Our browser-based puzzle game about hacktivism, Exploit: Zero Day, has two major components: Jobs and player-created puzzles. Jobs are what a traditional MMO would call PVE challenges; they're story crafted by us, which you play through alone. Player-created puzzles, on the other hand, are currently the closest thing we have to PVP challenges, although in our case the goal isn't really to defeat the other player but to give them an interesting challenge.

We're currently developing currency mechanics that will serve as an extra incentive for players to create puzzles and solve other players' puzzles (we call puzzles "systems," since they represent computer systems in the game's fiction). Players will be able to earn "scryp" by solving puzzles or having puzzles in their home cluster solved, which they can spend to make their home cluster more attractive and challenging. A big question arises, however. How do we set these rewards to encourage people make the best systems they can?

(This is part 2 of a series on applying devops principles and practices to game development. The main post is here and all posts can be found under this tag.)

If nothing else about this series proves directly useful to you, take this one thing home:

Don't get stuck in a local maximum.
—Michael DeHaan, creator of Ansible

Keep moving and keep improving.

Very often, we find a system for ourselves that works and stick with it. We just get used to things that are initially annoying or rough, even if we know there might be a “fix” for it. As a result, we accept failure in some areas, telling ourselves “that's just how it is.”

We shouldn't just accept those irritants and move on. We should continuously reassess whether those need to continue to be rough spots.

We've updated Exploit: Zero Day as part of our Alpha Two phase of development.

Changes:

• Upgraded Django (our web framework) to 1.9.
• Fixed a notification system issue that prevented the rest of the queue of emails from sending if one failed. Existing players, you may receive notifications from jobs ...