Five Impressive Video Game Conversions in ROBLOX

By Andrew Haak - October 3, 2012

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.

ROBLOX Launches Game Templates, Starting with CTF

By Sorcus - September 15, 2012

ROBLOX’s Content Team has been hard at work as of late creating Game Templates, which are freely available starter levels with the nuts and bolts of a specific genre already in place. Our first template gives you the basic elements you need to build a game of the popular multiplayer shooter variety, Capture the Flag. You can find the template — and more in the near future — from the “Templates” ROBLOX user profile.

Gusmanak Returns to ROBLOX With Apocalypse Rising

By Alan Fackler - July 25, 2012

17-year-old Gus Dubetz, or Gusmanak, started using ROBLOX in 2008, due primarily to a life-long fascination with physics. By 2010, Dubetz decided to take a short break to focus on clay and wood sculpting.

It wasn’t until two years later, shortly after the release of Day Z, a hugely popular add-on to ArmA 2, that Dubetz, with long-time friend and scripter Ethan Witt (aka ZolarKeth) asked, “what if we went back?”

The Future of Groups in ROBLOX

By Navin Lal - July 21, 2012

ROBLOX introduced groups in 2009, and, today, there are over 600,000 users in groups. While our community already uses them to organize, communicate, and battle, there are improvements we’d like to make and features we’d like to implement. At RGC 2012, Software Engineer Navin Lal premiered some of our ideas.

Groups are one of the features on ROBLOX that continue to garner interest and support from our users. Today, I’ll be outlining some of the plans we have for ROBLOX groups. We are, indeed, actively working on many of these features, while others are just ideas, so please feel free to leave any feedback in the comments section. We do not yet have any definitive release dates for the changes outlined in this article.

The Games That Paved the Way for User-Generated Gaming

By Alan Fackler - July 7, 2012

Here at ROBLOX, one of our goals is to make your world-building experience easy, flexible and fun. We’ve got teams of developers working tirelessly to ensure that creating and sharing games is a seamless experience, and that the tools you need are both user-friendly and deep.

And though ROBLOX users now create millions of games per year, we can’t take credit for inventing user-generated gaming. User-generated content has existed in the realm of video games for decades, though only a small fraction of gamers had the technical know-how to truly embrace the idea.

Emergence in ROBLOX: Hard to Define, Easy to See

By Andrew Haak - April 28, 2012

In gaming, emergence happens when players use a game’s basic systems in a way that is unexpected, unpredicted and unique. It’s built into the entire ROBLOX platform; users have the freedom to create almost any type of game, experience games, moments and physics that rarely – if ever – play out the same way twice, and even discover emergence in ROBLOX’s social space and virtual economy.

Depth of creativity

One of the beauties of ROBLOX is the creative freedom it gives users. Builders start out with a blank canvas and can build anything, from architectural displays to complex vehicle models to competitive, multi-player arenas. While the sophistication of a game or place depends on its creator’s abilities in both construction and scripting, ROBLOX offers users a free-form tool that lends itself to discovery, what-if scenarios and experimentation.

Base Wars’ Level Design, from Concept to Completion

By Andrew Haak - April 13, 2012

We’ve introduced you to ROBLOX Base Wars version 1.0 and explained how Luke Weber created its highly responsive weapons using raycasting techniques. Now, we’re rounding out the trio of Base Wars development stories with a look at the game’s level design.

Loosely inspired by a classic Counter-Strike level (de_Dust2, to be specific), Base Wars’ map is designed to give each team a fair chance to take control of any of the three capture points. That’s not to say it’s perfectly symmetrical; for instance, the blue team’s base is further from the capture points, but they have the advantage of elevation – particularly conducive to the game’s Sniper class. Each capture point is located in a small, open arena, where combat is almost guaranteed, and connected by narrow, winding paths.