Every week, we’re busy telling the stories behind our platform, our technology, and our place in the gaming and technology industries. For those of you who catch up with ROBLOX over the weekend, the Weekly ROBLOX Roundup collects the best stuff to hit our various avenues of publication in the last week. This time: the RoWars revival, LEGO Hero Factory: Breakout, what happens when you press the “Play” button on ROBLOX and more.
Spotlight: the RoWars revival
Years ago, one of our ambitious users started creating a machinima mini-series called RoWars in ROBLOX. The project got off the ground, but not to the finish line. ROBLOX users SharpTH and BlabVoid, recognizing the potential of the plot and ROBLOX as a platform for machinima, have revived the project and started chipping away at the still-ambitious project.
We talked with the pair about the project and how they’re recruiting the talents of dozens of ROBLOX users to make it even better than its first run.
LEGO Hero Factory: Breakout released
ROBLOX worked with LEGO® to build a new game, LEGO® Hero Factory: Breakout, which released last week. The game lets users play as Hero Factory characters Stringer and Voltix, and compete in teams to complete a scavenger hunt as quick as possible. There’s a bit of a twist: players can sabotage the opposing team by destroying their scavenger hunt items.
LEGO® Hero Factory: Breakout features a slick, futuristic Makuhero City, special gear for winning matches on each side and new character animations, powered by 14 motorized joints. At the time of this writing, the game has been played roughly 325,000 times, so it’s safe to say it’s been a hit among ROBLOX users.
What happens when you press the “Play” button on ROBLOX?
A lot. This excerpt from our full blog post gets at the crux of the topic:
Just as there’s no computer big enough to handle all the traffic we receive, there no single computer powerful enough to run all the instances of ROBLOX games. The challenge we continually face is one of scale. As ROBLOX continues to grow, both in page views, and in-game traffic, we have to learn to scale with it, by adding more machines to handle the bandwidth. The trick, however, is utilizing systems like the Load Balancer to give the illusion that it’s communicating with one, centralized, all-powerful machine. This stream-lines the user experience both in-game, and online.
If that doesn’t tantalize your tech senses, I don’t know what will.
Trading system: one-week challenge
ROBLOX Creative Director John Shedletsky put our brand-new trading system to the test in a week-long attempt to go from two $10 ROBLOX cards to Robux riches. He documented the first two days of his experiment in this blog post, and we’ll follow up with even more tips for becoming a successful trader and the results of the challenge in a later blog post. For now, check out the story to learn how you can get started with trading, and add wealth to your account quickly.
Bits
- Stringer’s initial descent from the tower in LEGO Hero Factory: Breakout never gets old.
- ROBLOX user Crazyman32 built a very, very large blimp in ROBLOX. He took it for some flights, too. I unfortunately missed them.
ROBLOX, elsewhere on the webGeek.com writer Ray Walters wrote up a perspective on ROBLOX. You can check it out here. Here’s a cool excerpt that attests to our users’ development work: By providing its users with a rich, easy to understand developing language called Lua, the people behind Roblox have created a community of future developers that are cutting their teeth on a possible future in the game development industry … Considering that some of the games listed on the site have over 10 million plays, their progress has been amazing. Technology and business columnist Chris O’Brien also mentioned ROBLOX as part of his MercuryNews.com write-up about platforms that let people of all ages make their own video games. |