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 making of the 2013 Egg Hunt, the benefits of saying “goodbye” to bevels, ROBLOX’s browser/native-client hybrid, a discussion between zombie-survival game designers, ROBLOX at Maker Faire 2013, Compound by samaxis, visitors from around the world, and other bits and pieces. Enjoy.

Seven-day Blog Recap

With the 2013 Egg Hunt in the books, read about how it was created

The ROBLOX Egg Hunt 2013 was a smash hit. The final tally of play sessions broke the 3 million mark and the peak concurrent player count was more than 19,000 (shattering the previous single-game mark of around 6,000). In celebration of the event, we published some additional egg-hunting statistics and sat down with the creators of the Egg Hunt to learn about the process of building and launching the game. If you haven’t already given it a read, it’s worth it — even if the event has wrapped up.

Bevels off, performance up, dynamic lighting on the way

Last week, we followed through on our promise to remove bevels from the ROBLOX rendering pipeline. The benefits of this change are twofold:

It facilitates an up to 3x performance increase, which is particularly noticeable in large, non-moving environments
It allows us to ship features like dynamic lighting and achieve the new, unified look for ROBLOX much sooner

We’re close to releasing dynamic lighting to our “gametest” environment, where you’ll be able to experiment with it. To learn more about the upcoming test and see a round of ROBLOX Battle with dynamic lighting turned on, check out this blog post.

Ever asked yourself, “why do I have to download ROBLOX to play games?”

Then you might want to read this story. It explains the spectrum of modern-day PC game-distribution channels, and how ROBLOX came to fall under a “hybrid” category that combines qualities of browser gaming and more traditional native-client gaming.

Apocalypse Rising and Deadzone developers talk game design

Last week, we had the developers of the leading zombie-survival games get together and talk about why their games are the way they are. As similar as Apocalypse Rising and Deadzone are on the surface, they’re very different in their game design and priorities. In this, the inaugural edition of our “Crossfire” column, you can get inside the heads of ROBLOX game designers as they discuss the merits of their decisions. Don’t forget to let us know what you think of the column after you finish reading.

You can be part of the ROBLOX Maker Faire experience

ROBLOX will be coming back to Maker Faire Bay Area 2013, and we’ll have a bigger presence than ever. This year, we’re looking for ROBLOX builders who are attending the Maker Faire to help make our booth a great, vibrant place. Would you like to help? Learn more about what we’re looking for in this blog post.

April Fools!

As you likely discovered, the ROBLOX blog team (myself and Alan) are not world-class game designers. And to answer any lingering questions, we did not light any computer equipment on fire, nor did we put any holes in drywall.

You should play this ROBLOX game

A couple weeks ago, we featured Compound as one of our “six awesome places you’ve probably never seen before.” Well, that might soon change — its creator, samaxis, recently added gameplay (via redditor’s FPS framework and some help from Nytraulics, who we’ve spotlighted in the past), bringing the war-torn level to life. With a day-night cycle, a small, but fun variety of weapons, and a great layout, Compound could catch on as a go-to place for your first-person shooter fix.

Visitors from far and wide

We had some notable visitors stop by the office this week. On Wednesday, we had the pleasure of grabbing lunch with Tyler Von Brocklin, the Vice President of the Pinewood Builders Club and winner of the ROBLOX Hackathon at ROBLOX Game Conference 2012. We chatted briefly about his quest to bring realistic fire to ROBLOX (as you can imagine, he’s a little excited about dynamic lighting). Visit this place out to see what he’s done with fire so far.

Then, our weekly Behind the BLOX brought some builders from across the globe! Users James (tomaj) and Peter (gon01gon) were on holiday from their home of London, and decided to sign up a few days prior to get a chance to come in. They, along with a user who flew here all the way from Tustin, California for Behind the BLOX, provided some awesome feedback during our playtesting. That’s dedication, Mike (LEGODUDE3000)!

Thanks to everyone who’s stopped by.

Bits

A tip of the hat to all you scripters.
And a quote I believe we can all get behind.
The third winner of our Fan Art Contest was user Zelios, who created “Sword Vs. Scythe”.
Our ROBLOX Mobile app has a slick new background that harkens back to the parallax-scrolling days of yore. Have you seen it? I find it hypnotic — in a good way.