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: ROBLOX’s virtual economy and how you use it to make money, hack week coverage, the end of bytecode in ROBLOX and developing scary ROBLOX games.
Hack week projects
ROBLOX recently wrapped up Hack Week, a week-long period in which our developers had a chance to explore their passions within the context of ROBLOX. It lead to a lot of great ideas, and we covered a few of them: a crafting system, rotating GUIs and iPad interfaces. While these projects are still in the “idea” phase, they certainly helped get discussions flowing for future ROBLOX features.
The end of bytecode in ROBLOX
Last week, ROBLOX shipped a release that prevents game scripts from loading bytecode. While the removal of this function breaks the small fraction of ROBLOX games that use it, we needed to make the change for the sake of security and future updates and improvements to ROBLOX scripting. You can read the complete blog post to learn more about the bytecode function and why we decided to remove it from ROBLOX.
A primer on the ROBLOX economy
Buying. Selling. Trading. Exchanging. Robux. Tickets. Builders Club. The ROBLOX economy is a busy, complex system, open for business 24 hours a day. We took a step back and looked at the economy from a bird’s-eye view to help you see many of the interesting ways ROBLOXians manage their capital.
In light of this story, we asked our Twitter followers what method they find most effective for earning money on ROBLOX. The leading method was, not surprisingly, developing great games. Users with popular games can quickly amass a small fortune, as each visit to their game earns a single ticket. It doesn’t sound like much, but hundreds of thousands of visits starts to feel pretty significant. Many ROBLOX users also leverage supply and demand to sell limited items at a profit, and sell VIP access to their games (through VIP t-shirts) to unlock special features.
Some users also contract their skills — they sell assets, clothes, places and more — to earn Robux. Smart.
Bits
- We hosted a caption contest on our Facebook page this week and received more than two-thousand responses. Check it out to see the winner.
- Here’s an example of a ROBLOX game with style. Minimal, but really interesting to look at. (And play.)
- We recently launched a new Build page on Roblox.com, which makes it easy to create new content and manage the games, assets and models you’ve already created. We’ll have a deeper look at the Build page soon.
Can you develop a scary ROBLOX game?Creating something scary requires atmosphere and tension — convincing players something they fear could happen at any time. It’s one of the reasons Slender has become such a phenomenon in gaming. Gamasutra posted an interesting article this week about four qualities that contribute to scary games. Can you leverage any of them to come up with something that’ll keep ROBLOX players on edge? We’re curious about what ROBLOX games, if any, you find to be particularly scary or haunting, and what they do to achieve the effect. Let us know. |
Enjoy the rest of your weekend.