Weekly ROBLOX Roundup: August 19, 2012

By -

Weekly ROBLOX Roundup logoEvery 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 RoWars revival, LEGO Hero Factory: Breakout, what happens when you press the “Play” button on ROBLOX and more.

Spotlight: the RoWars revival

Years ago, one of our ambitious users started creating a machinima mini-series called RoWars in ROBLOX. The project got off the ground, but not to the finish line. ROBLOX users SharpTH and BlabVoid, recognizing the potential of the plot and ROBLOX as a platform for machinima, have revived the project and started chipping away at the still-ambitious project.

We talked with the pair about the project and how they’re recruiting the talents of dozens of ROBLOX users to make it even better than its first run.

LEGO Hero Factory: Breakout released

LEGO Hero Factory: Breakout LogoROBLOX worked with LEGO® to build a new game, LEGO® Hero Factory: Breakout, which released last week. The game lets users play as Hero Factory characters Stringer and Voltix, and compete in teams to complete a scavenger hunt as quick as possible. There’s a bit of a twist: players can sabotage the opposing team by destroying their scavenger hunt items.

Lego Hero Factory BreakoutLEGO® Hero Factory: Breakout features a slick, futuristic Makuhero City, special gear for winning matches on each side and new character animations, powered by 14 motorized joints. At the time of this writing, the game has been played roughly 325,000 times, so it’s safe to say it’s been a hit among ROBLOX users.

What happens when you press the “Play” button on ROBLOX?

A lot. This excerpt from our full blog post gets at the crux of the topic:

ServersJust as there’s no computer big enough to handle all the traffic we receive, there no single computer powerful enough to run all the instances of ROBLOX games. The challenge we continually face is one of scale. As ROBLOX continues to grow, both in page views, and in-game traffic, we have to learn to scale with it, by adding more machines to handle the bandwidth. The trick, however, is utilizing systems like the Load Balancer to give the illusion that it’s communicating with one, centralized, all-powerful machine. This stream-lines the user experience both in-game, and online.

If that doesn’t tantalize your tech senses, I don’t know what will.

Trading system: one-week challenge

Trading System One Week ChallengeROBLOX Creative Director John Shedletsky put our brand-new trading system to the test in a week-long attempt to go from two $10 ROBLOX cards to Robux riches. He documented the first two days of his experiment in this blog post, and we’ll follow up with even more tips for becoming a successful trader and the results of the challenge in a later blog post. For now, check out the story to learn how you can get started with trading, and add wealth to your account quickly.

Bits

  • Stringer’s initial descent from the tower in LEGO Hero Factory: Breakout never gets old.
  • ROBLOX user Crazyman32 built a very, very large blimp in ROBLOX. He took it for some flights, too. I unfortunately missed them.

ROBLOX, elsewhere on the web

Geek.com writer Ray Walters wrote up a perspective on ROBLOX. You can check it out here. Here’s a cool excerpt that attests to our users’ development work:

By providing its users with a rich, easy to understand developing language called Lua, the people behind Roblox have created a community of future developers that are cutting their teeth on a possible future in the game development industry … Considering that some of the games listed on the site have over 10 million plays, their progress has been amazing.

Technology and business columnist Chris O’Brien also mentioned ROBLOX as part of his MercuryNews.com write-up about platforms that let people of all ages make their own video games.

88 thoughts on “Weekly ROBLOX Roundup: August 19, 2012”

  1. No,no,no.That’s not how tix work.You get 10 tix a day each day you stay logged in for ATLEAST half an hour/30 min.’s or more.

  3. make it so roblox is jsut a game taht u press game and u can search games in a game and stuff like trading and buying stuff

  4. I like this game it’s pretty good but it’s hard to find the stuff in a big city

    • you get tickets(tix by logging in to ROBLOX thats all it comes easily also you can get stuff for your player by buying things with your tix on the ROBLOX catalog.If you need R$(short for robux) trade currency on money at my roblox if you have an account.Thank you for asking.
      -Kitty

  7. New catalog is bad! I can’t even find the hat I want! Usually it comes up with a kerjillion models and almost 1 or 2 new gears! I MISS THE OLD CATALOG! :c

    • you should lets guestes talk im sdure that if maybe you lket them talk they whould be nicer

  15. I wish I had that hat when you get a Famuse group sonic, I really want to get one of my places Famuse and I would like to donate all my tix to the poor ROBLOXians :)

  18. Only way shedletsky got so rich was because he’s an admin, and almost everyone loves admin so they send him trades. Solution would be keeping his identity secret

  19. i got a idea for house interior can u make the tv chanhe colors and make more window options

  25. It so awesome! Make more games like hero factory breakout! Also,I agree with minigames. Seems awesome! Rock on roblox!

  27. I want to play the HeroFactory game so much. but my computer wont let me. I want to so badly because the prizes are so epic. Also I am really happy that Roblox and the lego team are working together because I am a huge fan of Legos and Roblox. Ithink there shold be more lego games.

  30. I really want robux :( But I wanna get them whitout having to get Membership or whatever :P

  31. How can I earn robux? im not understanding this system…. and i want a new kind of hairstyle.

  33. Who knows what we need? BC NEEDS TO BE ABLE TO MAKE FACES LIKE WE CAN MAKE SHIRTS! >.<

  34. The writeup was pretty dang cool its interesting to see other adults’ takes on roblox.

  36. ROBLOX Should make a Second site for … Say Minigames? And rewards robux. Say something like a Mining game and each jewel you mine gives say 50 points. And Say if you get a high enough points (I.E. 20,000) You get 400 R$ or so. At the max 400, though there are increments between 0 and 400. I think it’ll make ROBLOX A lot better with Minigames. And It’s not like someone can get 20K Points in 5 minutes -_- So people wont be able to Massively Increase their R$.

  37. When are the off-sale items going limited it was more than 2 months since the TS came out and you said you will make off-sale items limited.

  40. I think you guys should go through with the crafting idea, and the future of groups idea.

  41. I dont get it with all these update’s of what you have said you are gonna do. You have to say when the real update’s are coming out.

  42. These articles sound quite interesting, gotta read them. The blimp looks awesome too, crazyman32 is one talented person :D

  43. Good week. I loved the prizes and the guide to a good trader were helpful but my mom won’t let me buy a card or get robux. Still a good week.