Roblox is currently in alpha online testing. This means that we don’t consider Roblox to “finished” or “well tested”, it is an ongoing experiment that we let other people take part in. Today I’m going to give you a sneak peek at a Deep Alpha feature, something so experimental, raw, and new that it just barely compiles. It’s in the pipeline, but you probably won’t see it for several releases. Ladies and gentlemen, I present: James Blox.

James Blox was created by early Roblox user Katalyst, an acquaintance from gamedev.net. You will no doubt recognize his pyramid & sphinx place from the cool places tab on the Roblox homepage. James Blox was recently picked up by Montresor, the alter ego of a Roblox admin, who has been experimenting with custom avatars. James Blox is not an exciting feature. Don’t get me wrong – he looks so cool and stylish stalking around in the Rocket Arena that I often forget to shoot at him. But really, the exciting feature is character customization. We have a little bit of it on Roblox now (you can pick from ten models), in the future we will have a lot more. Raise your hand if you think that’s a bad thing. Ok, you guys go sit in the corner.

We know everyone wants to customize their avatar. We would be curious to know how you would like to do this. Should we have a special web page that lets you choose colors for your body parts and select from torso patterns? Should the interface be in-game rather than on the web site? Ultimately it should be both: but if you had to choose one to have first, which way would you go?

– Telamon