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 fancy new logo, our CEO’s look back at 2012 and forward to the new year, ROBLOX Mobile in the press, Nytraulics’ development of a top-down shooter, blog stories of the year, the Elite Builders of ROBLOXia, Choices by GollyGreg and more. Welcome to 2013.

Seven-day Blog Recap

Since we skipped last week’s roundup in lieu of the holidays, this recap covers a little more than seven days. On the bright side, things were relatively quiet at ROBLOX HQ during the break, so we don’t have too much catching up to do.

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The Elite Builders of ROBLOXia have been around since the advent of ROBLOX groups in 2009. Almost four years later, they boast a member count of … 93. In a virtual world where membership volume is often the sign of a group’s power and success, the Elite Builders of ROBLOXia appear to be a failure. But they measure success using a different metric: membership quality. Only the best of the best builders make it into the group’s ranks, and members have produced some of the finest worlds on ROBLOX. That’s the principle on which the group was founded and on which it exists today.

The group has changed hands several times since its inception. The Elite Builders of ROBLOXia (EBR) was started by Bloxmin as an invitation-based building group and initially gained traction via the high profiles of members like Altair7, Jardicel and Constructor. Months later, Bloxmin passed the reigns to owen0202, who helped increase the size of the group from roughly 25 to 50+ members before handing his duties over to SilentSwords for a short stint as leader.

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We’re taking a look back at all of the major events that took place within ROBLOX this past year. 2012 was big–between the release of water, the shattered 100K concurrent user benchmark, RGC 2012 and our recent launch to mobile, we’ve kept the pace of development moving at breakneck speed. We wanted to share some interesting stats we gathered from our company blog and list of some of our biggest stories of 2012.

The Numbers:

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Hey ROBLOX,

What a year it’s been.

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User Nytraulics is on a quest to change the way shooter games both look and play using our platform, as evidenced by Underscore, a recently submitted work in progress that looks unlike anything we’ve ever seen on ROBLOX. Though Underscore is more of a tech demo than an actual game (you can move around, utilize the camera system, fire your weapon, etc.), the possibilities that this sort of advanced system could bring about are endless. The user interface is polished–it looks like something from a triple-A console game. The weapons he’s created feel unique, a combined effect of custom animations and sounds coupled with detailed weapons constructed using individual parts. He’s also intentionally writing “engine” code, meaning he will be able to use it to power additional maps and game play styles in the future. We thought we’d catch up with Nytraulics to discuss how Underscore was created and where he hopes it’ll go.

The Tech 

Nytraulics’ idea to create a game with an over-the-top perspective came from tower defense games, though his vision included another layer of complexity: he wanted the user to be able to move the camera, in real-time and on the go.

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It’s now been a couple weeks since the official launch of ROBLOX Mobile gaming. Since then, several gaming and technology media outlets have taken notice of our unique mobile experience, where your content takes center stage. We’ve rounded up a few of the great articles that have been authored since ROBLOX Mobile’s release and pulled excerpts from each below.

Forbes writer Alex Konrad had the benefit of meeting in person with ROBLOX CEO David Baszucki, who demonstrated the app just before its launch. In his article, The World’s Most Popular Kids Site Takes Its Games Mobile, he said:

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We’ve asked our Content Team and Web Team what video games they’ve been playing when they’re not immersed in the world of ROBLOX, so we decided to ask our Client Team (and one member of our QA Team) what they’ll be playing over the upcoming holiday break. We told them that no games were off limit–until Kevin started talking about a game on Commodore 64, at which point we politely asked him to stay in this generation.  Check out their picks!

Ben Tkacheff — Game Engineer

I’ve sunk 50 hours into Borderlands 2, and I’m not even close to being done with it. The levels are huge and the character dialogue is really funny. I’m also really into the overall look of Borderlands 2–it’s got its own unique design aesthetics that really sets it apart from other first person shooters. Oh, and the guns. So. Many. Guns. They become insane after a while. I keep coming back just to see what kind of bizarre ulti-weapon I’ll stumble across next–I have no idea how Gearbox was able to come up with so many ideas for weapons. Maybe they have a room full of monkeys with typewriters…

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