For those living in the northern hemisphere, June 21st is the summer solstice and longest day of the year. If you happen to be waaaay up in the northern hemisphere’s Arctic Circle, this day is so long that the sun lights the sky for a full 24 hours. To celebrate this awesome phenomenon, we’re hosting an all-night (or day, depending on where you live in the world) sale of summer and midnight-themed gear, hats, and more!
You can expect to see sale items roll out one by one, starting at 9 p.m. Pacific Time, and all throughout the night. We recommend you follow @ROBLOX on Twitter for tips as to when a new item is about to release, and keep a close eye on the catalog.
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Dungeon Delver Creators Bring New Life to an Old Formula
Dungeon Delver is somewhat of an anomaly within the context of ROBLOX. While it’s a re-imagining of the brand of RPG made popular by Diablo, Everquest and the like, it features things we don’t often see: a fixed camera system, a click-to-walk interface, and different classes with different abilities that can be upgraded and enhanced. I got the chance to talk to the developers of the title, Gl0in and Gl0in2 to get the inside scoop on creating a game of such magnitude.
Dungeon Delver is still in its Alpha testing stage, but it’s stable and open to the public. Already, this unfinished title has amassed over 100,000 visits, thanks in part to its striking visual aesthetic. It first manifests itself in the character creation system, which uses a nifty graphic user interface to customize your look and abilities. Once you look the way you like, you find yourself in a lifelike tavern surrounded by wizards with long staffs and warriors with steel swords. Here, you can mingle with other players, purchase items and generally find reprieve from the dungeons you’re otherwise exploring.
Continue reading Thumbs Up to Game Ratings
Just last week, we described our vision for a Games page that’s loaded with fantastic games to play and worlds to explore. One piece of that puzzle is improving and adding alternative methods of sorting games, an effort we recently bolstered by launching the Top Grossing sort (soon to be “Top Earning”). Another piece of the puzzle is a rating system that lets you and everyone else vote content up and down, thereby providing a community-generated metric for games that are amazingly good, offensively bad and everything in between (i.e., “decidedly meh”).
This feature is now live on ROBLOX.com and comes packaged as part of a cosmetic overhaul for each game’s individual page. As you’ve probably noticed, we’ve re-organized the standard elements – description, play buttons, etc. – updated the icons, and made the game thumbnails slightly larger. The most significant change, though, is the addition of a “thumbs up” and “thumbs down” rating option, and an overall measure of public sentiment toward a game.
Continue reading A Look at the BLOXcon Main Stage Presentation
It’s been a little while since we revealed any details about our fast-approaching BLOXcons – so today, we’re going to reveal the projected program for our Main Stage Presentation. This is a roughly two-hour show with exclusive news and announcements, two fantastic awards shows, a “State of ROBLOXia” from CEO David Baszucki, Q&A sessions and more.
Continue reading Weekly ROBLOX Roundup: June 16th, 2013
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 video tutorial for adding an in-game store to your place, a new Top Grossing sort for the Games page, a builder who’s finding success with our in-game purchasing feature, five answers to a million-dollar question, a preview of the 2013 BLOXY Awards, our latest Feedback Loop article, Dungeon Delver and Formula 1 racing, and other bits and pieces. Enjoy.
Seven-day blog recap
How to add a store to your place
Over the last couple weeks, we’ve been talking regularly about our in-game purchasing API and trying to make it easy for you to implement an in-game store. To that end, we put together a tutorial video that walks you through the steps of building out an in-game store using our recent ROBLOX Studio plugin. If you’re interested in turning a profit off your ROBLOX creation, this is certainly a worthwhile venture. Especially when you consider we just launched…
Continue reading Preview the 2013 BLOXY Awards
With the excitement of the submission and voting periods now in the books, we have selected — with public opinion as a significant factor — the nominees for each category of the ROBLOX International Film Festival. As promised, we will be announcing the actual winners for each category at the upcoming BLOXcon Chicago, London and New York City. Winners will have their films screened in front of a live BLOXcon audience and highlighted on the ROBLOX YouTube channel, and receive a coveted BLOXY Award!
We don’t want to kill the suspense and anticipation of the actual announcements, so we’re not going to show the nominees for every category. However, we do have a bundle of potential winners for the popular machinima/short film and trailer categories to share. All nominees are listed in a random order. Grab a snack and settle in for some great works of ROBLOX cinema!
Continue reading Spotlight: FighterAce and the Kestrel Home Store
Every so often, we like to focus our attention on builders who are creating new and innovative things with our platform. This Spotlight is the first of its kind, as it focuses on a builder who has founded his own virtual clothing company, Kestrel. He has not only created a virtual store where you can browse his group’s clothing, but leveraged our in-game purchasing API to sell them on the spot. We talked with Kestrel founder FighterAce about his many accomplishments and his plans for the future of his emerging brand.
Only a few months ago, FighterAce noticed an increasing flow of requests from other users. They weren’t requests to party or join other games, nor were they requests to trade items. They were requests for clothing. Word had started to spread that if you were a builder who wanted a store full of clothing, FighterAce was the guy to do it. Before founding his very own brand, his work could be seen in several popular places—the super realistic ROBLOX recreations of Rome, Paris and Italy all feature clothing stores created by him. He became the go-to builder for in-game stores—though without the in-game purchasing API, they didn’t actually do anything.
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