Weekly ROBLOX Roundup: August 5, 2012

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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”

  3. Roblox has to go on the Ipad.
    You must make it able to go
    on the Ipad, I’ve waited for
    so long for this to finally be
    possible

  4. Hack Week Was Nice :) But Will ROBLOX Be Availible For The Other IOS Devices?

  5. I remember making one. I wasn’t scary, so I’ll read the article and find out what I can make :D

  6. To create a real scary game, you would have to allow some stuff. Like to insert music from the movie “Friday the 13th(Jason)” or “Halloween(Michael Myhers)”. The music from those would REALLY creep some players out. Second of all, you would have to allow some clips to be inserted. Not little animated failed clips, real, interesting, ones. Like possible (not saying this is the best choice) but a clip from the movie The Haunting (PG). Plus if it is a top scary place, it should be 13 or older players only.

  7. i believe this isent a great idea at all, the reason why is because many people dont come to all placs on roblox also how can they get robux if robloxians dont have membership

  9. Wow… Slenderman? I tried to get kids to not have nightmares by a video called Splendorman
    Splendorman is a happy version but someone reported me no reason why!

  13. Games on Roblox can be scary by using scripted sequences, and by using background noises.

    Dark Graphics help as well

  17. I like the ROBLOX economy idea about building popular games to earn money, but that’s kinda hard to do now that we can’t use regular bricks. I want the old tools back, I don’t like these new ones, and I’m forced to use them. I also want to the free models system back, that was the ONLY way to build actual fun games, without it, it’s really hard to get people on my place, eve if I advertize (which I have no idea how to do)my place, so PLEASE bring back old roblox features PLEASE!!!!!!!

    • Yes we can. Use studio. Learn how to use it. I use it to build easily. Just look at my workshop(See: Syfyguy64)

  19. “the removal of this function breaks the small fraction of ROBLOX games that use it” Yea, sure. You have never tried to play a great/amazing game after one of your supposed “good updates”.

  21. You didn’t say that you seperated the client and studio so DLL exploits were almost completely wiped out. Good job though. I like the rotating GUIs.

  22. Would be interesting to see a good horror game on ROBLOX, hope someone jumps onto it soon.

  23. Would be interesting to see a good horror game on ROBLOX, hopefully someone will get on it.

  24. I’m sure if Gusmanak saw the scary game thing, we would already start building. You know how good he is

  26. I’ve never been truly frightened by a roblox game, but Roblox freaked me out most when it did something I didn’t expect it to do. In this one horror game about a haunted hospital, I walked down a dark corridor, and the words, “Look behind you,” appeared on the wall. I looked behind me, and realized there was a masked figure walking down the hallway behind me the whole time! This kind of experience is what I believe to be the best kind of experience to scare the average robloxian.

  27. In the build section its great how you can view all your stuff in a list. But on the lists there should be checkboxes for Models so you can delete multipe at a time. We all have to flip though endless pages of our models to delete. Click, delete, come back, go through more pages,etc.
    Thats the stupid process we go through.

  30. Very good, but I think you should add byte code back as many games will now break, they could be old games too

  32. I have a top three I would like to submit now instead of before when I was supposed to, because I had to think.

    1. A paint bucket(changes color of brick on click to the chosen color)

    2. Brick material brush(changes brick material on click to the chosen material)

    3.wheather(wind, rain, lightning, thunder, hail, etc.)

  35. Zombie verruck is even not close to “scary” its more like Boring.
    Better try playing ROBLOX game called “slender”

  39. Yah i’m gonna do something with slenderman, but i have to make sure i don’t pee my in my pants while making it becouse im scared really easily x3 oh well slender is awesome he scares and yah scares the earth outta you :3 well bye

  41. im super happy u got rid of the hacking now i can rest in peace and play games instead of deffend them all the time Heres a idea make roblox for consols like ps3 and xbox wii more popel would play if u did had it for all 3 would make it awsome pluss the computer versian roblox would become bigger and expand to new lvls

  44. Improving the catalog would be a great thing to do. I think it would be cool if you could organize items through BC items, TBC, and OBC.

  47. this is important, and not hard to do-
    1) make the terrain generator generate stone 3blocks under grass, if theres room. if there’s water, then generate sand 1 block higher than the water level, grass on the bottom of the ocean looks stupid.
    2) make voxel leaves, so then you can generate tress as an option in terrain generator, without tress it looks bleak and lonely. also, make it so that you can pass through the leaves, but it slow your speed by 1/2
    3)make voxel lava, youve got water, just retexture it and make a fire-inserting and damageing script for it.
    4) make voxel glass, it would be nice to be able to make terrain windows, glass walkways, etc.

  50. I have an idea give all bcs and up a free 10000 rbx so they have somthing to heklp them feel a little better b4 heading back to school

  54. First comment and roblox is updating fast and makes good updates, keep up the good work roblox!

  55. I don’t have an iPad. I don’t think that many ROBLOX users do. I have a Kindle Fire, however. Make one for that and I’ll be happy-ish.

  57. Nice, but, why didn’t you guys add anything to having the “Veterans’ Badge”?

  65. My favorite quote is “you need to purchase premium membership to buy or sell almost anything on ROBLOX”

  69. First comment. The roundup seems accurate and I hope to see all the updates making a change on the ROBLOX Economy.