Character Explorations

By Taylor Whitmer - March 22, 2012

We have been exploring new body, head and face components for ROBLOX characters. All of the mockups in this post are conceptual. We invite your feedback on everything here. When giving feedback, please refer to the sketch and image ID, as in “I like Male Bodies-A, #2”.

We have been experiment with a range of looks – spanning from a blocky mini-fig to a more human shape. We have been playing a bit to see if we can capture the look and feel of iconic characters that you may recognize from movies and TV.

Getting That First Job

By David Baszucki - March 20, 2012

We finished a busy week at the Game Developer Conference, where we met many high caliber people looking for jobs. This made me reflect on how I found my first two jobs – which were both terrible – and how I would advise others to go about finding their first few jobs after coming out of school. Some people start companies immediately after graduating (or even before), which is also a viable option.

How ROBLOX is Improving its Network Physics

By Andrew Haak - March 19, 2012

If you drive a real-life car into a brick wall, the car doesn’t simply bounce back. With enough speed, it causes the brick wall to come crashing down in a destructive display of physics. (Just trust us on this.)

To make sure these kinds of things happen in ROBLOX, as in the real world, ROBLOX Senior Game Engine Developer Kevin He has made some improvements to ROBLOX’s distributed physics engine. Today, he’ll show us the improvements with a number of video demos.

ROBLOX: Built for Cross-Platform Play

By John Shedletsky - March 16, 2012

Last weekend, a friend and I set aside a day to delve into the trenches of Civilization V’s multiplayer mode. She purchased her Mac copy via Steam, slogged through the two-gigabyte download and fired it up – only to find out it isn’t compatible with Mac OSX 10.5. Making matters worse, our plans were destined to fail, as Aspyr’s Mac port doesn’t allow Mac and PC players to join the same online game.

Advertisements and Age Segmentation

By David Baszucki - March 14, 2012

We have started to track the click-through rate of user advertisements on ROBLOX. These are the ads on ROBLOX that are created by our ROBLOX entrepreneurs (not the commercial ads from companies like Cartoon Network or Nintendo). As you can see from the chart below, younger users are more likely to click ads on ROBLOX.

The Best and Worst of GDC

By David Baszucki - March 10, 2012

After a big week at the 2012 Game Developer’s Conference in San Francisco, I thought I would share some of the collective wisdom of team ROBLOX. Here are our picks for thumbs-up and thumbs-down from the show.

Thumbs Up

Speedtree

Ultra-fast tree modeler for AAA games. It’s awesome to see someone in person, pulling branches out of a trunk, like magic. Gives us ideas for advanced stamper parts in ROBLOX. Such as a tree that you insert with 3 clicks: 1) Click where you want the tree to go, 2) Click how tall you want it, 3) Click how wide you want it.

Simplifying ROBLOX

By Taylor Whitmer - March 6, 2012

Two years ago, ROBLOX started the Ambassador Program, which was designed to encourage players to spread the word about ROBLOX. In the program, users would take HTML code (specific to that player), and then post those links on other active websites. Users were rewarded with 2 tix per day per active link. We believed we could get users involved with promoting our game.