Building ROBLOX Battle, Part 3: Metrics and the Big Picture

By Sorcus - August 19, 2013

Our Games Team has been spending significant time making ROBLOX Battle as robust and feature-rich as it can be. We’ve already covered some of the more interesting updates, including the core gameplay mechanics that have been introduced recently and level design. Today, we had the chance to chat with Sorcus, the Games Team Lead, about using metrics to inform and gauge infrastructural changes made to ROBLOX Battle. Oh, and ROBLOX Battle is now open source. Read on for more.

Making the decision to completely overhaul ROBLOX Battle was challenging–as the Lead of the Games Team, I’m tasked with thinking about the big picture. Whereas Dan worked on gameplay specifically, and Luke was tasked with designing levels, my job was overseeing every single update to ROBLOX Battle. Early on during talks about revamping our flagship title, one thing became abundantly clear to me: if we’re going to do this, we want metrics.

Building ROBLOX Battle, Part 2: Level Design

By Luke Weber - August 2, 2013

If you’ve been keeping up with the blog (or if you’ve played ROBLOX Battle lately), you’ll have undoubtedly noticed major changes being made to one of our flagship titles. We’ve been updating and enhancing ROBLOX Battle to become a much deeper and more intuitive game. In our first part of the Building ROBLOX Battle series, we talked about how ROBLOX developers spent a ton of time enhancing gameplay by adding new modes, weapons, and much more. Today, we got the chance to sit down and talk with stickmasterluke about designing the new maps in ROBLOX Battle and some of the challenges of creating beautiful and balanced levels.

When we decided, for sure, that we wanted to revamp ROBLOX Battle a few months back, Sorcus made the suggestion of having a cycle of levels instead of just letting Crossroads become the staple level of ROBLOX Battle (even though it still sort of is). I was tasked with creating and building these new levels, and knew this early on that it would be no small task. Starting entirely from scratch (and some detailed notes I took from Crossroads), I started building.

Building ROBLOX Battle, Part 1: Core Gameplay Mechanics

By Dan Healy - July 22, 2013

We’ve made some drastic improvements to every facet of ROBLOX Battle, our flagship internally developed combat title, over the last several weeks. New game modes, maps, character animations, and social interactions have turned Battle into an entirely different game. These changes are substantial for numerous reasons–not only do they revamp the ROBLOX Battle gameplay experience, they serve as a benchmark for future product enhancements. We went behind the scenes with the Content Team to find out how and why ROBLOX Battle has changed, starting with the core gameplay experience. We tapped Software Engineer Dan Healy, who’s been working closely on the game, to deliver the details.

Gameplay

ROBLOX Battle has come a long way–what was once a simple combat game featuring six weapons and a single map has since evolved into a robust and layered multiplayer experience. When we initially decided to turn ROBLOX Battle into a deeper game, the Content Team got together and brainstormed game types that would be ideal for Battle. We started implementing new maps and modes, and have since renovated the entire core experience.