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: our visit to a Bay Area school, updates to the ROBLOX UI, user Ajedi32 and the ROBLOX Wikia, a preview of upcoming Apocalypse Rising updates, Giftsplosion, another must-see place in Block Town, the stories behind your usernames and more.

Seven-day Blog Recap

ROBLOX visits Bay Area student-gamers

A couple weeks ago, ROBLOX Founder and CEO David Baszucki, Senior Software Developer Robert Morgan and Studio Engineering Director Tim Brown headed to a Bay Area school to meet with students and game enthusiasts. The trio answered questions and took a little time to find out how members of the community build with ROBLOX. You can read a full report of the mini-event in our blog post.

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The holiday commercials started airing weeks ago but, at ROBLOX, we’re so tasteful we waited until almost-December to kick off our holiday promotions. That can only mean one thing: it’s time for this year’s holiday extravaganza, Giftsplosion 2012. Throughout the month of December, we’ll be placing mystery gift boxes in the ROBLOX Catalog and awarding them to users who either meet certain criteria or have the wit to crack the riddle they contain. Eventually, they’ll open and reveal a new addition to your inventory of goods.

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Throughout the development process of ROBLOX for the iPad, many people across a wide variety of disciplines have focused their efforts on a single goal: build a world-class mobile ROBLOX product that matches (and in the sense of being a tight, unified app exceeds) the quality of its desktop counterpart. We’ve heard about fast-loading in-app web pages, smart optimization of memory and performance and touch-friendly controls. Today, in the last entry of the ongoing Engineering ROBLOX for the iPad series, the Content Team talks about the importance of a high-quality and cohesive user interface (UI).

Some of the UI changes we’ve been developing have already rolled out to users. Regardless of the platform on which you’re playing, you’ll see refreshed versions of a couple of ROBLOX’s key UI elements: the toolbar, backpack and chat (with an updated playerlist and scrollable chat coming soon). While these elements already have a new look, the Content Team is continuing to work toward its ultimate vision for ROBLOX’s UI. You can see one of the mock-ups of the team’s vision below.

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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: Black Friday deals, ROBLOX’s touch-screen control design, a Spotlight on super-builder Geico480, protecting your account, epic ship battles in Galleons, Thanksgiving in ROBLOX and more.

Seven-day Blog Recap

Still going strong: Black Friday deals

ROBLOX’s Black Friday Sale has been running since the crack of almost-midnight on Friday and, if you haven’t snatched up some low-priced gear, there’s still time. (That is, the rest of the day today.) You can check out our guide to Black Friday deals here on the blog for a detailed listing or consider some of these popular options:

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Thus far, our Engineering ROBLOX for the iPad series has focused on iPad development through a performance-optimization lens. It has seen us go into the trenches with several ROBLOX developers to learn about and document their roles in building a stable, smooth mobile gaming experience with the unique challenge of user-generated content as the centerpiece. In the final installments of the series, we’ll stray from the path and look at the development of interactive components, starting with control design.

ROBLOX Game Engineer Ben Tkacheff is an expert when it comes to iOS controls. He’s played a lot of iOS games and cites Gameloft’s titles as examples of consistently good, mobile-optimized controls. First-person shooter N.O.V.A. stands out to Ben; the game is unabashedly reminiscent of the Halo series, but it isn’t just a console game ported to iOS – it’s a mobile game, in large part due to great controls. For example, players can execute a 180-degree turn quickly – that is, without having to flick across the screen more than once – and camera movement is free-form, rather than tied to a virtual joystick that mimics an analog stick. These are both examples of controls that work with touch screens, rather than around them. That was the kind of approach Ben took to designing a mobile control scheme for ROBLOX.

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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: ROBLOX Tablets in the Catalog, unlocking the 100,000 concurrent users achievement, must-see feats of ROBLOX building, Sorcus’ ultimate sword series, ROBLOX in the press and more.

Seven-day Blog Recap

Purchase a ROBLOX Tablet, get a real iPad

ROBLOX kicked off an iPad promotion this week. Each day, a ROBLOX Tablet will be released in the Catalog. Each one will be more expensive than the last. Once the ROBLOX iPad app is officially released, all users with a ROBLOX Tablet in their inventory will receive a physical iPad from ROBLOX. The first few have already been snatched up by the quickest of ROBLOX users, but we’ll be releasing more. Find all the details in our blog post about the promotion.

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ROBLOX is a multi-layered platform and different people love it for different reasons: the games, the socializing, the organizing, the economy, the physics, the forums and other things entirely. One of the things I’ve come to appreciate is thoughtful, detailed building. Here are six beautiful examples (a couple suggested by the Content Team’s Luke Weber) that might make you wonder just how much time their creators spent perfecting them.

Air Attica: Sefarnos Airport by cranacyr

This ROBLOX place looks and feels like an airport; it has all the tropes but cars dropping off passengers. With signs that look authentic, service counters and security stations, Sefarnos Airport is a lesson in attention to detail. It gets players in the spirit, too; there’s almost always someone behind the ticket counter.

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