We just passed the halfway mark of 2012, making it high time to look back and evaluate how much content ROBLOX users have generated and played so far this year. The graphic in this blog post shows the growth in games created, assets created (all user-generated, non-place content), game plays and game-play hours logged for the first halves of the past three years.
Click the image to see it at full resolution.
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ROBLOX sells prepaid cards that players can redeem for Robux and Builders Club memberships at many merchants, including participating GameStops, Targets and Best Buys. It’s worth pointing out that prepaid cards from certain stores also come with virtual gear or a hat – refreshed every month.
To help keep you in the loop on what’s available with ROBLOX cards from specific retailers, we’re sharing the virtual gear you get for redeeming a card in July. And being that tomorrow is July 11, we’re starting with the Blue Raspberry Slurpee, an item exclusive to prepaid cards purchased from 7-Eleven and redeemed this month. It not only keeps your character cool for the peak of summer heat, but also gives you a speed boost. Slurp to your heart’s content.
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We’re less than a week away from the ROBLOX Game Conference 2012 — time flies, doesn’t it? — at the Santa Clara Convention Center, and we’re beyond excited to see you all. Whether you’ve already purchased your tickets or not, ROBLOX CEO and Founder David Baszucki has an invite for you, as well as a little insight on the big idea behind this year’s event.
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: Zombie City, the first 2012 game to 1 million plays, RGC 2012, user-generated gaming and more.
We recently noticed that a ROBLOX user, um3k, had come up with a script that would automatically build a terrain and city each time a new instance of his game started. We deemed the project cool, smart and worthy of some brain-picking. Justin, as um3k is otherwise known, was kind enough to share a bunch of information and a plugin that lets you drop randomized buildings into any ROBLOX game with a single click.
Here at ROBLOX, one of our goals is to make your world-building experience easy, flexible and fun. We’ve got teams of developers working tirelessly to ensure that creating and sharing games is a seamless experience, and that the tools you need are both user-friendly and deep.
And though ROBLOX users now create millions of games per year, we can’t take credit for inventing user-generated gaming. User-generated content has existed in the realm of video games for decades, though only a small fraction of gamers had the technical know-how to truly embrace the idea.
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Every ROBLOX user wants to get to the top of the Games page. It’s symbolic of success. A place reserved for the best. It turns games into trends.
“It feels really, really unbelievably good and exciting when a game you’ve made hits the top of the first page,” said ROBLOX user Playrobot, whose creation, Lakeside, was the first game created in 2012 to reach 1 million game plays.
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Procedural generation refers to content that is created algorithmically, as opposed to manually. It was originally implemented in video games as a workaround to the memory limitations of early hardware; for example, the 1984 computer game Elite used procedural generation to create a universe with eight galaxies, each containing 256 planets, that wouldn’t soak up valuable memory. Today, procedural generation persists, but instead serves as a method for developers to make each play session of their game dynamic. ROBLOX’s Build and Battle, for instance, uses it to create a random swath of jagged terrain for each match.
Cunning ROBLOX users have found ways to implement procedurally generated content in their games. Zombie City!, an abstract – at least, for now – game by user um3k, known outside ROBLOX as Justin Phillips, is one such case. Each time a player starts an instance of the game, it procedurally generates an expanse of terrain and a complete city — littered with zombies.
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