Every so often, we ask our users to let us know what they’d like to see in ROBLOX, then respond to some of the most insightful comments and pertinent questions. This time, John Shedletsky, ROBLOX’s Creative Director, elaborates on a variety of topics, including your ideas for one-time-use Game Passes, in-game advertising, 3D model manipulation, in-app Studio tutorials, canvas objects and more. This entry includes guest commentary from three ROBLOX engineers. You can read previous entries in this ongoing series here.

One-Time-Use Game Passes

Smakdown21: Allow Game Passes to be purchased more than once. This way, a player can buy in-game currency. For example: five Robux gets you a Game Pass worth 500 game points. If you buy five of them, you will have 2,500 game points.

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: Halloween at ROBLOX HQ, games that keep players coming back (and the techniques they use), an update on ROBLOX for iPad development, and everything you need to know about Raycasting — including how Paintball! creator daxter33 uses it.

Halloween at ROBLOX: costumes and games

While ROBLOX users dressed their characters with the Halloween-themed attire and gear released throughout October, ROBLOX developers got into the spirit, too, and we have photos to prove it. On top of that, we reported four useful tips from members of the Content Team as to how to “Halloween-ify” your ROBLOX games. Sure, Halloween has come and gone, but many of the techniques described, such as zombies and atmospheric lighting, are good all year long. Check out the blog post for the gritty details.

Continue reading

Raycasting is a method of plotting the trajectory of in-game items, like bombs, lasers, explosions, and bullets. Though it isn’t entirely necessary to make a successful  game, certain users have found ways to leverage the system to create innovative gameplay mechanics. We thought we’d explore the concept by talking to Daxter33, creator of the ever-popular Paintball! 

Here’s how raycasting works: every weapon that features projectiles has a trajectory or, more simply, a path to travel. When you shoot a gun with instantaneous speed projectiles (as opposed to guns with slower projectiles that are physically simulated objects), you create a vector, which is determined by finding the gun in 3D space, the point it’s going to hit, and subtracting the two. Basically, you find a direction for your bullet to travel. A raycast can determine that path for you, as well as identify objects that appear in the path of the traveling bullet. You’re tracing a beam of light through 3D space.

Continue reading

One of the most important parts of developing a high-quality ROBLOX experience for the iPad is ensuring smooth, stable, steady game-play performance. iPads are not as powerful as almost any modern-day desktop computer or laptop, which means our developers have to dig deep into ROBLOX’s code, uncover problem areas and tune them to run more efficiently, while keeping game-play quality in mind. The end goal is to have quality and performance exist in harmony; the challenge is pushing performance optimization to its limit without noticeably degrading the experience.

For the past month, the Client Team has been neck-deep in ROBLOX’s source code, identifying inefficiencies and re-engineering them in exchange for quantifiable and positive impacts on performance. One of the best benchmarks for illustrating their collective progress is Crossroads, a classic level the team has been using as an iPad testing ground since September. When we first launched the ROBLOX code stack on an iPad, Crossroads with eight players ran at an unplayable five frames per second (FPS). Today, it runs at a cool 30+ FPS.

Continue reading

Building a popular game on ROBLOX requires various elements to work together complete harmony. To put it simply: it’s not easy. A big part of this harmonious chemistry is getting your game to stick–meaning users want to play it again and again. We decided to take a look at the “stickiest” games on ROBLOX, and postulate theories as to how they keep getting users to come back. 

In order to determine which games on ROBLOX were the stickiest, we studied game return rates, including one day return rates and one week return rates. You can check out which games on ROBLOX have the highest return rates in the graph below.

Continue reading

Given today is one of the few days it’s widely acceptable to do — and be — something out of the ordinary, we thought we’d take a break from what we’re working on and show you what we dressed up as for Halloween. Plus, now that we’ve spent a few weeks creating and releasing Halloween-themed gear, we have some last-minute recommendations from the ROBLOX Catalog.

With Halloween right around the corner, we thought we’d chat with members of the ROBLOX Content Team to see if they could provide any insight or advice as to how to “spook” up your games for Halloween. Here’s what they came up with. 

Intermediate – Creepy Lighting with Kip Turner