Our builders are passionate about creating top quality ROBLOX experiences, and many have asked us via Facebook, Twitter and ROBLOX games what it takes to secure a job here at ROBLOX HQ. The good news? This article will seek to answer that question. The interesting news? There’s way more than one answer. You see, ROBLOX is a unique combination of people from all walks of life, with different amounts of training in different fields. We share the same collective vision, though each of us do different things to achieve it. I thought it would be best to talk to a wide range of ROBLOX employees so that no matter which field you’re looking to pursue, you’ll have an example to follow.
Web Engineer Cullen Reilly (MacLir)
Influence: I grew up on USAF Missile Bases around a lot of engineers, so I was predisposed to engineering as a profession at a young age. I was exposed to and fascinated by computers, and pushing the capabilities of machines. In high school I started messing with coding–initially working to create more complex Warcraft III maps and behaviors. That’s where my interest in all this started.
Feedback Loop: Game Discovery, Materials, Video Ads and More
99% of the content available on ROBLOX is created by our passionate community of builders. In Feedback Loop — the spiritual successor to the long-running Responding to User Feedback series – we respond to builders’ grand ideas for ROBLOX and questions about the past, present and future.
In this, the second issue, John Shedletsky and a guest commentator discuss the quality game discovery and recommendations, additional materials for parts, cylinder physics, video tutorials, slots for additional games and places, community guidelines, user-created video advertisements and more.
Continue reading Surfacing Quality Games with the Top Grossing Sort
We have a vision of a Games page that’s populated with incredible games to play and places to explore. With content like Apocalypse Rising and ROBLOXity and Battlefield and Sword Fighting Tournament re-appearing week after week, we’re partway there. However, among such great stuff, you might see games that don’t live up to their own hype. We’re working on solving that problem; one step we’re taking is experimenting with a new sort for the Games page, known as the Top Grossing sort.
This type of sort might ring a bell if you’re a mobile app fiend. The iTunes App Store, for example, shows top 10 lists for not just highly downloaded apps, but apps that are grossing a lot of money via sales and in-app purchases. While there may be exceptions, top-grossing apps are often quality apps. People don’t spend significant money on things that are “bad,” especially not over a sustained period of time. ROBLOXians, by the same token, are smart enough not to spend their time or Robux on games that fail to deliver a good experience.
Continue reading Video How-To: Implementing a Store in Your Place
Last Saturday, we offered our builders a plugin in order to utilize our recently released in-game transaction API. The idea was to make it easier for builders to utilize the feature, as using the plugin removes the scripting aspect. We always keep a close eye on our blog comments, and these particular comments were varied–some people seemed to understand how it worked right off the bat, while others needed some guidance. That’s why we decided to document the procedure in a video, so builders who are having trouble can watch the entire implementation process from beginning to end. Check it out below.
Continue reading Weekly ROBLOX Roundup: June 9th, 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 STEM field trip to Behind the BLOX, a showcase of incredible ROBLOX builds, a simple GUI for creating an in-game store, scaling our thumbnail database, the winners of the BLOXcon Poster Contest, a plethora of new shades, Ready, Steady, Build!, and other bits and pieces. Enjoy.
Seven-day Blog Recap
Local STEM group field trips to Behind the BLOX
Many educators recognize the educational value of ROBLOX. It’s a vehicle for learning to manipulate digital objects in 3D, develop a programming foundation and learn some economics basics within the context of pure fun. We recently had a group of students from a local middle school’s STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering, and Mathematics Education Coalition) program stop in our office for a weekly Behind the BLOX session, where they had the opportunity to provide feedback and play test a project that’s currently in development. You can read about their visit and get some insight as to why this STEM group uses ROBLOX as a hybrid of fun and learning.
Continue reading This Plugin Makes Creating In-Game Stores Simple
Our in-game purchasing API has only been out for a few weeks and we’ve already seen builders use it to sell items in creative and effective ways. It’s not exactly beginner territory, though, so we decided to come up with a way to make in-game stores easier to implement. To that effect, we’ve created a ROBLOX Studio plugin that you can download, drop into Studio and use to build out a GUI-based store interface. This means can you can quickly and easily add a Game Pass and gear store to your place!
To create a store in your game, here are the steps:
Continue reading Presenting the Winners of the BLOXcon Poster Contest
In the ROBLOXian spirit of creativity and participation, we decided not to make our own posters for the fast-approaching BLOXcon, but leave it in the hands of our community. We received almost 300 (requirement-meeting) posters over the course of a 10-day submission period, and today are announcing the winners and runners up for each BLOXcon — Chicago, London and New York City. Congratulations in advance to all the winners and a big, blocky thank you to everyone who participated in the competition.
As promised, all three winners will receive three fantastic prizes: distribution of their printed poster to all BLOXcon attendees, a signed copy from the ROBLOX admins, and an exclusive virtual item (details forthcoming). And, because of the quality of the submissions, we’ll also give the virtual exclusive to the two runners up for each category.
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