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: a video tutorial for adding an in-game store to your place, a new Top Grossing sort for the Games page, a builder who’s finding success with our in-game purchasing feature, five answers to a million-dollar question, a preview of the 2013 BLOXY Awards, our latest Feedback Loop article, Dungeon Delver and Formula 1 racing, and other bits and pieces. Enjoy.

Seven-day blog recap

How to add a store to your place

Over the last couple weeks, we’ve been talking regularly about our in-game purchasing API and trying to make it easy for you to implement an in-game store. To that end, we put together a tutorial video that walks you through the steps of building out an in-game store using our recent ROBLOX Studio plugin. If you’re interested in turning a profit off your ROBLOX creation, this is certainly a worthwhile venture. Especially when you consider we just launched…

A new “top earning” game sort

Last week, we launched a new, totally optional method of sorting the Games page: the Top Grossing sort. This sort brings to the front page games that are earning significant money based on Game Pass and affiliate gear sales. It’s still an experiment, but the overarching goal is to offer an alternative to sheer volume of place visits for ROBLOX builders to get their creation to the coveted top of the Games page.

We’re also working on integrating clothing sales into the algorithm — once this is complete, successful clothing stores, such as FighterAce’s Kestrel Home Store, should naturally rise to the top. Speaking of Kestrel…

A spotlight on the Kestrel Home Store and clothing group

It was only fitting that our latest Spotlight article feature someone who’s crushing in-game purchasing. FighterAce, the owner of the Kestrel clothing group and Kestrel Home Store, not only runs a highly successful clothing-creation group, but owns one of the most elegant and well maintained department stores. Alan talked with him about his many accomplishments and his plans for the future of his emerging brand.

Five answers to the million dollar question, “how do I get a job at ROBLOX?”

Many ROBLOX gamers, builders and developers have asked us what they can do to prepare for a job in the gaming and technology industries. (In most cases, the question is specific to ROBLOX.) Being that there are many possible paths to success in many disparate fields, we decided to interview several ROBLOX admins to find out how they arrived at their ROBLOX position. From art to community to rendering to physics, these five perspectives might give you direction as you plot out your own path.

A brief BLOXY Awards preview

BLOXcon is quickly approaching and that means we’re gearing up to start announcing winners of the 2013 ROBLOX International Film Festival. Now that the submission and voting periods have ended, we collected submissions from a couple popular categories for this preview of the awards show, which kicks off next month at BLOXcon Chicago.

The latest edition of Feedback Loop

Community feedback is one of the driving forces behind the development of ROBLOX. We take that spirit to heart here on the ROBLOX blog, and occasionally survey our following to find out what’s important to you. In this edition of Feedback Loop, John Shedletsky responds to a wide variety of ideas and questions. The topics span quality game discovery and recommendations, additional materials for parts, cylinder physics, video tutorials, slots for additional games and places, community guidelines, user-created video advertisements and more. To see what’s on the horizon, read through the entire post!

You should see this ROBLOX place

With Dungeon Delver, the name says it all. It’s a dungeon crawler — not unlike any entry in the Diablo or Torchlight series — where your goal is to explore and survive randomly generated dungeons while amassing an ever-expanding inventory of increasingly epic loot. (Say that five times fast.) While the concept isn’t exactly mind-bending, Gl0in and Gl0in2‘s collective execution is top notch. Character movement is precise and responsive, and feels good from the isometric angle. The loot collection and inventory management is intuitive. The character creation interface is easy to use, and you can cycle between multiple characters (with a shared item stash, to boot). Plus, smaller touches like group boss battles, dynamic lighting and procedural generation add significant depth. Give yourself some time to sit down with Dungeon Delver today — it can be addicting. Play now!

Veteran ROBLOX game developer crazyman32 recently launched a new project, in which he’s creating and tuning an Formula 1 race car and track (embedded in the terrain of his Freeflight map). There’s work to be done — the cars have a frustrating knack for getting stuck in trees and other level geometry — but one can’t deny the fun of racing a few friends through the green hills. Zoom into first-person view for the best sense of speed (and to see the steering wheel move with your keyboard input). Play now!

Bits

ROBLOX CEO David Baszucki penned a column for GigaOM, which surveys the online gaming market’s different approaches to leveraging “the cloud.” Read it (and gain some insight as to where ROBLOX fits in the industry) on GigaOM now.
This week’s gear release is something of a mixed bag. Highlights include the latest entry in the popular “coil” series and, in recognition of Father’s Day, Trolladad. We’ve also got a Cool Story AC Unit and dynamically lit skateboard — perfect for summer.
Our latest game review pays tribute to Choices, a unique hybrid of 2D platforming and 3D cave exploration by GollyGreg. We’ve actually Spotlighted GollyGreg in the past; check out the article here.