Weekly ROBLOX Roundup: August 4th, 2013

By Andrew Haak - August 4, 2013

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 ton of BLOXcon media and BLOXcon New York City news, a Spotlight on 3D artist Zelios, the making of the new ROBLOX Battle, increased participation for all users, a gallery of must-see builds, in-depth raycasting feature, ClashBLOX Battle Cards, and other bits and pieces. Enjoy.

Two-week Blog Recap

As noted in the last issue of the Weekly Roundup, we’re currently on an every-other-week publishing schedule due to Sunday travel from BLOXcon. We’ll resume normal, weekly publication after the events have wrapped up and things have settled down at HQ!

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.

Weekly ROBLOX Roundup: July 21st, 2013

By Andrew Haak - July 21, 2013

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: BLOXcon Chicago photos, videos and awards, the fast-approaching BLOXcon London, aesthetics and outlines, Paid Access launch, chadthedestroyer2′s After the Flash: Darkness, City of London, UK, “Klamfest,” and other bits and pieces. Enjoy.

14-day Blog Recap

BLOXcon Chicago prevented last week’s Roundup from happening (totally worthwhile tradeoff, for the record), so this time we’re doing a recap of the hottest stories of the last two weeks. In all likelihood, Roundups will continue to be every other week until we’ve wrapped up BLOXcon New York City.

Become a More Efficient Builder with These Studio Tricks

By Alan Fackler - July 10, 2013

After mentioning the ability to select individual parts from a model in last week’s Feedback Loop, we were surprised to find how many of our builders were enthralled with, and grateful for, what we thought was a relatively minor suggestion. Alas, there are many small things you can learn that can make your building experience with Studio easier and faster. We decided to talk with Creative Director John Shedletsky and the Studio Team’s Tyler Berg to get some basic building advice. We’ll start with technical advice from John.

Is your ROBLOX level running slowly? ROBLOX Studio has tools to help you figure out why. Check out these three views in the “View” menu: “Script Performance”, “Task Scheduler” and “Diagnostics”. When your level is running (e.g., when you’re doing a Test > Solo visit), these panels are full of useful and telling stats about ROBLOX’s internal operations.

Weekly ROBLOX Roundup: July 7th, 2013

By Andrew Haak - July 7, 2013

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: the “liquid” layout for the Games page, six amazing sci-fi-themed places, a rousing round of your feedback and our responses, community booths at BLOXcon Chicago, hats and gear bundled with ROBLOX cards in July, Sword Fight and Sink a City, and other bits and pieces. Enjoy.

Seven-day Blog Recap

A new look for the Games page

One of the most popular pages on ROBLOX.com is the Games page. It’s the holy grail for game developers — by far the best means of getting exposure is getting to page one — and the natural starting point for anyone trying to find interesting ROBLOX games. Last week, we revealed a new look for the Games page, allowing us to display a much-increased volume of games and two side-by-side sorts. The end results is a more democratized Games page — more slots means more opportunity to achieve front-page placement and receive that prized exposure among millions of potential players. We’re currently rolling your feedback into our final bug fixes and improvements, and will launch this for all in the near future.

New “Liquid” Games Page Makes Blank Margins a Thing of the Past

By Alan Fackler - July 5, 2013

The ROBLOX Web Team is always looking to update and improve ROBLOX.com to further empower our builders, developers and gamers. We are on a never-ending quest to ensure that great games and content get as much visibility as possible. Positive and upfront exposure is one of the keys to being successful on ROBLOX, and it’s in that spirit that we’ve begun rolling out a new “liquid” Games page. In our tests thus far, we have received great player feedback and we’ll be incorporating that into the official release in the near future.

Liquid, in this context, means that the amount of games that populate your Games page is dependent on the amount of screen real estate you have. The wider the screen, the more games you can see. The liquid Games page is built to be entirely scalable, as well — if you decide to decrease the size of your browsers’ window, the amount of games available will shrink to fit. This is another step toward realizing our vision of a Games page loaded with fantastic content, and we’ll be sure to fill you in on further advancements in the coming weeks.