In less than a week, we’re going to be packing up, boarding a plane headed for Chicago and setting up the first of this summer’s BLOXcons. But we’re not the only ones coordinating a presence at the Museum of Science and Industry; several members of the ROBLOX community will be on-site to spread the word about their organizations, products and events. Read on to find out what will be on display (and to get prepared for an awesome BLOXcon experience).

First off, a look at what’s going on at BLOXcon

Main Stage Presentation: CEO and ROBLOX Co-Founder David Baszucki and VP of Marketing and Brand Experience Brad Justus will lead a two-hour presentation covering a gamut of ROBLOX news and developments. We’ll showcase new ROBLOX features, give a bunch of awards, do an on-stage interview with celebrity ROBLOXian Merely, and more!

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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: dynamic lighting illuminates ROBLOX Mobile, player engagement at popular games, paid game access beta, TheGamer101‘s random map generation script, a BLOXcon update and teaser, a Spotlight on a ROBLOXian truck aficionado, Notre-Dame De Paris and Broken Bones, and other bits and pieces. Enjoy.

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Seven-day Blog Recap

Dynamic lighting in the palms of your hands

As promised, we recently delivered dynamic lighting to ROBLOX Mobile. In this story, we take a behind-the-scenes look at all the technical hurdles — from shading to CPU architecture — our Rendering Team had to overcome to make the beloved feature work well on hardware-constrained mobile devices. To all you mobile ROBLOX players, enjoy having the power of dynamic lighting in the palms of your hands!

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If you’re a game developer, the one thing you probably want more than anything else is a devoted following of players who can’t get enough of your game – we’ll call them “core players.” These are the players who will sustain the success of your game by ensuring there’s always a lively server, thereby catching the eyes of both existing and prospective players. They’re also the people who are most likely to support you by buying into advanced features (e.g., Game Passes) and spreading the word.

In this article, we’ll look at several ROBLOX games, dig into fluctuations in player engagement, and try to draw some conclusions about what works among players. We’ll use a bunch of charts, which show trends in how many gamers have played a title once, twice, five, 10 and 20 times in the previous month (30 days). What’s important is the ratio of people who play multiple times to people who play once (and move on to other games). The better the ratio, the more “sticky” a game is. It keeps players coming back, and stays near the top of the Games page.

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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: ROBLOXians get thumbs (sort of), the making of Dungeon Delver, a city-building Crossfire, our readership survey, new BLOXcon details, a Mid-Summer Night’s Sale, Inverted Dreams and Designs, Checkpoint Racing 4.0, and other bits and pieces. Enjoy.

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Seven-day Blog Recap

Thumbs up/thumbs down: making waves

While features like dynamic lighting have an obvious sweeping impact on ROBLOX building and gameplay, even seemingly subtle web features have the potential to drastically improve your experience. A good example of a powerful web feature is the recently released thumbs up/thumbs down rating system, which gives every ROBLOX player the power to rate the games they play and help form a community-generated opinion. The end result is it’s easier to determine whether a game is quality — and lives up to its own hype — before you spend time trying it for yourself.

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We’ve ratcheted up our publication frequency here at the ROBLOX blog over the course of the last year, but we’ve never formally surveyed you, our reader, about the content we create and what you think of it. We want to know what types of articles float your boat, where you read them (perhaps on a boat?), what kinds of games and tech you like, and more. To help us out, please complete this brief survey as accurately as possible. Every response helps.

Important note: submitting a thoughtful response to question #9 qualifies you to receive a small prize. After all is said and done, we’ll pick the 10 most useful responses and award those respondents 1,000 Robux.

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It’s been a little while since we revealed any details about our fast-approaching BLOXcons – so today, we’re going to reveal the projected program for our Main Stage Presentation. This is a roughly two-hour show with exclusive news and announcements, two fantastic awards shows, a “State of ROBLOXia” from CEO David Baszucki, Q&A sessions and more.

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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 video tutorial for adding an in-game store to your place, a new Top Grossing sort for the Games page, a builder who’s finding success with our in-game purchasing feature, five answers to a million-dollar question, a preview of the 2013 BLOXY Awards, our latest Feedback Loop article, Dungeon Delver and Formula 1 racing, and other bits and pieces. Enjoy.

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Seven-day blog recap

How to add a store to your place

Over the last couple weeks, we’ve been talking regularly about our in-game purchasing API and trying to make it easy for you to implement an in-game store. To that end, we put together a tutorial video that walks you through the steps of building out an in-game store using our recent ROBLOX Studio plugin. If you’re interested in turning a profit off your ROBLOX creation, this is certainly a worthwhile venture. Especially when you consider we just launched…

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