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: Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles: Turtle Trouble, impressive game conversions and re-imaginations on ROBLOX, how ROBLOX renders shadows, our moderation program and more.

‘Twas the week of the Turtle

On Monday, we announced our Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles: Turtle Trouble game. On Saturday, we went in-depth on the making of said game. Indeed, it was the week of the Turtle (and ninja-rat). While you may have already played Turtle Trouble, we recommend you read our making-of article, then revisit the game. We think you’ll see it through a different lens, having consumed our breakdown of why things are the way they are and how they got there.

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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: a Game Pass update, enhanced water physics and boat control, our responses to your feedback, more wealthy ROBLOX users and more.

Game Passes proving to be successful for game developers

We pulled some Game Pass data with the first week and a half of the feature’s life in the books, and found that some game developers had already made large profits. The top-earning Game Pass, at the time of the blog post’s publication, had generated over 200,000 Robux. You can see the top three passes, what they offer and even how their strategies compare to bigger video game-industry trends here.

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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: selling premium access to your game using Game Passes, ROBLOX named one of TIME’s 50 best websites of 2012, the richest ROBLOX users, running a successful Personal Build Server and more.

Follow in the footsteps of MMO giants with Game Passes

The MMO industry is shifting from a traditional subscription model, where you pay upfront to have access to a game, to a “freemium” model, where the basic features of a game are free to play and you pay to access premium content. While ROBLOX users had already found a way to replicate this trend using “VIP T-shirts,” we introduced Game Passes to make it easier to set up and sell special access in your ROBLOX games. You can check out our blog post for an introduction to setting up a Game Pass, and this ROBLOX Wiki entry for help with giving your Game Pass an in-game effect.

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ROBLOX is proud to have been named one of TIME Magazine’s 50 Best Websites of 2012. The annual list recognizes websites in a variety of categories, including web tools, games, education, news and information, shopping, productivity, social and more.

The 50 best websites are those that TIME editors “find to be useful, entertaining, innovative or just plain addictive — and, in some cases, all of the above,” according to the article. We think we’re all of the above.

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ROBLOX game developers have the ability to create VIP shirts, which give players special perks and abilities in games. These added abilities can be anything, from super strength or speed, to a special item—the benefits are up to the game creator.

Originally an ingenious ROBLOX user idea, we’re simplifying the VIP t-shirt process with a new feature: Game Passes. A Game Pass essentially does the same thing a VIP shirt does–if you purchase a Game Pass for any particular game, you’ll have access to perks and abilities that others don’t.

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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: talking mechs, motors and invention with user TakeoverTom, we respond your ideas for things like a leveling-up/reputation system and investing in ROBLOX games, the user-generated content landscape, advanced FPS creation and more.

Mechs, motors and invention with TakeoverTom

TakeoverTom has created some of the most complex models you’ll see on ROBLOX. We had the chance to talk to him in person about his creations, all of which operate on real-world physical principles and revolve around suspension and steering. From mechs to motorcycles, TakeoverTom is taking advantage of some of ROBLOX’s deepest intricacies, and I think you’ll find his point of view fascinating. You can read the full story here. Recommended reading.

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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: our encounter with a 1-in-4-billion .NET bug, the very different ways several ROBLOX employees broke into the gaming industry, great video trailer submissions, a deep look at ROBLOX’s user-advertising infrastructure and more.

An unlikely occurrence

In July, one ROBLOX user unknowingly caused a bug, with roughly one-in-four-billion chances of occurring, that broke every Roblox.com page on which his character thumbnail appeared. All this, because he put a t-shirt on his character. If you want to know how a t-shirt cascaded into a site-wide bug (or if you have a penchant for numbers, odds, gambling and the like), you should read our blog post – it’s a fascinating view of our basic data structure and the volume of information we store.

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