‘Tis the holiday season, and one of our favorite ways to celebrate is with a custom-made game. Alas, our Games team has been fully occupied with other projects and getting a game done in time wasn’t in the cards. Luckily for us, our developer community is full of self-organizers–individual developers came together, brainstormed concepts, and eventually formed teams that competed to submit the best holiday-themed games by the relatively short deadline. We agreed that our Games and Marketing teams would take a look at each of these submissions, choose the most solid entry, put it up on our official ROBLOX Games page, and add brand new hats for earning badges in-game! We’re pleased to announce we’ve made our official selection: ROBLOX presents the Siege of Quebec by Team Rudimentality!

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Engineers, programmers, and scientists from many disciplines congregate here at ROBLOX HQ in a non-stop effort to better our platform. It is in this spirit of constant innovation that we celebrate Hack Week, where our engineers spend an entire week focusing on projects that live not just out of the box, but miles away from it. For the next five days, ROBLOX employees will be working tirelessly (either individually or in teams) on a wide range of pet projects and maybe-someday features. We’re provided with daily lunches, and for those who stay past the hour of 6:00 PM (see: most of us), dinners as well. On Friday afternoon, each of us will show the entire company what we’ve brewed up, and we’ll consider which of these projects are worth further investigation, and in rare cases, implementation. Hack Week is on!

To celebrate the kickoff of ROBLOX Hack Week, we thought we’d take a look back in time (our previous Hack Week was a year and a half ago) at some of the ideas that actually ended up becoming full-blown ROBLOX features. I got the chance to look through the archives of our 2012 Hack Week presentations and wanted to share with you some of the notes from Keith’s inaugural speech:

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Every week, we’re busy telling the stories behind our community, our technology and our place in the gaming and technology industries. For those of you who catch up with us over the weekend, the Weekly Roundup collects the best stuff to hit our various avenues of publication in the last week. This time: three more fan art contest winners, the 2013 ROBLOX Winter Games, game servers can now send HTTP requests, the launch of SurfaceGUIs, last-minute merchandise orders for the holidays, Unclear’s Crystal Raider, two games of the week, and other bits and pieces. Enjoy.

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Fan art contest winners, round 3

This week, we have three more fan art contest winners!

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As you may recall, part of the reason the Games Team created Space Knights was to experience firsthand the process of developing a top-quality game and illustrate the possibilities of ROBLOX game development. With that in mind, we took note when Unclear–known primarily for building environments with enough scale to stress even high-end hardware–launched Crystal Raider, a game that felt curiously similar to Space Knights. Turns out, it wasn’t just a coincidence.

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In mid-November, we released GUI rotation, which allows you to rotate a GUI for such purposes as a clock or compass, among other things. Now, we’ve taken GUI functionality one step further with the release of SurfaceGUIs, which give you the ability to place a GUI on the surface of a part. This is a small piece of functionality with big potential, as it opens up the possibility of creating interactive vehicle dashboards, virtual computers, and elevator buttons, and better 3D integration of menus and important player information.

To use SurfaceGUIs, we recommend you first create your GUI as a standard ScreenGUI object in ROBLOX Studio. Once it’s created, you add a new SurfaceGUI object to the part on which you want to project the ScreenGUI. This can be accomplished by selecting the part and double-clicking the new SurfaceGUI object (View > Basic Objects). Finally, you add the components of your ScreenGUI to the SurfaceGUI by nesting them beneath the SurfaceGUI object. The SurfaceGUI will then appear on the part.

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