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: our visit to a Bay Area school, updates to the ROBLOX UI, user Ajedi32 and the ROBLOX Wikia, a preview of upcoming Apocalypse Rising updates, Giftsplosion, another must-see place in Block Town, the stories behind your usernames and more.

Seven-day Blog Recap

ROBLOX visits Bay Area student-gamers

A couple weeks ago, ROBLOX Founder and CEO David Baszucki, Senior Software Developer Robert Morgan and Studio Engineering Director Tim Brown headed to a Bay Area school to meet with students and game enthusiasts. The trio answered questions and took a little time to find out how members of the community build with ROBLOX. You can read a full report of the mini-event in our blog post.

ROBLOX’s mobile-friendly UI updates

In the last couple weeks, the ROBLOX Content Team has started slowly rolling out an updated in-game user interface (UI). Changes include a refreshed look for the toolbar, playerlist and chat, with several enhancements yet to come. If you’re interested in UI design for your own games or want to know the team’s logic behind making interface elements transparent and lightweight, I recommend you check out the final Engineering ROBLOX for the iPad article.

We’ll surely publish more information on ROBLOX’s mobile development, but this iPad-specific series has come to a close. Here are links to all the previous articles.

• Part 1: Setting the stage
• Part 2: Memory optimization
• Part 3: Performance optimization
• Part 4: Mobile controls

Spotlight on Ajedi32, the ROBLOX Wikia’s lifesaver

Ajedi32 took it upon himself to revive the stagnant ROBLOX Wikia page, a community-driven, third-party information source for ROBLOX. We talked with him about building the ROBLOX Wikia from nothing to something, and gathered an outside perspective from Wikia Program Director George Jones. Check out our conversation with Ajedi32, then take a look at the ROBLOX Wikia.

Apocalypse Rising preview: vehicle and environment updates

Apocalypse Rising is one of the most popular games to grace ROBLOX in 2012. What really intrigues me about the game is how its creators — all two of them — have taken a professional-game-studio approach to its development. They constantly work to improve the user experience, and they have big ideas in mind. We reached out to ZolarKeth, one of the two users behind Apocalypse Rising, to preview the game’s forthcoming updates, which include an expanded map, revamped inventory and weapons, and vehicle transport.

Giftsplosion 2012

We kicked off the 2012 Giftsplosion with a mystery gift box that’s essentially a freebie: simply verify your ROBLOX account’s email address and check the box to receive email from ROBLOX. Why would we want you to do this? We’re going to start sending email newsletters to ROBLOX users with deals, interesting headlines, game recommendations and more. The Giftsplosion blog post tells you what you need to know to get this first gift for free.

Your requests, our responses

We collected general ROBLOX feedback from our users in the recent 2012 Player Survey.  This edition of Responding to User Feedback sees various ROBLOX developers address the great ideas and suggestions we received. You can see all previous entries in this ongoing series here.

You should see this ROBLOX place

Not too long ago, I put together a list of six must-see ROBLOX places. Of course, I haven’t seen everything, so I asked users to tell me what places I missed. One of the suggestions in the comments was Block Town by owen0202 (and other members of Elite Builders of ROBLOXia), a sprawling city that deserves the recognition I didn’t give it. It makes for an awesome screenshot.

Bits

• Timelapse video of John Shedletsky building a house in ROBLOX with in-game tools
• This week’s gear release featured an awesome Face Melting Guitar; if you shred hard enough, you can literally melt the face decals off your foes

Fun with social media

Usernames are personal. They can also be frustrating — someone always already has your first choice. But I digress. Last week, we asked our Facebook followers to share the stories behind their ROBLOX usernames. Here are some of the highlights of the 1,500+ responses:

• My name is SkateBored. I got it because I wanted to sound cool. “I’m not always bored, but when I am, I’m SkateBored.” It’s intentionally spelled that way. Anyone can remember my username.
  
• I don’t really like usernames with numbers, it isn’t unique. I wanted a furious username so I thought about something that is furious: a hurricane. I combined fury and hurricane, and made Furricane. Love my username a lot. It’s a unique kind.
• I love the musical Les Miserables. The musical’s main character is Jean Valjean and his convict number is 24601; hence my username: 24601jeanvaljean.
• I play Fallout 3 a lot. There are theses creatures, Mirelurks. I found the boss, the Mirelurk King, and he looks awesome so I went with that: MirelurkKing!
• I wanted it to be nathanyo, but my friend pressed the buttons “k” and “r” between the “nathan” and the “yo” so it became nathankryo.
• I rode a flying gorilla last summer. My User name is BananaFinder2.0
• I’m Myusernamesuckz. Pretty self explanatory.
• My name on ROBLOX is ”camperXD”. I made it because whenever I play FPS games I always camp and make people rage.