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 us over the weekend, the Weekly Roundup collects the best stuff to hit our various avenues of publication in the last week. This time: four more fan art contest winners, the first BLOXcast, vastly expanded terrain building, Giftsplosion 2013 updates, the $29,000+ we’ve paid to developers so far, a Spotlight on treyreynolds, two game recommendations, and other bits and pieces. Enjoy.

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Fan art contest winners, round 2

This week, we have four more fan art contest winners!

Excellent work — congratulations to these four artists! We will have many more winners to announce in upcoming issues of the Weekly Roundup (and in a photo album on our Facebook page). At the end, we’ll assemble them in one place and show you a bunch of other entries that just missed the cut and are otherwise well done in their own regard.

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Seven-day blog recap

BLOXcast livestream still available for viewing

Yesterday, we hosted the first ever BLOXcast livestream, where we took your questions for a Q&A session, introduced the concept of universes and the upcoming Winter Games event, and streamed ROBLOX gameplay for a while. If you missed it, fear not — the stream has been archived on YouTube and, what the heck, embedded right here in the Roundup. Watch:

Expanded terrain now available to builders

Our Rendering Team has been working hard to crush the limits on building with voxels (also known as terrain) and took a huge leap last week. Gone is the 512x64x512 voxel grid of the past; in its place is a 64,000×64,000×64,000 grid that lets you build colossal mountains, deep oceans and vast expanses. You can read all about the implementation of the feature and its side benefits in yesterday’s blog post.

Giftsplosion keeps on ‘sploding

A week ago today we launched the 2013 Giftsplosion, which gives everyone a chance to earn mystery gift boxes by completing ROBLOX challenges. We’re seven gifts deep, and we still have five more to go. Keep your eyes on Monday’s post about the event — we’re continuing to update it as gifts release, go on sale, and are awarded. It also contains information on how the Giftsplosion works. If you don’t understand, read the first few paragraphs!

We’ve paid devs more than $29,000 so far via DevEx

Now that the Developer Exchange program has been running for a full two months, we checked in to see how much we’ve paid developers. Turns out it’s more than $29,000! For a more detailed breakdown (and a couple more stories about how a couple participating developers are using their earnings), read this DevEx blog post!

Spotlight on Treyreynolds, a scripting innovator

Alan took note of Treyrenolds after his skydiving place made it to the front of the Games page a few weeks ago. Recognizing that there is something very complex powering the thrill of ROBLOX skydiving, we decided to find out how he developed the scripts and uncover his many other projects. He’s got many cool demos to experience, so read the article to get pointed in the right direction!

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You should play this game

Alan’s pick of the week: BioBlock: Limitless

BioBlock: Limitless is an incredible recreation of one of my favorite video games, Bioshock: Infinite. The aesthetic is spot on–semi transparent clouds drift effortlessly throughout the map, and you can even use the Skylift to latch on and fly through the entire level. Like Infinite, you’ve also got to search through the various stores and taverns to discover new weapons and vigor. All in all, a beautiful recreation that is definitely worth checking out.

Andrew’s pick of the week: Casual Adventure

It’s been called “probably the most advanced RPG on ROBLOX” by Shedletsky. It’s one of the best-looking voxel-based games yet. It’s… Casual Adventure!

Okay, the name could be a little more exciting. But I digress.

Casual Adventure is a work in progress that shows tremendous promise. While it’s not finished, it is a fully functional game — you engage in dialog with surprisingly lively NPCs, battle it out with goblins and ROBLOXian-eating wildlife, and pick up quests by exploring an expansive map — and there’s enough content to keep you busy for at least an hour. (I’m not sure how much gameplay there is; I had to stop at that point.) The time and thought the development team has poured into this game shines in the cutscenes, sparkling interface, quest dialog, level design and other details. Let’s hope they fill in the content and realize their grand vision.

Note: the game doesn’t save your progress just yet, so make sure you have a little time to commit.

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Bits

If a 90-minute livestream, two editor’s choice games, five blog posts and a game review aren’t enough to keep you occupied this Sunday, here’s some more stuff.

• The animation editor previewed a couple months ago has released to ROBLOX Studio. At present juncture, you can’t do too much with your animations (e.g., upload them to ROBLOX), but you can start to experiment with animating dummy characters. We’ll have more information on this feature when it is fully implemented.
• Quenty has already customized the animation editor with his own interface. Nice!
• Development tip from Merely.

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