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: contests, contests, contests, the venue for ROBLOX Game Conference in New York City, a Spotlight on the users who created a randomly generated obstacle course, cloud gaming vs. traditional game hosting, ensuring a quality Roblox.com through automated testing, how users are part of our development team, Pac-Man!! by PacManMan, and other bits and pieces. Enjoy.
Seven-day Blog Recap
Apparently, March is the month of contests!
We recently launched a bunch of contests on ROBLOX, all of which happen to test your art and design skills. Right now, we’re running a Fan Art contest, a Face contest and an Egg retexture contest. That ought to keep you busy, right? If you’ve got a knack for art, you have a chance to gain some serious community fame this month! To learn more about each contest and how you can enter, check out the blog post, Calling All Artists! And, of course, best of luck to all you participants.
The RGC NYC venue has been unveiled!
After much anticipation, we have announced the venue for the New York edition of ROBLOX Game Conference 2013: the Intrepid Sea, Air & Space Museum! We’re really excited to be hosting the event on such a unique piece of U.S. history. To learn more about the venue and event, check out yesterday’s blog post. We’ll be launching a dedicated site for this summer’s event in the near future, so stay tuned. To recap, here are the dates, cities and venues for each RGC:
- 7/13: Chicago, The Museum of Science and Industry
- 7/27: London, The Royal Air Force Museum
- 8/10: New York City, Intrepid Sea, Air & Space Museum
The users who created a randomly generated obstacle course
Obstacle courses — or “obbies”, as they’re known around these parts of the internet — have a special place in the hearts of many ROBLOX users. While they’re usually static courses, where the challenge lies in the difficulty of the jumps, users Smellypencil and FunFish7098 take the challenge to a new level in Obby Lobby 2.0. The game dynamically generates a fresh obstacle course every round, meaning it’s rare that two games end up looking the same. You can read more about the game’s development and how you can contribute pieces to Obby Lobby on this, our latest Spotlight feature.
Cloud gaming vs. traditional game hosting
For a long time, most games required players to pay for dedicated servers to host multiplayer matches. Those days are a memory. Today, technology has progressed far enough that we can remove the hassle and expense of playing online with friends.
We’re one of the largest cloud based gaming companies out there–we have built a vast array of machines whose sole purpose is to power your online games. Let us worry about the infrastructure while you worry about gaming. The expense and operational complexity of running a server farm is a hit we take so you guys can get in and out of games as quickly as possible.
Sound intriguing? Disagree? Read our full article on the benefits of cloud gaming and let us know your stance in the comments.
Other articles from the past week:
- As ROBLOX grows and our web functionality expands, we’re paying closer attention to the quality of our product. One of the keys to consistent quality on Roblox.com is automated testing. Learn more about our testing infrastructure in this article.
- ROBLOX users are a key part of our development team. We listen to your feedback, prioritize development based on what you think does and doesn’t work, and have a testing environment where you can help us fix bugs and make improvements.
You should play this ROBLOX game
It's a new look for Pac-Man, who has apparently gotten really mad over the years and now thoroughly enjoys demolishing trees and trucks.
I’m not going to tell you Pac-Man!! by PacManMan is a brilliant game that you’ll play for life, but I am going to tell you it’ll make you laugh. In this re-imagination of the arcade classic, Pac-Man — you know, that cute, innocent, little yellow ball — is a crazy, vicious monster that wants nothing more than to rip you apart. The AI-controlled Pac-Man (now decked out with huge fangs) darts around the map, and it’s up to you to use the trees as safety from getting destroyed. It’s chaos, it’s mostly a diversion, but it’s funny. (Thanks to user DarkGenex for pointing this place out via Twitter!)
Bits
- Check out this video review of Shi No Numa, a ROBLOX game where you and your teammates have to fight to survive wave after wave of hungry zombies
- Here’s a photo by John Shedletsky from the first Behind the BLOX event on Friday, March 1st at ROBLOX HQ
