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: BLOXcon New York City media and awards, the upcoming Virtual BLOXcon, complete control over outlines, two game designers talk about creating dynamic obstacle courses, what’s working for Paid Access, a goodbye to our summer interns, a guided tour of New Hellenic Republic: City of Naxos, a pile of videos and art, and other bits and pieces. Enjoy.

Two-week Blog Recap

We skipped last Sunday’s Weekly Roundup in light of BLOXcon New York City. Now that it’s done, we should be back on an actual weekly schedule! Here’s what’s gone on in the last couple weeks.

BLOXcon New York City, of course!

We leave every BLOXcon with more than a few things to say, and BLOXcon New York City was no exception. For a perspective on how the event unfolded, check out our photo gallery, retrospective recap, and quick video tour of the event!

We also announced a third round of award winners; check it out to see everyone who took home a prize — whether a BLOXY, Hall of Fame or Hackathon award.

On a related note, we’ve also published a complete review of the 2013 Hall of Fame, including the nominees and winners for each category. We’ll have even a few more at the Virtual BLOXcon, scheduled for Saturday, September 21st. We’re hard at work now pulling together everything for the big online event!

You now have complete control over outlines

We’ve decided to make the recently launched outlines feature optional for all ROBLOX builders and game developers. While we do see outlines as part of our vision for the ROBLOX aesthetic – and they do look great in many instances – the feedback we’ve received indicates they don’t yet work everywhere. We will continue to work toward a perfect implementation but, in the meantime and with the latest version of ROBLOX Studio, you now have complete control. To learn how to toggle outlines per place or per part surface, see this post.

Two top-tier obstacle course creators talk game design

Our Crossfire series gives us a chance to sit down and chat with the designers of two competing games. In the latest edition, we had crazyblox and erikwesley96 — designers of Flood Escape and Death Run, respectively — talk about how they’ve made their obstacle courses dynamic and the challenges they encountered along the way, among other things. We also drop a brief hint about a future ROBLOX with much better support for sounds and music.

We look at what’s working for Paid Access

While we’re fully aware that the Paid Access feature is controversial, we are continuing to allow the experiment to unfold. We dug into the numbers from the feature’s early stages to see what’s working, and provide some ideas of ways you can leverage it for your creations. If you have high-quality content and are considering taking advantage of it, this article might be a good starting point.

We bid farewell to our summer interns

This year, our summer interns weren’t Bay Area natives — they came from around the country and, more importantly, from the ROBLOX community. It makes sense; they’ve spent years interacting with ROBLOX and have developed a keen understanding of how things work. Now that they’re on their way out, we decided to find out how their summer unfolded and where they’re headed this fall.

You should play this ROBLOX game

New Hellenic Republic: City of Naxos is an up-and-coming island-city, built by cranacyr, legospacepolice, ParallelDimension and N1CEANDS1MPLE. I dropped in to check it out on Friday and got a nice, guided tour from legospacepolice, and thought this would be a good place to show you what I saw.

The entourage.

Checking out a map of the city.

Now *this* is how you do a rooftop pool party.

Also, I reached what I can only imagine will go down in history as my crowning moment on ROBLOX: riding a Ro-torcycle on one wheel down the sail of a yacht.

See me? Yeah, that happened.

Bits

Check out the ROBLOX Instagram for a bunch of photos and videos from all three BLOXcons.
Spideyrulz (creator of the BLOXY-winning Builderman trailer) is recreating Crossroads as a set for the episodic Builderman series! It looks way cool. Can’t wait to see it in action…
One of the best ROBLOX cakes I’ve seen yet.

It’s time for cool ROBLOX videos — there were a bunch this week!