ROBLOX: Helping Cultivate the Next Generation of Entrepreneurs

By Andrew Haak - March 11, 2013

In late February, Code.org published a video, in which several tech-industry luminaries – from Bill Gates and Gabe Newell to Mark Zuckerberg and Jack Dorsey – extol the values of being able to write code. While the video has an underlying goal of increasing the prevalence of programming classes in schools (Code.org claims that nine out of 10 schools do not offer them), it conveys a bigger message: anyone can learn to code and anyone can position themselves to be a successful engineer. And they can start today – even if their school doesn’t have a formal computer science program.

Our Content Team Critiques Your Works in Progress

By Alan Fackler - March 9, 2013

About a week ago, we asked users to submit their best and most creative places via the ROBLOX Game Design forum. We told them that the top picks of the litter would receive critiques by our very own ROBLOX developers, and we’re here to do just that. We chose four of our favorite submissions, and shipped them off to our dev team for feedback. Here’s what they had to say:

Luke Weber, ROBLOX Content Team, on Ice Castle, an open-world environment by Gerrett99

Behind the Scenes of Behind the BLOX

By Alan Fackler - March 6, 2013

Last Friday, we kicked off the first in a series of Behind the BLOX, opening the doors of ROBLOX HQ so users could take a tour of our office, test some exciting new features, and talk with our developers about all things ROBLOX. We invited six users from our submission pool—and will be inviting more so we can hold a Behind the BLOX event each week for the foreseeable future!

Spotlight: Infinite Replayability With Obby Lobby 2.0

By Alan Fackler - February 26, 2013

Users Smellypencil and FunFish7098 have created a game that is innovative, challenging, and most importantly, a heck of a lot of fun. Obby Lobby 2.0 takes many familiar tropes about ROBLOX obstacle courses (or obbies for short) and flips them on their head. The result is a game with staggering amounts of replayability.

Though many are visually innovative, most obstacle courses on ROBLOX follow the same rules (and there’s nothing wrong with that, mind you). You build a gigantic obstacle course that players can complete at their leisure. Obby Lobby 2.0 plays by no such rules. The game splits each round into frantic races to the finish line–you’ve got four minutes per round to complete the obstacle course before your opponents do, which involves some intense on-the-spot thinking.

Use Gamehero’s MIDI Player to Play Music in Your Game

By Alan Fackler - February 21, 2013

Ever wonder what ROBLOX would be like with music? User Gamehero certainly has, and stepped outside of just “wondering” and actually created something that’s pretty innovative: a Musical Instrument Digital Interface (MIDI) player. Before we take a look at the player and show you how to use it in your games, let’s go over what exactly a MIDI file is.

MIDI is a technical standard that can carry event messages that specify notation, pitch and velocity, and send them to separate devices. MIDI files have an extremely small footprint–they’re often very small files, especially for how long the songs can actually be. MIDI versions of songs often makes them sound like “8-bit” versions of themselves–they are composed entirely of virtual instruments.

Spotlight: Agent767′s Script for Fully Destructible Worlds

By Alan Fackler - February 16, 2013

We like using our Spotlight articles to feature not just famous ROBLOXians, but those who are doing innovative things with our platform. If you pop over to Agent767′s profile, you’ll see different iterations of Crossroads, a map that has become universally known on ROBLOX. Each of the iterations feature a slightly modified fragmentation tech test, and we’re here to tell you that these tests are awesome.

Taking the Democratization of Game Development to New Heights

By Andrew Haak - February 5, 2013

If you’re an aspiring or up-and-coming game designer, you have choices: you can develop in Game Maker or Flixel, Unity or Unreal Development Kit, XNA Game Studio or Torque, among many others. These are all easily accessible tools that individuals and development studios have used to create everything from simple games to feature-rich, pro-quality experiences across mobile, consoles and desktop computers. While there are already myriad choices, suiting an increasing breadth of expertise, ROBLOX is pushing the democratization of game development further than ever by merging a powerful development tool with something no one else has: an enthusiastic player base numbering in the tens of millions.

That’s not to imply it’s easy to reach ROBLOX’s audience. But with the right amount of ingenuity and determination, it’s possible – even for a single person.