Hello! Welcome to the first actual post on this blog. Today I will be discussing Montresor's Place on Roblox, and no it isn't just a random account with just a starter place. This was actually an account that hosted an experimental build of the Glass Houses map from February 2007 that would be released later that same month on February 16th. Unfortunately, we don't have a copy of the full version from around this time, but from given screenshots and videos from the time, we pretty much know what it consisted of for the most part. Let's see what's different!

General differences

Let's get the obvious changes out of the way so we can discuss the more interesting ones in detail, here is a list that's in comparison to the release version:

• No tools with meshes yet
• Killbot spawning is broken (unfinished)
• Different tool order
• One of the cannons is non-functional (We will get into why later!)

Teleportation

Now let's get into the interesting and odd differences, the first thing that was incredibly strange is how the Trowel tool works, instead of placing a wall, it just teleports you to wherever you were clicking at, very primitive teleportation. Now why was this in Glass Houses? Maybe Shedletsky thought it'd be a fun gameplay gimmick? I don't know, but if that was the case then I can see why it was ultimately scrapped.

Teleportation, to the next level

What? there is more unused stuff regarding teleporting in this level? Give me a break. Anyways, remember that broken cannon I talked about in the bullet points earlier? Well, the reason that it doesn't work is that the code responsible for firing the projectiles isn't there, but instead is replaced by code that would presumably teleport you into an entirely different server. Maybe glass houses was meant to span across multiple games? Your guess is as good as mine.

This same exact server teleportation code is also present inside of the timebomb tool, under a function just called teleport, only difference being some print statements have been inserted. This function is never called anywhere else in the script by the way.

An interesting thing to note here is the code that sets a property in the visit class called "MultiplayerGui" to true, my current theory is that this property would simply make the Toolbox and Edit Mode buttons disappear, until later in March of 2007 this property was removed in favor of just graying out the buttons. Given it's scriptable nature I am sure someone could set this property themself and get studio tools in games that way, talk about secure. ^{(Cough cough...)}

Time to go to jail

Not exactly unused but more so unknown, there is an interesting piece of code in this version that handles team killing prior to the re-implementation of BrickBattle tools to work with teams. If you killed one of your teammates then you would receive a message warning you to stop team killing.

If you kept killing people despite your warnings like a rebel, you would be killed and immediately spawned into the jail at the center of the map.

As you can see in the video, I was teleported ABOVE the jail instead of inside it, but this was likely fixed in the release version. I guess you could say I got bailed out. The jail itself is entirely indestructible and it is impossible to leave when inside it, even if you do get killed by shooting a rocket or a bomb, you will stay in the jail forever. The only way to leave is to manually rejoin the server to wash yourself of your sins. This is honestly a funny way to handle team killing in my opinion. I can imagine many kids getting humiliated that they got stuck inside of the jail because they were acting dumb. It is amazing to know this previously mysterious building in the middle of the map actually had a purpose instead of being some temple decoration thing for the yellow killbot or something, as some people have guessed prior.

Conclusion

Overall, the game seemed to have been completed very early on in development as far as the building was concerned, but there was sure some shortcomings with the initial implementation of teams and gameplay elements that had to be ironed out in later updates. I hope this was a fun read despite it being very niche, I wanted to document this due to how much it has fascinated me for the past several months. Stuff like this is one of the main reasons I even made this blog in the first place. Thanks for reading and I hope you have a good rest of your day.