Weekly ROBLOX Roundup: August 5, 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: ROBLOX’s virtual economy and how you use it to make money, hack week coverage, the end of bytecode in ROBLOX and developing scary ROBLOX games.

Hack week projects

ROBLOX on iPad - Game ScreenROBLOX recently wrapped up Hack Week, a week-long period in which our developers had a chance to explore their passions within the context of ROBLOX. It lead to a lot of great ideas, and we covered a few of them: a crafting system, rotating GUIs and iPad interfaces. While these projects are still in the “idea” phase, they certainly helped get discussions flowing for future ROBLOX features.

The end of bytecode in ROBLOX

Last week, ROBLOX shipped a release that prevents game scripts from loading bytecode.  While the removal of this function breaks the small fraction of ROBLOX games that use it, we needed to make the change for the sake of security and future updates and improvements to ROBLOX scripting. You can read the complete blog post to learn more about the bytecode function and why we decided to remove it from ROBLOX.

A primer on the ROBLOX economy

Buying. Selling. Trading. Exchanging. Robux. Tickets. Builders Club. The ROBLOX economy is a busy, complex system, open for business 24 hours a day. We took a step back and looked at the economy from a bird’s-eye view to help you see many of the interesting ways ROBLOXians manage their capital.

In light of this story, we asked our Twitter followers what method they find most effective for earning money on ROBLOX. The leading method was, not surprisingly, developing great games. Users with popular games can quickly amass a small fortune, as each visit to their game earns a single ticket. It doesn’t sound like much, but hundreds of thousands of visits starts to feel pretty significant. Many ROBLOX users also leverage supply and demand to sell limited items at a profit, and sell VIP access to their games (through VIP t-shirts) to unlock special features.

Some users also contract their skills — they sell assets, clothes, places and more — to earn Robux. Smart.

Bits

  • We hosted a caption contest on our Facebook page this week and received more than two-thousand responses. Check it out to see the winner.
  • Here’s an example of a ROBLOX game with style. Minimal, but really interesting to look at. (And play.)
  • We recently launched a new Build page on Roblox.com, which makes it easy to create new content and manage the games,  assets and models you’ve already created. We’ll have a deeper look at the Build page soon.

Can you develop a scary ROBLOX game?

Creating something scary requires atmosphere and tension — convincing players something they fear could happen at any time. It’s one of the reasons Slender has become such a phenomenon in gaming. Gamasutra posted an interesting article this week about four qualities that contribute to scary games. Can you leverage any of them to come up with something that’ll keep ROBLOX players on edge?

We’re curious about what ROBLOX games, if any, you find to be particularly scary or haunting, and what they do to achieve the effect. Let us know.

Enjoy the rest of your weekend.

142 thoughts on “Weekly ROBLOX Roundup: August 5, 2012”

  1. the deadsburg hotel was pretty darn scary the first time, you get the feeling the killer could be anywhere.
    Play with the sound on.

  2. Personnel request, but, could you at the least tell us if you are or aren’t working on fixing exploits? It would earn respect back from me, and a lot of the community. Make a tweet about, make a facebook post, make a blog post, whatever. We just want to know if you are working on patches or hats.

  3. It’d be nice if we could send some information to the site. It’s hard to explain but, take the character builder in apocalypse rising. If we could do that once, send it to the site and save the info, and if there is another game you could teleport to game with a special link to apoc. rising, then you don’t need to build your character. I’d think it’d be nice because you don’t need to chose this exact hair style or body time after time.

  4. yes please fix the party chat it doesnt load if you go on different pages you have to wait for someone to talk before you can see it again

  5. Fix the in-game friend part, When you send a friend request in a game, They are remembered as your friend wherever you are on the site.

    • FIX THE FRIENDS ON YOUR MY ROBLOX I HAVE maid GOOD FRIENDS BUT WHEN I FRIEND THEM THEY DONT SHOW UP ON MY FRIENDS IN MY ROBLOX

  6. Try SomeRandomGuysrg’s SCP game, a ROBLOX version of a famous Steam Game.
    It’s in early developement, but it is amazingly scripted and can be quite scary at times.

  8. Fix the problem with party chats, my thing takes like 5 minutes to load the chat.

  10. Why dont you work on making roblox harder to exploit so I dont go paranoid about my forts being stolen.

    • Im not sure how many times I have to tell people this. Its not as simple as “oh people are exploiting” *click* “all better”
      They have to take time to observe then patch. Rest assured people ARE working on stopping exploits, you just arent hearing about it.

  11. I think there should be a console roblox too. The scary games would be about 2-4 times as scary with a turtle beach turned all the way up. (trust me don’t play slender with it turned all the way up. just don’t)

  12. And i use bytecode alot!!!! and no i wont change it to ME it makes scripting eaiser!!!

  13. hey bring back bytecode!!!!!! my game uses it! or make something like bytecode that will have the same effect and will do what bytecode does cause ROBLOX u guys just ruined half my games!!!!!

  14. It would be great if it was on the Ipod because then more people would get the app.

  15. I love these ideas, but I think you should improve sword fighting on ROBLOX. You need to add more motion, kind of like what you did with the Katana of the Ninth Moon. Right now, all we can do is point our sword foward when we attack. The lunge attack isn’t even a lunge. You should add more intensity to sword fights too. When 2 swords collide, there can be a clash and both players get knocked back a little without taking any damage. We should also be able to choose the direction in which we swing the sword, so you will never know what your opponent will do. The swords we have now are too predictable. You need to be able to surprise an opponent. Also, there should be combos. If you land 2 successful hits in a row, then you do some sort of special attack like a spinning slash that does more damage. Sword fighting is starting to seem dull. It needs more excitement. I hope you take these ideas into consideration.

    • They also need to add attacks a little bit based on Kirby when he has the Cutter ability. Like Kirby’s dash and chop. He kneels down and slides with his cutter blade. And also the down chop, when you’re in mid are and press DOWN + B Kirby chops down and lands on top of the opponent. So in roblox, the dash attack players would jump forward and slash. And Kirby’s other attack players could jump up and like jam their sword into the opponent’s head. Like the idea?

    • No, I havn’t seen them look at that in awhile. Try Uservoice. that seems like more of the place. But, whatever one you want work’s. Havn’t seen much on either of them. Or do both, that would work.

    • The sword is running on a script. I’m fairly sure that can be edited to fit your needs. I mean, you can’t just expect the ROBLOX team to solve all of your problems for you!

    • Yeah. It’s a great game that has been featured by many youtube channels. It’s horror games version of minecraft. Not the game, but how it is publicalized. Minecraft was good because lots of people recorded videos, uploaded them, and people who watched played the game, and some did the same, and then repeat. It’s the food chain of games. Only reason ROBLOX doesn’t do it is because
      (1: The community is immature.
      (2: It’s not very mainstream (See: community).

  17. That place that you guys mention “Sword Fight of Imagination” Its pretty interesting

  20. ROBLOX, Could you make your site have a language option and a COUNTRY option? those would be totally private to the user, It’s just that I see many spanish speaking people not do their very special characters as-well as french speaking people doing a english version of their letter, See I’m not sure about ñ being random symbols and I’m for sure when I type a french word in roblox and it has this in it ç or ê it gives me not so lovely random symbols. (I have a Mac(Macs allow you to hold down a letter then you get other options) and that is how I could type those letters)

  21. There should totally be a console ROBLOX. o3o

    Also, how are we supposed to make actually scary games whenyou guys just content delete them?!

  22. I plan to make a Scary game. I have bought the Basic ROBLOX Lua Programming and I am progressing through it very fast. I have many ideas how to make it very exhilerating. But until I get to grips with Scripting then I’ll begin to make it.

  24. ROBLOX should add an no face feature.
    The normal roblox face would then be free.
    But you could remove it from your face.
    So you could look like Slender Man!!

  25. Crafting is an okay idea…. Although advanced minimaps and planets with realistic gravtiy when to walk on a differint angle would be kewl :D! Day/Night cycle would be nice, the minimap should include is as a tool only :P or a GUI to change the camera positions :P(Unknown of needed, up to you guys) And shows the player moving, as it updates every 0.0005 seconds :) It would be very usefull indeed, selling decals and models would be AWSOME! BC TBC and OBC can sell models only, people with no BC can sell Decals and T-Shirts for free for VIP and etc…. :3 BC/TBC/OBC can make faces and sell em! And add a meshisizer plugin to make ur own mesh >:3 used to making Character meshs and stuff, Meshisizer catagorys: Character mesh/regular mesh(BC/TBC/OBC only for all), Gears and heads can only be made by administraitors! And a special menu GUI type shall be added, put in a starter GUI, add a screen GUI, then add “Menu GUI”, then add any GUI’s you want, add as many Menu GUI’s too :P, menus appear with text’s and stuff, your average GUI will appear with some extra stuff >:) Such as: Tool(Has to be in lighting): name here, Price: price here, a shop GUI :D! Put tools in your lighting! :P And morph GUI’s :) put in lighting too :3 Models should be allowed to put in lighting too :P And tools TOO :D! Gear/tool creator! With allows you to anitmate and create your tool :3 gotta enter a mesh and start ANIMATING ;3! Lol so can chu make all of this happen D:? It would make roblox INSANELY POPULAR, cuz alot of us cant script :{

  26. I think the crafting system would be great for us long time members who have worthless hats :D

  30. You’ve been working on ROBLOX for iPad for about 8 months now, and you haven’t at least released the tech demo yet. Could you please release the tech demo? It would be SWEET to play it on the iPad. Keep up the good work roblox! :)

  31. the crafting system sounds great but NBCs are at a disadvantage because they have no money and no items in the first place. if you put roblox on the ipad i want it on android.

    lol im not jon trollsten im pkernub2 :P

    • Lol. I know who John Trollston is though! xD Anyways, yeah I agree with you! I think NBCers should earn what BCers get and BCers should have what TBCers get and OBCers to get more then their usual income. :l

    • I Agree. Roblox Should go Easter Egg hunt style and make it able to find materials in game.

      Like Shard of Darkheart would be hard to find, While polished steel is quite common. Plus it would be found COMPLETELY Randomly. It would make EVERYONE happy to find hidden stuff they need!

    • they have a disadvantage any way what good is it if they have it and dont have any thing

    • Not sure that would work out well when you add the following facts into play: The best phone they have only has a duo core processor, and openGL graphics. And the phone is way too small.

    • Actually the crafting system helps NBC users to get better items, specifically.. If an NBC member buys a low priced item, then scraps it, they can use the materials to create new and better things.

    • NBC users will always be at a disadvantage, they obviously need us to buy BC. I haven’t bought it myself, don’t need it.

      • Maybe they could have a system where a secret invisable brick is put into a few servers of any online games, and whoever runs into it, gets to pick from a small list of items to take. Games on the front page have more chances at this, because I’m thinking a 3% chance per game, so only 3% of the servers get it and it’s only there until someone finds it, and it’s put in a different server. It’d be a fun little prize for community to find. Maybe they could add a feature where you can bid tickets/robux on your place to raise the percentage, and get more players.

  32. Mmmmk anyways, since you’ve removed the Bytecode now Exploiters will find away around it…

    Plus-

    Are you still working on the set.Group.Rank() ?

  34. I love scary games thats why im making a scary game called “The Rake” which is also known as a Creepypasta. I cant wait to see my game on the front page! :D

  36. I agree with slender being an excellent horror indie game, but it is not made for roblox. I believe the only person with such talent at even replicating a game like slender would be crazyman32. I also think the trading option is excellent, but make it so BC players can trade with NBC players. Add me im theturok987.

    • In my favorites, there is the(a) ROBLOX edition of “Slender”, and it scared me more than the real thing, but in my defence I played it on ROBLOX before the real thing.

    • Actually someone has made Slender, and believe me, it’s really good.(and just in case I ain’t allowed to link, I’m not really used to the blog.) /Slender-place?id=4705740

    • I agree. Though there should be a Donation system. Like for example; I want to donate to my Cousin but he’s NBC. So if you had a Donation system, I could donate any amount. I hope they take this Idea into Consideration :]

  38. I like the iPad idea but what about the space it will take up during a visit? Because if a person were to play ROBLOX and have about 31 and 1/2 GB’s (For the 32 GB iPad) used up, I don’t think it could handle ROBLOX.

  39. Speaking of Slender, it appears our players have tried making Roblox versions of it. I’m making my own horror game called “The Hoard I” (yes, there will be a “The Hoard II”). It’s not done, yet, because I’m busy with group stuff, most of the time. If you can extend the challenge deadline, I can make a nicely done horror game that requires little amounts of fancy scripts, yet creates such an atmosphere you describe.

  42. ok roblox im in the uk and i have been to sainsburys and they have no roblox cards which i really want can you make them available in stores like asda?