Every week, we’re busy telling the stories behind our community, 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: new material textures (and your feedback on them), a beginner’s guide to limited item buying and selling, devs respond to your comments about new features, our ROBLOX HQ Halloween celebration, a Spotlight on an aviation innovator, Defend the Frontier, and other bits and pieces. Enjoy.

Seven-day blog recap

New materials: the story of the week

On Monday, we launched updates to all existing material textures, as well as six new materials. For the most part, your feedback has been positive, with a few exceptions (which we’ve heard, loud and clear): studs are too distinct, corroded metal shouldn’t always be diamond-plated, and plastic sometimes needs to be entirely smooth. As Arseny mentioned in Wednesday’s Feedback Loop post, we are looking into integrating your feedback and appreciate the many hundreds of you who let us know your opinions.

If that video wasn’t enough, the original announcement includes a complete screenshot gallery of the new materials and additional shots illustrating how they look in other existing places.

Breaking into the limited item market

We’re often asked for guidance on getting into the business of buying and selling limited items on the ROBLOX market. We decided to have one of the most experienced slingers of items, Mr. Shedletsky himself, to write a “getting-started” guide to making smart purchases and sales. Get ready for a bit of economic theory. Then put it to the test.

Feedback Loop

October was a busy month. Not only were we celebrating Halloween all month long with our many BLOXtober festivities, our engineers were lining up features one after another. We’ve received a lot of feedback and questions in regard to the new announcements — things like character animations, DevEx, the new materials, streaming parts, and more — so we decided, in our latest Feedback Loop post, to collect some of the most pertinent blog comments and have the developers respond. If you had any lingering questions about any of October’s new features, make sure to browse Feedback Loop.

Halloween at ROBLOX HQ

To close out the month-long BLOXtober celebration, we ROBLOX staffers had our own Halloween party — costume contest included. To see ROBLOX admins in their Halloween costumes, take a look at our photo gallery.

A Spotlight on an aviation innovator

BuilderAtWork is deep in the midst of creating one of the most ambitious flight simulators we’ve experienced yet on ROBLOX. Between the grand scale and the realistic jets, the game offers a lot of depth — and its developer is continuing to expand the possibilities. To learn more about what motivates BuilderAtWork, his vision, and how you can participate in the direction of Avionic, read our latest Spotlight article. Aviation fan or not, it’s an exciting project and story/

You should play this game

Magically (and fortunately), your own attacks don’t damage the wall!

Defend the Frontier by Xeptix is a very simple game, and that’s part of the reason it resonated with me. The concept is as simple as can be: you and a team of hardened defenders stave off wave after wave of AI opponents that want nothing more than to tear down your wall and invade your base. Your wall has limited health, so you need to cut off the attackers before they do too much damage. Very basic stuff. There are a couple things that stand out. First, the AI is cool. The enemies charge at your wall until you engage them; then, they come at you, weapons blazing. Second, leveling up and earning cash lets you acquire satisfying weapons and abilities. If you’re in the mood for some cooperative, wave-survival today, this is one game to try!

Erebor, the Lonely Mountain is a building showcase by kreka567. It’s very much the opposite of Defend the Frontier; it’s all about huge scale, sprawling rooms and grand architecture. For those of you who just want to see something impressive (and/or also have an interest in the Lord of the Rings mythos), this is a build worth visiting.

Bits

• You can now search the items in your backpack! Nice little feature for all you gearheads.
• Merely has published a short but handy guide to using sprite sheets in ROBLOX.
• He has also written and released a Chrome extension for groups that looks to be quite cool. (Required disclaimer: this is not an official ROBLOX feature and you should always exercise caution when using Chrome extensions.)
• Photo of a nice build in the works that showcases the new material textures.
• Another interesting Extra Credits video about “competitive storytelling” — a topic that might be interesting to you multiplayer game devs.
• starmarine614 has added a new coaster to the already sprawling ROBLOX Point Theme Park!
• And, finally, the game review you’ve all been asking Maxxz to do:

Subscribe to our YouTube channel to have game reviews by Maxxz delivered directly to your feed every Friday around noon PT!

Find us on social media