ROBLOX Roundup - Jan/27/2013

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 ROBLOX Game Conference 2013 location survey, chat and vehicle supportin ROBLOX Mobile, the development of first-person shooter Borderline, ROBLOX’s 2012 in numbers, games making big money, The Stalker, your ideas for gear and other bits and pieces.

Seven-day Blog Recap

We want to know where we should host ROBLOX Game Conference 2013!

In our unofficial announcement that ROBLOX Game Conference 2013 is official, we asked you to help us choose a location for this year’s edition of the annual meetup. We’re not ready to reveal any results just yet, but you can take a look at the comments of the blog post to get a feel for some of the more popular locations. And, if you haven’t already taken the survey, please do so today! The more responses we get, the easier it is for us to make the right decision.

Chat and vehicle support enabled on ROBLOX Mobile

This week, we released an update to ROBLOX Mobile, allowing iPhone and iPod touch players to chat in-game and adding support for ROBLOX vehicles on all supported iOS devices. This is a pair of updates you, the community, have been hotly anticipating, and we hope they make your mobile experience all the more enjoyable. We’ll keep listening to your feedback and trying to fill as many requests as we can in the future. As always, you can contribute your feedback on the ROBLOX Mobile forum.

Borderline: the next best first-person shooter?

A few months ago, we noticed some videos on YouTube that showed some of the most polished, responsive first-person shooter game play we’ve seen on ROBLOX. We knew we need to talk to the people who created it and, finally, we had a chance to chat with members of StudioMM, the team developing the upcoming first-person shooter. Our article not only covers the large amount of detail being crammed into the game, but also how their home-made framework facilitates it. Watch videos, see exclusive images, and learn about the game, straight from the source.

ROBLOX’s 2012 in numbers

ROBLOX had a great 2012 for a bunch of reasons. In this blog post, we break down how good of a year we had from a numerical standpoint. Among the findings: 176 million gameplay hours, 13.3 billion pageviews and 17.6 billion Robux trading hands. You can see more stats in the complete article. Thanks to the ROBLOX community for putting so much time into our platform!

We respond to your community-related feedback

In our latest Responding to User Feedback article, Creative Director John Shedletsky responds to your feedback about the ROBLOX community. The feedback covers a range of topics, from requests for more non-Builders Club features to new-member tutorials to groups and community reputation. Read our responses in this blog post, and see previous entries in this ongoing series here.

You should play this ROBLOX game

At a glance, the screenshot above makes it look like I’m shooting an inanimate red box. Take a closer look. See that almost entirely transparent ROBLOXian? That’s the stalker.

The Stalker is a simple game, but one that will keep you on edge time and time again. Each round, one players gets to be the stalker. They prowl around the map, hunting for soldiers with powerful paralysis and pouncing attacks, and, most importantly, the power of transparency. As a soldier, you have to constantly survey your surroundings and hope your teammates are just as vigil. The second you see something obscure your vision, you open fire. With a rotating selection of cool, dark maps, and the randomness of a different, player-controlled stalker each round, no single game plays out like the last, making this an all-around solid ROBLOX game.

Bits

Your ROBLOX gear inventions

This part week, we asked our Facebook fans, “if you could invent any ROBLOX gear imaginable, what would it be?” We’ve received about 2,000 ideas; some of our favorites are highlighted here:

• Shapeshifting gear. You can turn your arms into different things to do different things. E.g., Arm blade (slow, high damage), Claws (low damage, fast), Hammers (area effect, slow), and Whip (long range, high damage), and it increases your walk-speed, jump height and health. Costs loads.
• Taco rocket launcher.
• Boots (possibly gloves to go along with them) that allow you to walk on walls and ceilings. Maybe walk up other models, too? Like trees. Could be useful in war games.
• The ability to spawn pigs that run after everyone on the server and turn them into bacon sandwiches. Who said this couldn’t be original!
• I would create a mustache boomerang that takes down 20% of health.
• Green beans.
• A block of butter to refill your health! You can also double click to make it drop to the floor, and when a unlucky person comes to it, THEY TRIP!
• A tool that, when you click on someone, they are swarmed by a pack of wild wolves and/or dogs. Or, if you click on yourself, you’ll have a swarm of wolves follow you.
• A taco that you bite into and causes you to explode.
• I would invent a pager named Robo-Pager where you can click on someone and send them a message in the chat that only they can see. They can send one back if they have the gear. And if they don’t, they can have a max of 3 replies available.

What would you invent?