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, our exhaustive year-in-review series, a pair of Spotlight articles, three games you need to play, a huge ROBLOX video roundup, and other bits and pieces. Welcome to 2014.

Fan art contest winners, round 5

Welcome to 2014, Roundup readers! We’re kicking off the year in style with four more fan art contest winners, bringing the grand total to 19 winners (including the wintry vignette by Encladeus). Next week, we’ll compile all the winners and a bunch of runners up here on the blog, so stay tuned for an all-out fan-art extravaganza. Here we go.

Two-week blog recap

ROBLOX HQ has been quiet for the past couple weeks as many members of the team stepped out of the office and into quaint log cabins nestled into the hills, where they gathered around fireplaces and sang joyous holiday melodies while clanking glasses of sparkling grape juice over a giant roasted ham. Well, that’s what I imagine. Point is, aside from setting a new record for concurrent logged-in ROBLOXians at 160,000, not much happened here.

So, instead of announcing anything new and exciting, we took the downtime as an opportunity to reflect on the year that was 2013. That resulted in a four-part video series, which you can watch in its entirety with the following playlist.

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We also rounded out the year-in-review series with deep dive into the most popular games, virtual goods and conversation topics of 2013. There’s a lot of information in there, so grab a drink and get cozy.

If you’re in the mood for some more reading, make sure not to miss our recent Spotlight articles. The first is a conversation with ErikWesley96, the lead developer of the hit game Deathrun 2, and the second is an exploration of innovative developer xSoulStealerx’s fascinating projects.

You should play this game

There’s something endlessly gratifying about throwing on a jetpack and zipping through open space with a few friends. Add to that formula homing missiles and an arcade-style air-combat targeting system, and you’ve got a recipe for fun. Wingsuit Testing 2.0 isn’t so much a game as it is crazyman32 working on a new wingsuit control scheme, but it has been full of players for days — partly because there aren’t any targeting systems of this quality and it hits a good balance of freedom and combat. The level takes advantage of the new expanded terrain feature, but you’re never too far from another person.

Unknown Demise is an atmospheric horror game that will give you chills. You work as a group of detectives to investigate a grizzly murder scene, gathering evidence throughout the haunted premises and returning it all to a centralized location (a big red truck, for some reason). The tension cranks up as you find more evidence, and you can hear the ghostly apparition groaning off in the distance. When he finally finds you, use your video camera to “flash” the ghost to keep him from tearing you to shreds. The game can be very scary, particularly when you’re the lone survivor of your four-man crew and know you’re the next target. RUN.

The latest game review by Maxxz:

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Bits

Interesting use of the new HTTP Service.

Good tip in regard to controlling the display of core GUI elements in your games

Cool example of our new material textures bringing ROBLOX creations to life

We had a fun conversation about 2014 projects on Twitter last week

It seems as though the holidays brought the video community tons of inspiration. We came back from our break to find a lot of fun ROBLOX machinima. They may be slightly dated at this point, but that doesn’t make them any less entertaining.

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