Hitting A Roadblock

I’m often asked to design cakes on unfamiliar themes. Most of the time I’m perfectly happy to do that. After all, I love learning new things. If given an option, it’s possible I may not have chosen children’s TV characters, online gaming, and the intricacies of football to study. But on the other hand I can now have an educated conversation with a five-year-old about Fireman Sam! I couldn’t have said that this time last year.

So I cheerfully set to work on this latest assignment. Here’s what I knew. Benjamin is a huge fan of Lego. So much so that his mother buys him a Lego birthday cake every year. This year she decided to mix it up a bit and add in some Roblox. Wait, what was that?

Naturally, I turned to the Internet. Roblox is a massive multiplayer online game creation platform that allows users to design their own games and play a wide variety of different types of games created by other users through Roblox Studio. The platform hosts social network games constructed of Lego-like virtual blocks (Wikipedia).

Uh huh. So if I’m understanding this correctly, Lego provides a platform and users can create whatever they like on it. But what does that look like? If every user creates something original, in what way is it identifiable?

I turned back to the Internet. Google images helped somewhat. Here’s what I learned. Nothing. I still don’t understand it. But this is what Roblox pages and images all have in common: simplistic looking trees, Lego figures standing on pedestals, and the Roblox logo – or alternately one large R.

Some Roblox cakes have an R bursting out of the centre and that looked kind of fun so I copied that feature. There’s actually an art to creating this effect so thankfully I finished the day at least having learned something.