Roblox Thread

[huckleton]

roblox brings you: thread

ever since i moved back into a house that has an actual internet connection i fell VERY HARD back into a roblox kick. the platform is super interesting to me from a game design and community standpoint, plus for the past few years i've been searching for roblox games (or "experiences" as apple's app store TOS kind of forced their hand to call them) that appeal to my demographic of players so.

some topics i could write about (putting this here as a reminder to myself)

•  the various cooking games i've been trying (also listed in the try-out list below)
  
• tower defense games (in general)
  
• thoughts on the games i find myself coming back to (super bomb survival, evade, tower heroes, minus elevation) and some games i used to go back to repeatedly (midnight horrors, doors, random rumble)
  
• games i have been trying in the past couple of weeks alone (mini megafactory, super scuffle, bribbleco-adjacent games, dingus, the trolley game, dare to cook, generic cooking game, running from the internet, the storage, balls.rng, plates of fate: remastered, burger game, recollection, become forklift certified obby)
  

additionally: i know a lot about roblox's general community culture and history, i have a bunch of dev friends, i have an age verified account that can access the voice chat and those weird ass 17+ rated games, feel free to ask me questions

[brilokuloj]

I love Roblox sooo much. It's such a bizarre, uh, experience.

I have over 250 Roblox games bookmarked and I've played at least 189 of them. I should probably figure out how to share that list publicly. The games I've gotten the "farthest" in is Work At A Pizza Place and Survive The Killer, just because they're the easiest to play in between other games, I guess. My favorite is BIRD but it doesn't have any replay value for me. Metal Gear Solid Tribute made me cry laughing but it's only really funny if you know MGS memes.

I tried making a Roblox game years ago but never got anywhere. I made a little greenhouse with nothing in it.

The weirdest thing to me is those fucking cart ride games. Every single one I've played has been broken and I end up screaming.

The second weirdest is a type of game I can only think to describe as The Generic Neighborhood, I wish I had some examples, but it's always a flat world with some clearly premade houses dropped into it, and then there's ALWAYS some weird jank like NPCs in the middle of nowhere or some shit that flings you across the map.

I have also experienced "the malevolent forces" where sometimes some invisible wind just PUSHES you. Usually on one of the really thrown-together maps.

Honestly my favorite thing is playing the absolute most thrown-together, raw games I can find. Whenever I find a game that has a typoed name, a description that's entirely keywords, and a default icon? It's always gold. I genuinely enjoy it. So much of it is just like looking at people's special interest scrapbooks. Joyful.

[brilokuloj]

Today I ended up going down a minor YouTube rabbit hole of non-euclidean geometry in Roblox:

Probably nothing super new to people who know how this shit works, but I never would have thought of Roblox being capable of this stuff. I guess that's the thing, is that people who can pull this sort of stuff off make it feel like magic that I don't even think about, and then every shitty tycoon game goes along and re-convinces me that Roblox is a machine that can make shitty tycoon games only

[starsystemerror]

This stuff is so cool. Roblox can do some pretty wild stuff, but the fact that it's so accessible to children who make mass amounts of complete garbage throwaway games means the cool stuff (at least the kind that isn't heavily advertised and monetized) gets lost in the piles of sludge. And I think that's beautiful.

[huckleton]

i know i showed you the screenshots from that "see-through portal" test @cheet and i found a little while ago; here's the link to that: Teleportation portal demo

this also comes attached with a DevForum thread where someone asks how to do this in Scripting Support, and EgoMoose (the creator of this demo) volunteers their experimentation skills.

as that last video demonstrates, a lot of this is magic related to ViewportFrames! a ViewportFrame is a GUI element that basically, lets you render 3D objects as a 2D interface element. however, of course, to display a 3D object it needs a "POV" of sorts, so ViewportFrames also let you control the camera within the frame.

by the way, Roblox gives you multiple possible places to render a GUI. one, of course, would be the player's screen, using a ScreenGui. but there's also a SurfaceGui, which allows you to put 2D interface elements (buttons, textboxes, labels, and of course, ViewportFrames) directly on the face of an object

combine this, and then you do a little wizardry with camera offsets, (fun fact: the player's camera is an object in 3D space too, and its position and rotation can be obtained at any time) and you can make it look like the player is looking through a portal

this trick is slightly unusual though because you don't often put entire environments in a VF; you usually only put individual objects in. for a more common use of ViewportFrames you see in games, the game Tower Heroes has an enemy bestiary that displays 3D previews of its enemies

[brilokuloj]

I really admire how I can click on any Roblox tech demonstration video and find some of the most hostile and/or panicked "THIS IS GOING TO RUIN EVERYTHING" comments I've ever seen

[huckleton]

okay i had a very big list of games i wanted to talk about on this thread. but i did not do that. however i have been VERY hooked on roblox lately still and i made a very long post on my website talking about it (Roblox and "Authentic Fun"). to prove that i'm not trying to shamelessly shill 300 paragraphs on my fucking website though i can summarize it for you

the waiting room: cute little hangout/exploration game with a lot of little mechanics. has been making me abnormal for a little while. i find it's hard to socialize though because one of the mini-mechanics this game has deliberately messes with your ability to tell what is real

Evade: very typical "survive the nextbots" game. a nextbot is a loud billboarding image (usually a meme) that makes a lot of loud sounds (usually memey). it's stupid fun, each round is like 3 minutes so its easy to jump in/out of

balls.rng: more of a toy than a game. you click on balls with different attributes and sometimes a Very Rare ball spawns that has a bunch of different attributes. 100% random chance based game with no end goal. i have geometric shapes autism though

Breadwinner World: simulator game. not a game i would sincerely recommend because it's a bit "dark patterns", but it does some very strange and unique things that i haven't seen in a roblox game, namely its use of a 100% persistent world where you have to Pay Rent. i find the simulator mechanics of the game feel very tactile

the Repleh County Series: narrative horror series consisting of A Stereotypical Obby, Repleh County Archives, and Repleh County Archives 2. i find them narratively weak, but the latter two's use of environment/sound design and atmosphere really elevates this above a lot of other roblox horror games. they get a bit formulaic though.

Guts & Blackpowder: objective-based cooperative zombie survival game set in the Napoleonic Wars. i find this artistically incredibly impressive with a lot of commitment to the aesthetic and historical aspects. people in this game are always arguing but the arguments they have are kind of funny. only using muskets and swords heavily raises the stakes of things. i find this one really really fun.

[starsystemerror]

I have been kinda fixated on Roblox myself lately and I've been hopping between lots of games so this list is very much appreciated. the waiting room was really fun running around with Will, and balls.rng was weirdly meditative and fun to click on weird shapes. Evade was instantly overwhelming and not even for the loud nextbot sounds, it just felt very strangely Modern Game if you get what I mean.

All that is to say, I tried Breadwinner World and holy shit this is dangerous for me. I want to make bread forever and decorate my silly little house which I pay rent for. It's like if the gameplay loop of Work at a Pizza Place appealed just a little bit more to my particular repetitive game autism. Great game, but I'm going to have to set timers on it or something.