The Making of Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles: Turtle Trouble

By Andrew Haak - October 5, 2012

The ROBLOX Content team recently put the finishing touches on its latest game, Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles: Turtle Trouble, as part of an advertising deal with Nickelodeon. At the time of this writing, users have played the game almost 300,000 times and it continues to sit atop the Games page – a testament to the collective effort the team poured into its development.

The Content team set out to create a game that felt like part of the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles now-CGI universe – a far cry from ROBLOX’s traditional, blocky look. That required pushing the engine with advanced combat, character models and animations, enemy artificial intelligence (AI), and level design. Content Team Lead Deepak Chandrasekaran (Sorcus) encouraged the developers to critique one another’s work, and bring standard ROBLOX elements to a new level in a cohesive experience.

Five Impressive Video Game Conversions in ROBLOX

By Andrew Haak - October 3, 2012

In September, a team of 40 volunteers capped off roughly eight years of development with the release of Black Mesa. The game is a near-complete recreation of the influential 1998 first-person shooter, Half-Life, in Valve’s current Source engine. The project brought new life back to an old game, and got us thinking about game conversions. We’ve compiled a list of some of the most interesting game conversions that we’ve found in ROBLOX.

What compels someone to recreate a game that already exists? It could be their sheer love for the original product, and the desire to work with the property on a deeper level. The original product might have faced problems or limitations that would be solved or expanded using modern technology. Perhaps it’s a reasonable entrance into developing a full game – the concept exists, so developers can re-execute (and even improve) on it.

Shadows on ROBLOX: Past, Present, and Future

By Simon Kozlov - October 3, 2012

We got the chance to sit down and chat with Simon Kozlov, Client Engine Lead for ROBLOX, about the implementation of shadows, how they came to be, and where he hopes they go in the future. What do you have for us, Simon?

People take shadows for granted. The placement of shadows on 3D models is integral for your brain and eyes to understand how large something is, how heavy it is, and how close or far away it is from you, just to name a few things. So creating realistic shadows in ROBLOX is very important to us.

Moderation on ROBLOX: How it Works

By Becky Lee Herndon - October 2, 2012

We’ve got a full staff of moderators who work every hour of every day to make sure that the content that hits ROBLOX is safe for all ages. Though we have users of varying age groups, we make an effort to keep our younger audiences from seeing offensive words or pictures. Keeping moderators on ROBLOX 24 hours a day for seven days a week is a heck of a challenge, as the majority of our moderators have ever-changing schedules. But each of them enforces a strict code of rules that we’ve developed over time. Here, Community Manager Becky Herndon walks you through how we moderate content on ROBLOX.

We’ve noticed that our users have become increasingly curious as to how exactly we moderate content on ROBLOX. It’s actually a pretty straightforward process. We receive millions of things to look over a day, but the process differs depending on what we’re moderating.

Play Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles: Turtle Trouble Today

By Christina McGrath - October 1, 2012

ROBLOX has been hard at work to bring you Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles: Turtle Trouble, in conjunction with the release of the new CGI television show airing Saturday mornings at 11a/10c, only on Nickelodeon.

Weekly ROBLOX Roundup: September 30, 2012

By Andrew Haak - September 30, 2012

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 Game Pass update, enhanced water physics and boat control, our responses to your feedback, more wealthy ROBLOX users and more.

Game Passes proving to be successful for game developers

We pulled some Game Pass data with the first week and a half of the feature’s life in the books, and found that some game developers had already made large profits. The top-earning Game Pass, at the time of the blog post’s publication, had generated over 200,000 Robux. You can see the top three passes, what they offer and even how their strategies compare to bigger video game-industry trends here.

Groups: The Armies, Organizations, Think-tanks and Clubs of ROBLOX

By Andrew Haak - September 29, 2012

Look at ROBLOX from a distance and you’ll notice a couple things: a lot of games and a large, bustling community. Look a little closer, and you’ll find depth: a complex building/game-development kit, a rich virtual economy and a social network that connects users around the world. Part of that social network is a system of groups, which allow ROBLOX users to join up, organize, communicate, form alliances and rivalries, compete, and execute grand building projects.

On ROBLOX, groups are another way we empower users. All Builders Club members have the ability to create a group that anyone can join – a sub-community that can function like anything from a fan club to a MMO guild to a game studio – for 100 Robux, and recruit members with various levels of access. Call it user-generated community: the other user-generated content.