If you’re a game developer, the one thing you probably want more than anything else is a devoted following of players who can’t get enough of your game – we’ll call them “core players.” These are the players who will sustain the success of your game by ensuring there’s always a lively server, thereby catching the eyes of both existing and prospective players. They’re also the people who are most likely to support you by buying into advanced features (e.g., Game Passes) and spreading the word.

In this article, we’ll look at several ROBLOX games, dig into fluctuations in player engagement, and try to draw some conclusions about what works among players. We’ll use a bunch of charts, which show trends in how many gamers have played a title once, twice, five, 10 and 20 times in the previous month (30 days). What’s important is the ratio of people who play multiple times to people who play once (and move on to other games). The better the ratio, the more “sticky” a game is. It keeps players coming back, and stays near the top of the Games page.

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You’ve probably noticed over the last month that we’re making significant moves to give you new paths to success and encourage creation and discovery of quality games. While we’ve already launched thumbs up/thumbs down game ratings and the Top Earning sort, we’ve got even more to come – including a new feature for profiting off great games: paid access.

Paid access gives ROBLOX game creators the ability to require that players pay to access their games. Think of it like selling a permanent subscription to a MMO — players pay once and receive unlimited access to the content. The benefits are myriad: you have an opportunity to generate more Robux, paid-access games will have their own category on the Games page (meaning another opportunity to rise to the top), and the feature further encourages high-quality content (players won’t pay for access to a bad game). It will also tie into our Top Earning sort, thereby diversifying the techniques you can use to get noticed in that list. The decision to take advantage of paid access is entirely up to the game creator.

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Hey guys, I’m TheGamer101. You might recognize me as the creator of several popular ROBLOX games, including Sword Fighting Tournament, Ultimate Assassin’s Creed, and King of the Hill (the latter of which is the subject of this article). I’m here to share my personal development process for a complex map generation script that automatically builds a new map with every round of King of the Hill. Creating this was a real learning experience, and hopefully you’ll be able to pick up a few ideas I present and use them in your own unique development strategies.

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You’ve probably noticed by now that the lights are on in ROBLOX Mobile. As with many significant rendering updates, getting dynamic lighting to illuminate iPhone and iPad screens was a tricky endeavor that brought our engineers face to face with some very specific technical hurdles. We got the chance to sit down with Graphics and Rendering Specialist Arseny Kapoulkine to get the scoop on porting dynamic lighting to mobile devices.

Shaders

To understand how we pulled this off, let’s start simple. Computers that can support dynamic lighting (about 97% of the computers running ROBLOX) are able to do so by utilizing shaders built into their graphics card. So our first question was, “will we be able to utilize the graphics technology bundled into iPhones and iPads to utilize shaders?” Lucky for us, iPads and iPhones 4 and higher have shader support baked in.

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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: ROBLOXians get thumbs (sort of), the making of Dungeon Delver, a city-building Crossfire, our readership survey, new BLOXcon details, a Mid-Summer Night’s Sale, Inverted Dreams and Designs, Checkpoint Racing 4.0, and other bits and pieces. Enjoy.

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Seven-day Blog Recap

Thumbs up/thumbs down: making waves

While features like dynamic lighting have an obvious sweeping impact on ROBLOX building and gameplay, even seemingly subtle web features have the potential to drastically improve your experience. A good example of a powerful web feature is the recently released thumbs up/thumbs down rating system, which gives every ROBLOX player the power to rate the games they play and help form a community-generated opinion. The end result is it’s easier to determine whether a game is quality — and lives up to its own hype — before you spend time trying it for yourself.

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We’ve ratcheted up our publication frequency here at the ROBLOX blog over the course of the last year, but we’ve never formally surveyed you, our reader, about the content we create and what you think of it. We want to know what types of articles float your boat, where you read them (perhaps on a boat?), what kinds of games and tech you like, and more. To help us out, please complete this brief survey as accurately as possible. Every response helps.

Important note: submitting a thoughtful response to question #9 qualifies you to receive a small prize. After all is said and done, we’ll pick the 10 most useful responses and award those respondents 1,000 Robux.

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