As we mentioned on the blog earlier in the week, Hack Week is an opportunity for ROBLOX staff to explore and prototype their pet projects, and ultimately present them Friday during a company meeting. We thought today would be a great opportunity to take a sneak peak at what our developers have hacked together this year. Remember, these are all purely hypothetical projects — we’re not making any promises here, we’re kicking around ideas in order to form a collective understanding of what projects we could potentially pursue in the future. That being said, we did some really exciting and innovative work in the last week. Check it out!

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Engineers, programmers, and scientists from many disciplines congregate here at ROBLOX HQ in a non-stop effort to better our platform. It is in this spirit of constant innovation that we celebrate Hack Week, where our engineers spend an entire week focusing on projects that live not just out of the box, but miles away from it. For the next five days, ROBLOX employees will be working tirelessly (either individually or in teams) on a wide range of pet projects and maybe-someday features. We’re provided with daily lunches, and for those who stay past the hour of 6:00 PM (see: most of us), dinners as well. On Friday afternoon, each of us will show the entire company what we’ve brewed up, and we’ll consider which of these projects are worth further investigation, and in rare cases, implementation. Hack Week is on!

To celebrate the kickoff of ROBLOX Hack Week, we thought we’d take a look back in time (our previous Hack Week was a year and a half ago) at some of the ideas that actually ended up becoming full-blown ROBLOX features. I got the chance to look through the archives of our 2012 Hack Week presentations and wanted to share with you some of the notes from Keith’s inaugural speech:

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ROBLOX is a big platform. While each of our development teams has its own areas of focus, goals and projects, there’s been an overarching objective in recent months: make ROBLOX a more mobile-friendly platform. Today, we took a step forward by launching a mobile ROBLOX website at m.roblox.com.

M.roblox.com is not yet the default landing page for mobile traffic, but it’s now available for our dedicated blog readers to try. We’re seeking your feedback regarding what works well, what could work better and what features you’d like to see in the future. You can let us know in this article’s comments or on our dedicated mobile forum; just remember to note the mobile device you’re using when feeding back.

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During this year’s Hack Week, ROBLOX developers shifted gears, working tirelessly to devise and present ideas fueled more by creativity than priority. This week, we’re featuring some of the most innovative ideas to come out of Hack Week. Our third highlighted project is an exploration of how ROBLOX’s in-game, game-browsing and social networking interfaces might look on an iPad. These early-stage mock-ups were conceived and produced by Visual Artist Tara Byars and Visual Designer Miguel Ortiz.

ROBLOX is an expansive platform. So, when it came to mocking up a new ROBLOX interface for a new device, we quickly realized we had to narrow the scope to the stuff users want to do on the go – browse games, play games, network with friends and groups, and buy and sell content.

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During this year’s Hack Week, ROBLOX developers shifted gears, working tirelessly to devise and present ideas fueled more by creativity than priority. This week, we’re featuring some of the most innovative ideas to come out of Hack Week. Our third highlighted project is an exploration of how ROBLOX’s in-game, game-browsing and social networking interfaces might look on an iPad. These early-stage mock-ups were conceived and produced by Visual Artist Tara Byars and Visual Designer Miguel Ortiz.

ROBLOX is an expansive platform. So, when it came to mocking up a new ROBLOX interface for a new device, we quickly realized we had to narrow the scope to the stuff users want to do on the go – browse games, play games, network with friends and groups, and buy and sell content.

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During our annual Hack Week, ROBLOX developers shifted gears, working tirelessly to devise and present ideas fueled more by creativity than priority. This week, we’ll be featuring some of the most innovative ideas to come out of Hack Week. Our second story is about some changes that will be implemented to ROBLOX’s robust GUIs (graphical user interfaces), by Software Engineers Deepak Chandrasekaran and Tyler Mullen.

During this year’s Hack Week, ROBLOX developers shifted gears, working tirelessly to devise and present ideas fueled more by creativity than priority. This week, we’ll be featuring some of the most innovative ideas to come out of Hack Week. Our first story is about a “Crafting” system in ROBLOX, by Software Engineer Navin Lal.

The idea of “Crafting” has been in the gaming world for a long time; DotA, Ultima, Everquest, and even Diablo have featured their own versions of the concept. It’s an undeniably interesting idea that is worth exploring in the world of ROBLOX. In order to better explain our unique take on a crafting system, let’s split the notion into two categories: materials and recipes. We’ll go over materials first.

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