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 most popular games and gear of 2012, Creative Director John Shedletsky responds to some user feedback, our splash page contest is a go, we follow up with our recent release of ROBLOX to mobile and crunch the numbers, and Graphics Engineer Simon Kozlov shows off some prototype footage of a new potential look for ROBLOX.
The Most Popular Games, Gear, and Items of 2012
We crunched the year-end numbers to find out which gear items and games were most popular in 2012. Basewars: The Land was the most visited game of 2012, garnering over 15 million players by the end of the year. It’s easy to see why once you play it–with over thirty different classes to choose from, it’s an addictive and deep game that keeps you experimenting with different load outs. We’ve listed the top fifteen games and the top ten gear items that hit ROBLOX in 2012, so if you want to check it out, you can do so here.
Responding to User Feedback, V.13
John Shedletsky returned to answer more questions, and talked with users about expanded terrain dimensions, enhancements to ROBLOX GUI creation, vehicle seat functions, script protection, dedicated image hosting, and a whole lot more. In order to be as specific as possible, we even got ROBLOX Web Engineer Navin Lal to chime in on the possibility of 13+ group forums.
Fame and Glory! Help Us Design Our ROBLOX Studio Splash Page
We’re running a contest that encourages users to create their own personalized ROBLOX Studio splash page and submit it to us for review. After only a day we’ve received well over 200 submissions, and we want you to keep them coming! The top five users will receive 20,000 Robux each, but the real winner will have their graphicpop up every time any user loads Studio. The rules are pretty lax, but there are some guidelines to follow. Check out the contest page and enter your graphic if you haven’t already!
ROBLOX Mobile Follow Up
ROBLOX has had playable games on iOS for two months now, so we decided we’d crunch the numbers to see how we’re doing so far. The results are pretty impressive. Did you know over the Christmas holiday, we had over 200,000 mobile game sessions happening at once? That’s just one in a series of crazy stats we pulled from our mobile numbers database. Check out some of the other statistics in this blog article from Friday.
Prototyping the Future Look of ROBLOX Part 2 
ROBLOX Graphics Engineer Simon Kozlov prototypes a new look for ROBLOX graphics. It was optimized to play nice with mobile devices, in addition to PCs and Macs. Though it’s just a mock-up render, it’s definitely eye-catching to say the very least. With dark, dramatic lines and eye popping lighting effects, Simon and his team have created a bold new potential look for our platform. Check out an exclusive video and some screen shots from the new render, here.
You should play this ROBLOX game
From its opening cut scene to its dreary, blood spattered environment, Bloody Mary: Awake and Trapped, is a fun and creepy battle for survival. You and a group of friends start out in a random house and have to find a way out. Each room is a new test–some require some heavy exploration to find a usable path, others require some pretty intense platforming elements, while some have you and your friends solve riddles to move on. The opening movie that leads into the game is reason enough to check it out. Well, that and the fact that 302,588 people have also elected to take this ride.
Be Advised: This game contains some pretty graphic material.
Bits
- Indie Game Developer Tommy Refenes wrote an in-depth guide at getting starting with programming games. It’s a fun and informative read, and many of the ideas he goes over can be applied to ROBLOX.
- A few weeks ago, we allowed users to bid on virtual tablets that they could either keep (and win a real life iPad) or trade for valuable in-game items. Some of the grateful users who received their iPads in the mail were nice enough to snap a picture for us. Here are iPad winners mygame43 and Are200.
Are200
- mygame43
