Spotlight: Nexx Launches Crowd-Sourced ROBLOXReviews.com

By Alan Fackler - March 12, 2013

Long time ROBLOX user Nexx recently launched ROBLOXReviews.com, a website that compiles and sorts user-based reviews of ROBLOX games. Riffing off of ROBLOXHQ.com, a legacy ROBLOX game reviews site that is no longer running, ROBLOX Reviews features compiled lists of reviews from a wide range of users–each “reviewer” can earn “respect” points by submitting reviews that users find helpful.

The front page of ROBLOX Reviews is a compilation of popular games on ROBLOX–scrolling over each of the titles gives you the option to read user-submitted reviews about the game, or play the game itself (which transports you back to ROBLOX.com). The algorithm that generates what games populate the front page of ROBLOX Reviews is much different than ours–Nexx’s is based off of what people think is good, while ours is based off of what people are playing in that specific instance.

Our Content Team Critiques Your Works in Progress

By Alan Fackler - March 9, 2013

About a week ago, we asked users to submit their best and most creative places via the ROBLOX Game Design forum. We told them that the top picks of the litter would receive critiques by our very own ROBLOX developers, and we’re here to do just that. We chose four of our favorite submissions, and shipped them off to our dev team for feedback. Here’s what they had to say:

Luke Weber, ROBLOX Content Team, on Ice Castle, an open-world environment by Gerrett99

Comments on Comments: Physics, Character Animation and More

By Alan Fackler - March 7, 2013

Many readers pour significant time into writing thoughtful replies to our blog articles, and we want to do a better job of addressing them. We’re introducing Comments on Comments as a monthly series that will focus on responding to great questions and feedback.

Each segment, we’ll delve into recent blog comments to find relevant questions, concerns, and feedback, and have the most qualified members of the ROBLOX team respond. For our first post, we’ve tapped ROBLOX Creative Director John Shedletsky and ROBLOX physics guru Kevin He to respond to comments covering character animation, locally hosted servers, recent updates to ROBLOX’s physics, custom gravity, John’s bizarre sense of humor, and more!

Behind the Scenes of Behind the BLOX

By Alan Fackler - March 6, 2013

Last Friday, we kicked off the first in a series of Behind the BLOX, opening the doors of ROBLOX HQ so users could take a tour of our office, test some exciting new features, and talk with our developers about all things ROBLOX. We invited six users from our submission pool—and will be inviting more so we can hold a Behind the BLOX event each week for the foreseeable future!

ROBLOX is Expanding to Continue Innovating

By Alan Fackler - March 4, 2013

ROBLOX is one of the biggest gaming sites on the internet–we’ve logged 140,000 peak concurrent users and 393 million hours of gameplay in 2012. As we continue to steadily grow our userbase, we’re also looking to expand the size of our team. That’s right folks, ROBLOX is hiring. The current version of ROBLOX represents less than 10% of what we envision for the future–come help us build that future today!

Spotlight: Infinite Replayability With Obby Lobby 2.0

By Alan Fackler - February 26, 2013

Users Smellypencil and FunFish7098 have created a game that is innovative, challenging, and most importantly, a heck of a lot of fun. Obby Lobby 2.0 takes many familiar tropes about ROBLOX obstacle courses (or obbies for short) and flips them on their head. The result is a game with staggering amounts of replayability.

Though many are visually innovative, most obstacle courses on ROBLOX follow the same rules (and there’s nothing wrong with that, mind you). You build a gigantic obstacle course that players can complete at their leisure. Obby Lobby 2.0 plays by no such rules. The game splits each round into frantic races to the finish line–you’ve got four minutes per round to complete the obstacle course before your opponents do, which involves some intense on-the-spot thinking.

ROBLOX Users: Part of Our Development Team

By Alan Fackler - February 25, 2013

ROBLOX is a user generated platform at it’s core. We make the tools, then leave it up to you to utilize them in new and innovative ways. We need your feedback as game developers and builders to help us ensure that our tools are giving you as much power and efficiency as possible.

User feedback and participation are cornerstones of ROBLOX’s elaborate testing infrastructure, and play a large role in dictating what exactly we work on here at HQ. Unlike other online games, ROBLOX is under constant development. The direction that development takes is dictated by our players. In a very real way, our users are part of our development team.