Weekly ROBLOX Roundup: April 7th, 2013

By Andrew Haak - April 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 making of the 2013 Egg Hunt, the benefits of saying “goodbye” to bevels, ROBLOX’s browser/native-client hybrid, a discussion between zombie-survival game designers, ROBLOX at Maker Faire 2013, Compound by samaxis, visitors from around the world, and other bits and pieces. Enjoy.

Seven-day Blog Recap

With the 2013 Egg Hunt in the books, read about how it was created

The ROBLOX Egg Hunt 2013 was a smash hit. The final tally of play sessions broke the 3 million mark and the peak concurrent player count was more than 19,000 (shattering the previous single-game mark of around 6,000). In celebration of the event, we published some additional egg-hunting statistics and sat down with the creators of the Egg Hunt to learn about the process of building and launching the game. If you haven’t already given it a read, it’s worth it — even if the event has wrapped up.

Weekly ROBLOX Roundup: March 31st, 2013 (GDC 2013 Edition)

By Andrew Haak - March 31, 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: ROBLOX’s presence at Game Developers Conference 2013, the ROBLOX Egg Hunt 2013, rendering changes and optimizations coming next week, a gameplay quality improvement for first-person-playing ROBLOXians, virtual BLOXcon Fedoras for event attendees, a Spotlight on the creator of the City of Rome in ROBLOX, Robloxity, and other bits and pieces. Enjoy.

Seven-day Blog Recap

Turning off bevels and upping ROBLOX’s rendering performance

Next week, we’ll be removing bevels — in basic terms these are the rounded corners of ROBLOX bricks — from ROBLOX’s rendering pipeline. This will not only increase performance, but allow us to focus more energy on implementing new rendering features, including dynamic, voxel-based shadows and lighting. To see before-and-after footage of our upcoming rendering optimizations and new graphics-quality adjustments, and learn more about why we’re making this change, please read this post and provide your feedback.

Weekly ROBLOX Roundup: March 31st, 2013 (GDC 2013 Edition)

By Andrew Haak - March 31, 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: ROBLOX’s presence at Game Developers Conference 2013, the ROBLOX Egg Hunt 2013, rendering changes and optimizations coming next week, a gameplay quality improvement for first-person-playing ROBLOXians, virtual BLOXcon Fedoras for event attendees, a Spotlight on the creator of the City of Rome in ROBLOX, Robloxity, and other bits and pieces. Enjoy.

Seven-day Blog Recap

Turning off bevels and upping ROBLOX’s rendering performance

Weekly ROBLOX Roundup: March 24th, 2013

By Andrew Haak - March 24, 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 preview of the 2013 ROBLOX Egg Hunt, our Spotlight on TacoConsumer‘s detailed building style, stress testing the ROBLOX physics engine, a new beta test for multiple-limited-item ownership, quite possibly the most detailed vehicle interior ever built in ROBLOX, and other bits and pieces. Enjoy.

Seven-day Blog Recap

The ROBLOX event of the year is almost here…

Each year, our annual Egg Hunt becomes bigger and more creative than ever before. We’ve got some really cool plans in store for the 2013 installment of this fan-favorite event, and we’ll be revealing all the details when the game launches the week of the 25th. In the meantime, read this blog article; it explains what to expect and features a first look at three of the eggs and the virtual environment where you’ll find all 20+.

Weekly ROBLOX Roundup: March 17th, 2013

By Andrew Haak - March 17, 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: cultivating the next generation of engineers and entrepreneurs on ROBLOX, our Spotlight on the latest and greatest ROBLOX fan site, a series of visually stunning ROBLOX places you’ve probably never seen before, how we’re speeding up the “join time” for games and places, our new Nerf game, Roadrunner Canyon by asimo3089 and more. Enjoy.

Seven-day Blog Recap

Learning life skills through ROBLOX

In late February, Code.org published a video, in which several tech-industry luminaries 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, it conveys a bigger message: anyone can learn to code and anyone can position themselves to be a successful engineer. In this article, we look at a few key points made in the video and how they relate to ROBLOX (including the variety of valuable life skills users can gain from our platform).

Weekly ROBLOX Roundup: March 10th, 2013

By Andrew Haak - March 10, 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 announcement of BLOXcon, a recap of the first Behind the BLOX at ROBLOX HQ, St. Patty’s gear bundled with prepaid ROBLOX cards, a new series where the ROBLOX team responds to comments on blog stories, ROBLOX’s expansion, Washington D.C. rebuilt in ROBLOX, and other bits and pieces. Enjoy.

Seven-day Blog Recap

Introducing BLOXcon

In 2011, it was the ROBLOX Rally. Last year, it was the ROBLOX Game Conference. This year, we’re taking our show on the road and bringing with us a new name: BLOXcon. BLOXcon will focus not just on games, but building – the core of ROBLOX – and we felt the old name didn’t do the new direction justice. We’ll be hosting BLOXcons in Chicago, London and New York City this summer. To learn more about the event and upcoming ticket sales, see Friday’s official announcement!

Weekly ROBLOX Roundup: March 3rd, 2013

By Andrew Haak - March 3, 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: contests, contests, contests, the venue for ROBLOX Game Conference in New York City, a Spotlight on the users who created a randomly generated obstacle course, cloud gaming vs. traditional game hosting, ensuring a quality Roblox.com through automated testing, how users are part of our development team, Pac-Man!! by PacManMan, and other bits and pieces. Enjoy.

Seven-day Blog Recap

Apparently, March is the month of contests!

We recently launched a bunch of contests on ROBLOX, all of which happen to test your art and design skills. Right now, we’re running a Fan Art contest, a Face contest and an Egg retexture contest. That ought to keep you busy, right? If you’ve got a knack for art, you have a chance to gain some serious community fame this month! To learn more about each contest and how you can enter, check out the blog post, Calling All Artists! And, of course, best of luck to all you participants.