows its own during the initial load. Your custom loading screen really kicks in after the player connects and starts spawning assets, so timing matters more than you'd think.

I ran into a problem once where the loading screen would disappear before the player could even see it because a server-sided script was firing a RemoteEvent too quickly during initialization. The client would respond to that event and disable the GUI instantly, making it pointless. The fix was adding a debounce check on the client side so the screen stays visible until the character is fully loaded and the camera has transitioned. I ended up just using a simple state variable and only disabling the GUI when the character's HumanoidRootPart had settled for at least half a second. That workaround still holds up in production now.

Advanced Details Most People Skip

There are a few edge cases worth knowing about. If your game uses a lot of custom assets—sounds, models, textures—the loading time can vary significantly between players depending on their device. A loading screen that works fine on your testing machine might disappear too quickly on a slower device, or it might stay up so long it feels like the game froze. The CharacterAdded event doesn't guarantee all assets are loaded, just that the character model has been created. If you need everything fully loaded before showing the game world, you have to check a few more conditions. Another thing: if you're using a custom loading screen, don't forget about the PreloadService. If you're loading large assets manually, the platform's default loading UI might still show behind your custom one, which looks inconsistent. You can't fully remove the default loading UI, but you can minimize the visual conflict by making sure your custom screen is opaque and takes up the full viewport. Performance-wise, loading screens are generally cheap unless you're doing something ridiculous like animating high-poly models or running complex particle effects on the screen while the game is still loading. A static image or simple tweened frame is fine. Animated progress bars that use continuous tweening every frame will add unnecessary overhead on lower-end devices, and it's not worth it for what it does.

If you need something more robust than a basic GUI hide, you can look into using the LoadingScreens service that some larger engines provide, but for most Roblox games, a ScreenGui with a LocalScript is the standard and sufficient approach. There's no built-in "LoadingScreen" object in Roblox Studio—you're building it from standard UI components, which is both a limitation and a flexibility depending on your needs. The whole process from start to finish usually takes about 10 to 20 minutes if you know what you're doing. Most of the time people spend on it is tweaking the visuals, not the scripting. Don't overthink the code. Get the basic show-and-hide working first, then worry about making it look nice.