The ROBLOX Content team recently put the finishing touches on its latest game, Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles: Turtle Trouble, as part of an advertising deal with Nickelodeon. At the time of this writing, users have played the game almost 300,000 times and it continues to sit atop the Games page – a testament to the collective effort the team poured into its development.

The Content team set out to create a game that felt like part of the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles now-CGI universe – a far cry from ROBLOX’s traditional, blocky look. That required pushing the engine with advanced combat, character models and animations, enemy artificial intelligence (AI), and level design. Content Team Lead Deepak Chandrasekaran (Sorcus) encouraged the developers to critique one another’s work, and bring standard ROBLOX elements to a new level in a cohesive experience.

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In September, a team of 40 volunteers capped off roughly eight years of development with the release of Black Mesa. The game is a near-complete recreation of the influential 1998 first-person shooter, Half-Life, in Valve’s current Source engine. The project brought new life back to an old game, and got us thinking about game conversions. We’ve compiled a list of some of the most interesting game conversions that we’ve found in ROBLOX.

What compels someone to recreate a game that already exists? It could be their sheer love for the original product, and the desire to work with the property on a deeper level. The original product might have faced problems or limitations that would be solved or expanded using modern technology. Perhaps it’s a reasonable entrance into developing a full game – the concept exists, so developers can re-execute (and even improve) on it.

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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 Game Pass update, enhanced water physics and boat control, our responses to your feedback, more wealthy ROBLOX users and more.

Game Passes proving to be successful for game developers

We pulled some Game Pass data with the first week and a half of the feature’s life in the books, and found that some game developers had already made large profits. The top-earning Game Pass, at the time of the blog post’s publication, had generated over 200,000 Robux. You can see the top three passes, what they offer and even how their strategies compare to bigger video game-industry trends here.

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Look at ROBLOX from a distance and you’ll notice a couple things: a lot of games and a large, bustling community. Look a little closer, and you’ll find depth: a complex building/game-development kit, a rich virtual economy and a social network that connects users around the world. Part of that social network is a system of groups, which allow ROBLOX users to join up, organize, communicate, form alliances and rivalries, compete, and execute grand building projects.

On ROBLOX, groups are another way we empower users. All Builders Club members have the ability to create a group that anyone can join – a sub-community that can function like anything from a fan club to a MMO guild to a game studio – for 100 Robux, and recruit members with various levels of access. Call it user-generated community: the other user-generated content.

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Early last week, ROBLOX launched Game Passes, which give game developers a simple, new way to leverage an old trick – charging players for access to premium abilities and content – and further profit off their creations. We’ve seen hundreds of developers add Game Passes to their games, and some have proven very successful, for very different reasons.

Top Grossing Game Passes

We dug into our Game Pass data to find out what passes have been successful so far. What’s interesting about the top three most profitable Game Passes is that they use varying price structures and incentives to turn a profit.

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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: selling premium access to your game using Game Passes, ROBLOX named one of TIME’s 50 best websites of 2012, the richest ROBLOX users, running a successful Personal Build Server and more.

Follow in the footsteps of MMO giants with Game Passes

The MMO industry is shifting from a traditional subscription model, where you pay upfront to have access to a game, to a “freemium” model, where the basic features of a game are free to play and you pay to access premium content. While ROBLOX users had already found a way to replicate this trend using “VIP T-shirts,” we introduced Game Passes to make it easier to set up and sell special access in your ROBLOX games. You can check out our blog post for an introduction to setting up a Game Pass, and this ROBLOX Wiki entry for help with giving your Game Pass an in-game effect.

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Personal Build Servers launched just under a year ago and, since then, have spawned creations impressive for their colors, senses of place and especially scale – many are home to tens of thousands of parts. At the time of this writing, there are 283,000 servers anyone can join and, at the least, explore.

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