With Halloween right around the corner, we thought we’d chat with members of the ROBLOX Content Team to see if they could provide any insight or advice as to how to “spook” up your games for Halloween. Here’s what they came up with. 

Intermediate – Creepy Lighting with Kip Turner

With Halloween right around the corner, we thought we’d chat with members of the ROBLOX Content Team to see if they could provide any insight or advice as to how to “spook” up your games for Halloween. Here’s what they came up with. 

Intermediate – Creepy Lighting with Kip Turner

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: see popular ROBLOX games running on an iPad, a deep dive on our fixes for character-motion stuttering, talking larger-than-life ROBLOX experiences with user Diddleshot, new game templates and more.

Popular games running on an iPad (and a wall of sticky notes)

As we continue to develop ROBLOX for iPad, one of the things we’re doing is helping ROBLOX users optimize their games for play on a tablet. We produced a short video showing a sneak peek of our development effort and some of said games actually running on an iPad. Check it out in the blog post. We’ll have more information about our development progress in the coming weeks.

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When you see ROBLOX characters moving in-game, their motion occasionally appears to “stutter.” The problem is magnified in certain scenarios; for example, two characters standing in close proximity on a moving conveyor will appear to stutter dramatically in each other’s camera. ROBLOX Client Physics and Networking Lead Kevin He recently dove deep into this problem, as it applies to characters and vehicles, and has some observable improvements to share.

First off, let’s take a look at some before-and-after video. In both clips, there are three players in a vehicle and the video is captured from the camera of a non-driver passenger. On the “new” side, it’s clear that much of the vehicle’s motion stuttering has been eliminated.

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Ever since he was a kid, user Robert Wallbank (Diddleshot in ROBLOX) has been interested in how things work on a fundamental level. He developed a fascination with physics and design work, as well as graphics. Though math wasn’t his strongest subject, it was this passion that brought him stumbling to ROBLOX in 2008, after watching videos of ROBLOX on YouTube.

Robert decided that he wanted to make games, but wanted to shy away from simplicity. He wanted to make games that were total visual and audio spectacles–games that would put people in a state of awe. For Robert, immense scale was a must.

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As stated in last week’s Engineering ROBLOX for the iPad article, a significant fraction of ROBLOX developers are currently entrenched in porting the platform to iPad. Among the myriad engineering projects involved in completing this technical feat is one that’s unique to user-generated content platforms: making sure the games users have already poured hours into developing play well on a tablet.

ROBLOX Creative Director John Shedletsky is currently working with a number of game developers to help them implement iPad-friendly design changes — like relocating graphic user interface (GUI) elements to more accessible parts of the screen and fine-tuning touch controls so they’re intuitive and don’t put mobile players at a huge disadvantage. We’ve put together a video demonstrating some of those games running on an iPad, along with an inside look at our progress toward finishing a high-quality ROBLOX app and submitting it to the App Store.

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You may remember us mentioning our new Capture the Flag template a few weeks ago. Since then, the Content Team has been hard at work creating new templates–particularly prime for competitive gameplay, with more styles of games to come in the future. ROBLOX Software Engineers Dan Healy and Kip Turner explain.

Each of the templates we’ve built is designed to serve a specific purpose, though there are numerous assets you could pull from them. There are standard death-match templates, and a few that may flip that basic mode on its head.

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