99% of the content available on ROBLOX is created by our passionate community of builders. In Feedback Loop — the spiritual successor to the long-running Responding to User Feedback series – we respond to builders’ grand ideas for ROBLOX and questions about the past, present and future.

In this, the second issue, John Shedletsky and a guest commentator discuss the quality game discovery and recommendations, additional materials for parts, cylinder physics, video tutorials, slots for additional games and places, community guidelines, user-created video advertisements and more.

Continue reading

We have a vision of a Games page that’s populated with incredible games to play and places to explore. With content like Apocalypse Rising and ROBLOXity and Battlefield and Sword Fighting Tournament re-appearing week after week, we’re partway there. However, among such great stuff, you might see games that don’t live up to their own hype. We’re working on solving that problem; one step we’re taking is experimenting with a new sort for the Games page, known as the Top Grossing sort.

This type of sort might ring a bell if you’re a mobile app fiend. The iTunes App Store, for example, shows top 10 lists for not just highly downloaded apps, but apps that are grossing a lot of money via sales and in-app purchases. While there may be exceptions, top-grossing apps are often quality apps. People don’t spend significant money on things that are “bad,” especially not over a sustained period of time. ROBLOXians, by the same token, are smart enough not to spend their time or Robux on games that fail to deliver a good experience.

Continue reading

Last Saturday, we offered our builders a plugin in order to utilize our recently released in-game transaction API. The idea was to make it easier for builders to utilize the feature, as using the plugin removes the scripting aspect. We always keep a close eye on our blog comments, and these particular comments were varied–some people seemed to understand how it worked right off the bat, while others needed some guidance. That’s why we decided to document the procedure in a video, so builders who are having trouble can watch the entire implementation process from beginning to end. Check it out below.

Continue reading

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 STEM field trip to Behind the BLOX, a showcase of incredible ROBLOX builds, a simple GUI for creating an in-game store, scaling our thumbnail database, the winners of the BLOXcon Poster Contest, a plethora of new shades, Ready, Steady, Build!, and other bits and pieces. Enjoy.

---

Seven-day Blog Recap

Local STEM group field trips to Behind the BLOX

Many educators recognize the educational value of ROBLOX. It’s a vehicle for learning to manipulate digital objects in 3D, develop a programming foundation and learn some economics basics within the context of pure fun. We recently had a group of students from a local middle school’s STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering, and Mathematics Education Coalition) program stop in our office for a weekly Behind the BLOX session, where they had the opportunity to provide feedback and play test a project that’s currently in development. You can read about their visit and get some insight as to why this STEM group uses ROBLOX as a hybrid of fun and learning.

Continue reading

Our in-game purchasing API has only been out for a few weeks and we’ve already seen builders use it to sell items in creative and effective ways. It’s not exactly beginner territory, though, so we decided to come up with a way to make in-game stores easier to implement. To that effect, we’ve created a ROBLOX Studio plugin that you can download, drop into Studio and use to build out a GUI-based store interface. This means can you can quickly and easily add a Game Pass and gear store to your place!

To create a store in your game, here are the steps:

Continue reading

In the ROBLOXian spirit of creativity and participation, we decided not to make our own posters for the fast-approaching BLOXcon, but leave it in the hands of our community. We received almost 300 (requirement-meeting) posters over the course of a 10-day submission period, and today are announcing the winners and runners up for each BLOXcon — Chicago, London and New York City. Congratulations in advance to all the winners and a big, blocky thank you to everyone who participated in the competition.

As promised, all three winners will receive three fantastic prizes: distribution of their printed poster to all BLOXcon attendees, a signed copy from the ROBLOX admins, and an exclusive virtual item (details forthcoming). And, because of the quality of the submissions, we’ll also give the virtual exclusive to the two runners up for each category.

Continue reading

ROBLOX allows users to upload images in order to create unique avatar clothing and environments. If you’ve ever uploaded a custom asset, you’ve undoubtedly come across a thumbnail image that says “Review Pending.” That’s because every single image that is uploaded to our storage cloud must be moderated for inappropriate content. Users can’t see the thumbnail of the content until it’s been inspected and approved. In this blog article, we’ll not only walk you through the approval process, but our recently changed process of creating and tracking every thumbnail you see on ROBLOX.

Let’s first step back and define exactly how thumbnail generation works. Uploading a place, model, clothing or decal automatically generates a thumbnail on our website–every one of these thumbnails has a unique ID that is associated with a unique asset ID. This association indicates that the specified asset was used to create a thumbnail of the specified content. The association between the asset and the thumbnail is called a thumbnail dependency. There can be more than one dependency record per thumbnail.

Continue reading