With Halloween right around the corner, we thought we’d chat with members of the ROBLOX Content Team to see if they could provide any insight or advice as to how to “spook” up your games for Halloween. Here’s what they came up with.
Developers’ Tricks for Transforming Your Game into a Halloween Event
Spotlight: Larger Than Life Experiences With Diddleshot
Ever since he was a kid, user Robert Wallbank (Diddleshot in ROBLOX) has been interested in how things work on a fundamental level. He developed a fascination with physics and design work, as well as graphics. Though math wasn’t his strongest subject, it was this passion that brought him stumbling to ROBLOX in 2008, after watching videos of ROBLOX on YouTube.
Robert decided that he wanted to make games, but wanted to shy away from simplicity. He wanted to make games that were total visual and audio spectacles–games that would put people in a state of awe. For Robert, immense scale was a must.
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Adding Gear to Games: Some Tips & Success Stories
We released the Add Gear to Game feature last week, and have been monitoring how our users have been using it to further enrich their games. We’re proud to report that some of our most entrepreneurial users have been quick to leverage this new feature to further enhance their popular games. For those of you who haven’t heard of it, last week we released a feature that gave uers fine-grain control over which gear items can enter their games, while at the same time, allowing place creators to earn some extra Robux.
ROBLOX Currency Exchange: The Deep End
The fundamentals of our currency exchange system are modeled after real-world trade systems–much like in real life, the earlier you act on information, the better off you’ll be. But we understand that joining the ever-shifting currency can be daunting–it’s a power-user feature with a pretty steep learning curve–but the rewards can be huge. In this article, we’re going to take an in-depth look at our currency exchange system, teach you how it works, and offer up some tips on how to leverage it. Let’s dive in.
The Basics
Continue reading What Happens When You Change Your Appearance on ROBLOX
Every part of your ROBLOX character is fully customizable–you can change your hat, shirt, appendages, and even the look on your face. Like with every facet of ROBLOX, we want to give you as much creative freedom as possible. But what happens behind the scenes when you change the appearance of your ROBLOXian? We turned to Creative Director John Shedletsky to tell us. John?
Every item of clothing is a ROBLOX asset–a ROBLOX asset can include a wide range of things, like shirts, pants, decals, and models. Each and every asset has a unique number attached to it–the famous Domino Crown, for example, has an asset ID of 31174270, while the Shiny Teeth face has an ID of 20722130. On a fundamental level, the look of your character is determined by a list of combined numbers–IDs of all the assets you are wearing.
Continue reading Developers’ Picks: The Content Team’s Favorite ROBLOX Games
Feeling nostalgic after posting an article about popular console and arcade titles re-imagined in ROBLOX, we got to wondering: What are some of our very own software engineers’ favorite games on ROBLOX? We asked four members of the Content team and, in spite of spending hours every day in close proximity, they all had very different responses.
Paintball! by daxter33
Paintball! is consistently among the front-running games on ROBLOX, and for good reason: it’s responsive and intuitive. The game simulates real paintballs, which, unlike traditional shots in first-person shooters, lose momentum and fall to the ground as they would in the real world. This adds a challenge to hitting targets, especially across long distances. Plus, the weapons are so responsive that Zach Lindblad, who chose Paintball!, describes them as “as close to a retail game I’ve seen” in ROBLOX.
Continue reading Spotlight: Exchange Statistics, Lasers and Robots with NXTBoy
Since he was a kid, user NXTBoy has been interested in building. An award-winning robotics builder by the time he was a teenager, he’s also made some innovative games and services for ROBLOX, including an Exchange Statistics website that tracks the exchange rates of ROBLOX currency.
The website is essentially a chart that updates itself. NXTBoy originally launched it in 2008 as an excuse to re-learn SQL (Structured Query Language), a special-purpose programming language.“Basically, I created a cron-job that scrapes the currency exchange page every two hours,” recalls NXTBoy. “I used XPath selectors to extract info, and stored the data in my SQL database.”
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