Spotlight: Running for Our Lives With Erikwesley96

SpotlightDeathRun2Deathrun is a fan-favorite game in ROBLOX that has surged in popularity throughout the years. A few months ago, we talked with developer ErikWesley96 about designing Deathrun in a Crossfire article, where he mentioned that his team of developers (who still don’t have an official name, and are open to suggestions) was hard at work on crafting an official sequel. Fast forward a few months, and Deathrun 2 has not only officially released, but has been sitting at the top of the Games page for multiple weeks. I got the chance to talk with him about developing the Deathrun sequel from scratch. 

“What surprised me most was that Deathrun 2 reached the front page without the use of ads of any kind,” recalls ErikWesley96. “I was expecting users to like it because the first Deathrun was loved by so many, but the popularity of the title really surprised me.”

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Happy Holidays from ROBLOX!

If today’s numbers are any indication, ROBLOXians have definitely started their holiday vacations — and they’re spending their time on ROBLOX! This morning (and for the first time ever), ROBLOX had well over 150,000 logged-in players online at the same time. One hundred. And fifty. Thousand. Wow. And then, an hour later: 160,000! (You may recall that about this time last year we were marking 100,000 for the first time.)

We’ll be off enjoying the holidays with our friends and family for the next couple days, but we didn’t want to leave without wishing you all a safe and happy holiday week. Enjoy your break, play and build lots of games (which you’re clearly doing), watch for the ROBLOX Stocking to open, and stay tuned for our year-in-review series later this week. For now, we’ll send you off with this overwhelmingly happy ROBLOXian scene, created by vignette master-artist Encladeus.

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Weekly Roundup: December 22nd, 2013 [Bonus: Contest Winners]

Weekly ROBLOX Roundup Logo, V2Every week, we’re busy telling the stories behind our community, our technology and our place in the gaming and technology industries. For those of you who catch up with us over the weekend, the Weekly Roundup collects the best stuff to hit our various avenues of publication in the last week. This time: another four fan art contest winners, an inside look at ROBLOX’s 2013 Hack Week, game universes and massive scale, our 2013 holiday game, ROBLOX Survivor 2.0, two game recommendations, and other bits and pieces. Enjoy.


Fan art contest winners, round 4

Looking at this week’s selection of winners, it really hit home just how many amazing and talented artists there are in the ROBLOX community. Keep honing your craft!

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Surviving ROBLOX Survivor 2.0

Surviving

ROBLOX Survivor is a staple of the survival genre that many consider to be a classic. The game features a robust and deep wilderness survival engine, encouraging exploration, scavenging, hunting–basically all the things you would need to do in real life to stay alive in the wild. With nearly two million plays, and a wide range of updates since its release, Jojomen56 recently decided it was time to start developing the official sequel. I got the chance to spend some time inside ROBLOX Survivor 2.0, which is in Paid Access beta for 40 ROBUX. Though the level itself is extremely small, the amount of innovative gameplay mechanics it comes packed with is staggering. Jojomen56 has implemented numerous advanced features, and created a dynamic environment that is reactive in nature. First, have a look at this:

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Hack Week Sneak Peek: A Few Fascinating Projects

HackWeek2013

Another successful Hack Week completed!

As we mentioned on the blog earlier in the week, Hack Week is an opportunity for ROBLOX staff to explore and prototype their pet projects, and ultimately present them Friday during a company meeting. We thought today would be a great opportunity to take a sneak peak at what our developers have hacked together this year. Remember, these are all purely hypothetical projects — we’re not making any promises here, we’re kicking around ideas in order to form a collective understanding of what projects we could potentially pursue in the future. That being said, we did some really exciting and innovative work in the last week. Check it out!

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Game Universes and the Quest for Massive Scale

Multiple UniversesImagine this: there’s a ROBLOX game that’s built out of 10 levels. Thousands of people are playing it and teleporting between environments at the drop of a hat. As they move from place to place, their character statistics and ever-growing in-game inventory move with them. They’re all exploring a cohesive world with impressive scale and interacting with one another as they make chance encounters on their journeys. They’re in an immersive world.

This is the impending future of ROBLOX games. Our Client, Networking, Services and Web teams are making it happen by building a robust framework of teleports, game universes and data persistence.

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