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: ROBLOXians get thumbs (sort of), the making of Dungeon Delver, a city-building Crossfire, our readership survey, new BLOXcon details, a Mid-Summer Night’s Sale, Inverted Dreams and Designs, Checkpoint Racing 4.0, and other bits and pieces. Enjoy.

Seven-day Blog Recap

Thumbs up/thumbs down: making waves

While features like dynamic lighting have an obvious sweeping impact on ROBLOX building and gameplay, even seemingly subtle web features have the potential to drastically improve your experience. A good example of a powerful web feature is the recently released thumbs up/thumbs down rating system, which gives every ROBLOX player the power to rate the games they play and help form a community-generated opinion. The end result is it’s easier to determine whether a game is quality — and lives up to its own hype — before you spend time trying it for yourself.

There has been a good discussion about this feature and its ramifications within the initial blog announcement; I recommend you check out the comments and chip in with your own thoughts.

The making of Dungeon Delver

Our small editorial team has been all about Dungeon Delver over the past 10 odd days. Considering there’s nothing else quite like it on ROBLOX, it made sense for us to get in touch with the game’s creators and find out what went into developing the hack-and-slash action RPG. From dynamic lighting and the fixed camera to dynamic difficulty and character customization, we touch on many of the game’s significant features. Plus, there’s insight into what’s to come from this game that, by the way, is still only in its alpha stage.

Crossfire: competing city builders

While our previous Crossfire articles have focused on the choices and challenges associated with designing a competitive multiplayer game, our latest entry delves into building full-fledged ROBLOXian cities. We selected two seasoned city builders – Nightgaladeld (Washington DC) and Juliane14 (Rome, Italia) — and went in-depth on the inspiration behind their worlds, the techniques used to build such massive places, dynamic lighting, what goes on in virtual cities, and more. It’s a fascinating look at the popular city-simulation sub-genre of ROBLOX games.

We want to get to know our readers — help us!

Alan and I have been publishing to the ROBLOX blog daily for many months, but we’ve never gone out of our way to survey our readers about the content we create. We want to get to know you, our reader. We want to know what floats your boat, what kinds of games and tech you like, and where you read our articles. To help us out, please complete this brief survey as accurately as possible. Every response helps.

Plus, there’s a little incentive for good answers to question nine!

A look at what’s in store for BLOXcon

Our plans for BLOXcon are starting to come together — as they should, considering BLOXcon Chicago is a mere 20 days away! You can see a rough schedule of the Main Stage Presentation, as well as a few of the other activities we’ll have available, by checking out this blog post. We’ll have more details — including what admins will be at what BLOXcons and what you should bring — in the very near future.

And don’t forget: everyone can attend the Virtual BLOXcon this September.

A Mid-Summer Night’s Sale

The Mid-Summer Night’s Sale wasn’t your average ROBLOX sale (and, with a name like that, how could it have been?). We rang in the summer solstice with an all-night sale, in which new items were released one by one through the whee night and morning hours. While the limited items were snatched up quickly, a few of the timed items are still available. We hope you had fun staying up late to get your hands on awesome ROBLOX goods.

You should play this ROBLOX game

Checkpoint Racing is a game I’ve featured on the Weekly Roundup once before, but it’s one of my all-time favorites and Wingman8 recently gave it the 4.0 treatment. If you didn’t play it at my last recommendation, you owe it to yourself to give it a shot today. The wild antics and high-speed chases that come with randomly placed checkpoints on wide-open courses are super fun.

I might not fully understand the name or purpose of Inverted Dreams and Designs, but it’s a sight to behold. The fortress’ detailed architecture and grand scale are impressive in their own right, but my personal favorite nuance is the automatic lighting of the torches as you cross the bridge leading up to the central building. They have a way of making you feel… Important. Only thing missing is an epic orchestral score.

Bits

Thanks to everyone who stayed up late with us for the Mid-Summer Night’s Sale and helped keep things lively by interacting on Twitter.
Roughly 24 hours after launching thumbs up/thumbs down, we polled our Facebook fans to find out whether they thought the feature has improved the quality of the Games page. As of last Friday morning, 970 people responded and 73% said “yes.” 16% said “no” and 11% said the quality was about the same. What do you think? Like ROBLOX on Facebook and contribute your opinion.
Crazyman32 is continuing to develop his Formula 1 racing demo, which we featured last week. It’s starting to feel like more of a racer!
SkateBored published a super-detailed Apocalypse Rising strategy guide to the forums. It’s great for newcomers and veterans alike. Someone should format this for digital readers!
Video: 1,000 spheres, falling.