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: Black Friday deals, ROBLOX’s touch-screen control design, a Spotlight on super-builder Geico480, protecting your account, epic ship battles in Galleons, Thanksgiving in ROBLOX and more.

Seven-day Blog Recap

Still going strong: Black Friday deals

ROBLOX’s Black Friday Sale has been running since the crack of almost-midnight on Friday and, if you haven’t snatched up some low-priced gear, there’s still time. (That is, the rest of the day today.) You can check out our guide to Black Friday deals here on the blog for a detailed listing or consider some of these popular options:

Sword Pack (put back on sale and discounted 80% to just 50 Robux)
W Inc. Designer Sunglasses (discounted 20% to 7,500 Robux)
General BadBlox Body (Now 150 Robux; will be 400 Robux as of 11/26)

ROBLOX for iPad: control design

The difference between traditional, mouse-and-keyboard input and touch-screen controls is vast. In this article, the latest in our series of Engineer ROBLOX for the iPad posts, Ben Tkacheff describes his approach to designing a flexible, mobile control scheme that works for ROBLOX, and integrating support for touch-screen functionality (e.g., multitouch and analog movement).

Spotlight on: Geico480

There are many tremendous ROBLOX builders, but ever since we laid eyes on Geico480′s BMW M5 Series Concept place, which features three BMWs modeled in incredible detail, we’ve wanted to talk with him. We had the opportunity last week, and the conversation was the foundation for our latest Spotlight article. We talked to Geico480 not only about model creation, but building environments with atmosphere and address some of his questions about making highly detailed models move.

Protect your ROBLOX account

As we enter the holiday season, it’s especially important for ROBLOX users to be cautious about divulging their account information. In this blog post, we offer four easy ways for you to keep your account secure. Here’s the gist:

There is no reason for any user to ask you for your log-in credentials and you should never give them away
Official ROBLOX Polls will have polls.roblox.com in the URL
The only place you should enter your user name and password is at Roblox.com
Do not share your e-mail address with any user

You should play this ROBLOX game

Galleons does a good job of exploiting a couple of ROBLOX’s abilities: realistic physics simulation (for cannons and ship destruction) and massively multiplayer worlds (for large-scale, team-based battles). The object of the game is simple: destroy the enemy’s ship. One player acts as the captain and takes charge of maneuvering the ship, while the rest of the team mans cannons (and even raids the enemy ship when it’s in close proximity). The concept is simple and the game has been around for a while, but it stays interesting because no single battle plays out exactly like another and winning requires some strategy. Plus, ship destruction always feels satisfying.