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 revamped ROBLOX Catalog, what happens behind the scenes when you publish a game, our spotlight feature on Fort Borealis and much more.
Our new Catalog helps you find the gear you want, faster
A long time in the making, the new ROBLOX Catalog was launched for all users at the beginning of the week. It adds a wealth of new sorting, filtering and searching functions to help you navigate the millions of user creations and find just the right gear for your ROBLOX character. Our blog post offers some background on the new interface and functions, so check it out and learn how you can shop more efficiently than ever.
The not-so-simple process of publishing a ROBLOX game
Publishing a game to ROBLOX appears to be some magical feat of technology, where you go from building a game on your computer to launching a publicly available, multiplayer game in a matter of seconds. It’s simple on your end, but it takes a lot of hidden tasks for your game to go from local file to playable ROBLOX game. This inside-look blog post goes in-depth on the whole publishing process.
Spotlight on: Fort Borealis
Fort Borealis is a land-and-sea FPS battleground, where members of ROBLOX group RAT (and its allies) defend against a team of attackers. We talked to the game’s creator, Jake Evans, about organizing multiple ROBLOX developers and the value of creating games with unique systems. Read the blog post, our latest Spotlight feature, for some unique insight on game development using ROBLOX.
Special, low price on video trailers — and a contest!
We’ve not only dropped the price of video trailers for ROBLOX games by 50%, but all game trailers uploaded through September 10 will be entered in a contest to win 20,000 Robux and a virtual trophy. The top five trailers win, so put on your director’s hat and get to work on your masterpiece!
Check out the details of the contest in this blog post.
There’s a new Roblox.com navigation bar
You probably already noticed, but ROBLOX’s Web Team updated the navigation bar that tops every page on Roblox.com. We offered insight as to why we made the changes we did, which you can check out in this blog post.
ROBLOX, elsewhere on the webBloomberg reporter Kathleen Chaykowski wrote an interesting article about young programmers helping fuel the booming mobile-game-development industry, with special attention paid to ROBLOX as a launch pad for such careers. Here’s an excerpt from the article, which is certainly worth reading in full. Lua is one of a handful of languages that are helping kids try their hand at software programming amid a boom in online games and applications for devices such as Apple Inc. (AAPL)’s iPhone. The user-friendly tools are being popularized by sites like Roblox, a platform that lets users create and play games with interactive animations from zombies to medieval fortresses. They could be instrumental in helping fill what companies like Google Inc. (GOOG) and Cisco Systems Inc. (CSCO) say is a shortfall in U.S. engineering talent. See also:
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Bits
- 1.98 billion Tickets have been spent running users ads on ROBLOX since January 1, 2010, according to Creative Director John Shedletsky.
- A shot from above Fort Borealis, our Spotlighted ROBLOX game from last week:
- Here’s a video of a 30-car pileup in ROBLOX. It’s been sped up 5x because that’s a lot of physics. Destructive.
Enjoy the remainder of the weekend and, for you Americans, have a happy Labor Day. Sit back, relax, and play some ROBLOX.