Written by on in Development.
Our cyberthriller puzzle game Exploit: Zero Day has a single puzzle type right now, which we call a Matrix puzzle. It's a minor refinement of the puzzles found in my old Flash game, Exploit. It's always been our intention to have multiple kinds of puzzles for the sake of ...
Written by on in Development, Releases.
We've updated Exploit: Zero Day as part of our Alpha Two phase of development. A lot of these are improvements we devised from watching people play EZD at the East Coast Game Conference a couple of weeks ago.
Changes:
Written by on in Development, Releases.
We've updated Exploit: Zero Day as part of our Alpha Two phase of development.
Changes:
Written by on in Development, Releases.
We've updated Exploit: Zero Day as part of our Alpha Two phase of development.
Changes:
Written by on in Development, Releases.
We've updated Exploit: Zero Day as part of our Alpha Two phase of development.
Changes:
If you're seeing ...
Written by on in Development, Releases.
We've updated Exploit: Zero Day as part of our Alpha Two phase of development.
Changes:
Written by on in Development, Society.
Exploit: Zero Day is a game about hacktivism. We cast players into the role of hacktivists fighting for justice against monolithic corporations and governments. In doing so, we portray hacktivism as necessary, effective, and even (to some extent) glamorous. But to treat it too lightly would be to ignore the ...
Written by on in Development.
(This is part 3 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.)
In our post on devops philosophies, we emphasized the continuous process of learning and revising, and said that a good place for that to happen is in retrospective (or post-mortem) meetings.
So what is a retrospective?
...Written by on in Development.
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?
...Written by on in Development.
(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.
...
