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 chat with the owner of the LuaLearners group and website, supplementing your trades with Robux, useful ROBLOX Studio plug-ins, our web developers’ gaming tastes, ROBLOX Tablets moving through the economy, your characters in one word, and top-down shooter Underscore.

Seven-day Blog Recap

LuaLearners.org: a scripting haven

We’re often asked, “How can I learn how to script in ROBLOX?” We have a couple go-to resources — the ROBLOX Wiki and user cowbear16′s “Basic ROBLOX Lua Programming” book — but now we can add LuaLearners.org and the LuaLearners ROBLOX group to the list. The site/group exists for the sole purpose of helping ROBLOX users of all levels learn to write in Lua and enhance their creations with scripts. We talked with the group’s leader, Coolbob44, about the LuaLearners site and community and put together a blog feature to increase exposure of the great work happening in both.

You can now add Robux to your trades

Many ROBLOX users love negotiating trades for virtual gear. But many also find themselves in tough situations, where a trade is close, but not quite fair. Recognizing the challenge of balancing trades, the ROBLOX Web Team recently launched an enhancement that allows users to add Robux to their trades. You can read how the feature works — and some of the future side benefits of its implementation — in our blog post on the topic.

Plug-ins make the building life a little easier

Every ROBLOX builder has a unique way of going from a blank virtual canvas to a living virtual world. ROBLOX Studio plug-ins are meant to make that process more efficient in very specific ways. Members of our Content Team use plug-ins on a daily basis, and in this blog post they talk about their favorites — some even created by ROBLOX users. If you’re a builder, they’re worth trying.

Gaming tastes of the ROBLOX Web Team

We occasionally ask ROBLOX developers what games they play outside of work to share a bit of insight into the tastes and personalities of the people building our platform. For the latest entry in this periodic feature, we talked with a number of ROBLOX web developers about a Wing Commander fan remake, Sins of a Solar Empire and more.

ROBLOX Tablets, moving through the economy

Over the course of the last three weeks, we released a limited quantity of virtual ROBLOX Tablets, each at an increased price. They were in high demand, partly because of their limited run and partly because anyone who owns one at the time of ROBLOX’s official mobile launch will receive a brand new iPad 3 from ROBLOX. Some lucky owners leveraged their prized tablet in trades for other highly valuable gear, while some decided to keep them. We put together a story of some of the buying and trading activity.

You should play this ROBLOX game

There’s not a lot of “game” yet, but Underscore is worth seeing today because it’s another example of a cunning user redefining the traditional ROBLOX experience. The big differences are perspective and control — the game uses a top-down, arcade-style camera, while the controls work like those of a dual-joystick shooter. According to the game’s description, Underscore is a spinoff of user redditor‘s game, Bracket (a competitive FPS worth playing for its own reasons). It features a great, simple aesthetic and pro-level camera movement to boot.

Once in game, you can press Q and E to rotate the camera 90 degrees, and X to rotate it 180 degrees. The mouse wheel adjusts the zoom level, while the 1 and 2 keys (or Alt) swap weapons. Here’s a demo video of the game (a second player joins at 1:17):

Bits

Year-end Gamasutra article about their top five trends that defined the games industry in 2012; what’s interesting in the context of ROBLOX is the huge shift toward mobile gaming and the end of the subscription era of MMOs.
Last week, we posed a question to our Facebook followers: if you had to describe your ROBLOX character in one word, what would it be? We’ve received almost 3,000 comments, and it’s not too late to Like us on Facebook to chime in with your response! Epic? Builder? Undead? Famous? Let us know.
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