Soon all new Roblox users will start with a house instead of a cruddy 32×32 baseplate with only a table and a bed on it. The first time they visit their new place, they will see something like the image above. An empty house, teeming with possibilities. Thanks to the 9 players who participated in our little building contest, new players will have a choice of 46 items of furniture to place in their dwelling from the Toolbox. Of course, everyone playing now benefits too. Check out the new Furniture catagory in the toolbox the next time you need stuff to put in your house.

We were surprised with the tremendous quality of the submissions. My personal favorite is miked‘s widescreen TV with working remote. By touching the remote, you can surf 10 different channels, each with funny Roblox news stories. He also made a toaster that uses scripting to actually make toast! Check out this pic:

If we were giving a prize for the most awesome scripted model, miked would take home everything. Incredible stuff.

Let’s check out some of the other winning submissions, shall we?

Bunk Bed

Country-Style Dining Room Table

Subwoofer 3000 Stereo System

Racecar Bed

Home Entertainment System

Canopy Bed

Retro-style Arcade Machine

Other creative entries that we saw we a soda machine, a bouncy castle, a ceiling fan, and inflatable furniture. Yes, Robloxians will be living in style for months to come.

Grand Prize Winners

When I started this contest I really was planning to pick just one grand prize winner. I was not anticipating the submission of so many high-quality models. You guys have saved me a lot of time creating all this furniture from scratch, so it seems like the only fair thing to do is to give a customized character to everyone who submitted a model that we actually used. The winners are:

• DrWaffles
• Koopa
• Cadi
• Rocks25
• Anaminus
• Toazuku
• MrDoomBringer
• PoliceModler
• Miked

Incidentally, this is everyone who entered the contest. Guess the rest of you should have jumped on this, huh? I may be less generous in future building contests — you guys just saved me a lot of time and I’m grateful.

Winners: How to get your Customized Character

Ok, we have a lot of winners, and customizing your avatar involves some work on my part, so everyone needs to read these instructions carefully and follow them so that I don’t go crazy.

1. Get a Figure model from someplace. A good way to do this is to insert one into a level using the Toolbox (everyone should have a Figure model).
2. Color the character’s parts however you want.
3. At your option, you can put on different face and torso decals. A good size for a torso decal is 107×128, which will prevent stretching.
4. Publish this figure model to Roblox.
5. Message Telamon and tell me where you put the model.

If you try any funny business like making an invisible character with transparent parts or setting the Humanoid MaxHealth to a billion, you will forfeit your prize. Please do not modify the actual model by adding, removing, or resizing parts.

Make sure you get the model looking the way you like before you message me. I don’t want to change your character more than once.

If you use decals in your model, remember that we still don’t support decals well in multiplayer. They may or may not be visible to other users. We are working to fix this in the near future.

If you have questions or need help with any of this, message me. I’m shooting to get the new characters up by Monday.

If you did not win, do not message me asking for a customized character. It takes time to set up and I need to spend that time developing Roblox. Everyone will get one eventually.

The Future

I had fun runnnig this contest, but managing it was more time-consuming than I had expected. Should we continue to have building contests in the future? We’ve tried to have building contests in the past, but this was the first successful one. I imagine this is either because: 1) making a piece of furniture is a 5-10 minute job, so anyone can get involved without a large time investment or 2) people really want customizable characters and this was the only way to get one for now. Would anyone be interested in a building contest where you had to make something bigger? Like a house? Or an entire level? Or would that be too much?

– Telamon