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: the making of the 2013 Egg Hunt, the benefits of saying “goodbye” to bevels, ROBLOX’s browser/native-client hybrid, a discussion between zombie-survival game designers, ROBLOX at Maker Faire 2013, Compound by samaxis, visitors from around the world, and other bits and pieces. Enjoy.

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Seven-day Blog Recap

With the 2013 Egg Hunt in the books, read about how it was created

The ROBLOX Egg Hunt 2013 was a smash hit. The final tally of play sessions broke the 3 million mark and the peak concurrent player count was more than 19,000 (shattering the previous single-game mark of around 6,000). In celebration of the event, we published some additional egg-hunting statistics and sat down with the creators of the Egg Hunt to learn about the process of building and launching the game. If you haven’t already given it a read, it’s worth it — even if the event has wrapped up.

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Creativity and sharing are two qualities that fuel ROBLOX, and it’s in that spirit that we introduce Crossfire, a new series where we chat with ROBLOX game developers about their design choices and other ROBLOX topics. For our very first segment, we talked with developers Gusmanak and DeadzoneZackZak, both of whom have created go-to games for ROBLOX zombie survivalists–Apocalypse Rising and Deadzone. Combined, the two uber-popular titles have been played nearly 10 million times. The games have stood the test of time because they are constantly being enhanced and upgraded by their creators.

ROBLOX: Apocalypse Rising seems to be the more open game. You can wander around for quite some time without seeing anybody. In Deadzone it’s much easier to find people. Was this a conscious decision on your end?

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One of the best things about being headquartered in San Mateo, California, is we’re a hop, skip and a jump from the grounds of an incredible, annual West Coast event: Maker Faire Bay Area. For the second year in a row, ROBLOX will be showcasing the digital side of “maker” culture at the event. It takes place on May 18th and 19th at the San Mateo County Events Center.

This year, our space will be four times the size of our presence in 2012, giving you more room to talk with ROBLOX staff, meet other ROBLOXians, playtest new product development, and enjoy playing and building. We’re also inviting ROBLOX builders to our booth to showcase and discuss creations that illustrate the limitless possibilities of ROBLOX. If you have built something great (a scripted or mechanical model, a beautiful world or an adventurous game), would be comfortable presenting and discussing it in front of other Maker Faire attendees, and are attending Maker Faire, please fill out this form to let us know by April 21st, 2013 at 11:59 p.m. PT. We’ll choose a selection of submissions and work with you to become your own exhibitor at the event!

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Last week, we notified you of some rendering changes we would be implementing in order to enhance performance while simultaneously setting the stage for our future look, which will include dynamic lighting and an updated, unified aesthetic. Today, the initial round of changes has begun. We’ve turned off bevels–they hurt performance and don’t fit our vision for the future look of ROBLOX–and shipped new rendering code that improves performance, particularly in the context of rendering static environments on slow and/or dated hardware.

Turning off bevels not only boosts performance, but also will enable us to ship dynamic lighting sooner. We’re already playing ROBLOX Battle with it turned on!

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The advent of broadband internet has revolutionized the way video games are distributed. 10 years ago, the idea of downloading, streaming or playing in a web browser what was traditionally boxed and sold on store shelves was almost unbelievable. Today, it powers video game distribution. Steam does big business distributing games, OnLive and Gaikai have demonstrated that streaming even high-production experiences can be done without sacrificing gameplay quality, and there’s a plethora of free browser and social games you can start playing within seconds in every corner of the web.

Technology has enabled game developers of all shapes and sizes to get their creations to an exponentially larger audience than they could in the past. The question for PC game developers, then, is what’s the best medium: a web-based player or a downloadable client? The industry is still figuring out the answer to this question – right now, the decision hinges on the game’s goals and target audience – but we expect to see some convergence sooner rather than later.

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The ROBLOX 2013 Egg Hunt has become the most popular event we’ve ever thrown on our platform. We thought we’d take some time to share some of the staggering numbers the game has accumulated in the last week (nearly 2.5 million players and 20,000 concurrent players!)–both in terms of users playing, and the amount of eggs collected. We also got the chance to sit and talk with three of the key architects behind the Egg Hunt, who shared some of the challenges of undertaking such a massive endeavor.

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