Future Proof Games

A major part of our vision for Exploit: Zero Day involves lively discussion and roleplaying among players. When registering for the game, you pick a hacker handle and automatically have a forum account created for you — the forums are just another part of the game.

In the spring, when our first relatively large batches of folks got access, we saw some awesome roleplaying and player-created story and puzzles. That's since trickled off, and the forums have more site updates and bug reports than anything else.

Why the desire for forum content? There are a couple of reasons.

In honor of the Discordian holiday of Bureflux, our creepy, satirical, conversation-based adventure game Ossuary will be 50% off on Steam from September 21-27, 2015.

In Discordianism, there are five seasons, each with 73 days. These seasons reflect the cyclical periods of history, which start with Chaos, fall into Discord, ...

We launched the Alpha of Exploit: Zero Day on December 22, 2014, but we haven't posted a "state of the union" type of post since February.

In that time, we've gotten a lot done, including finishing the features that allow us to craft stories and releasing some early story content.

So what is Exploit: Zero Day?

When we decided to go to the GDC this year, we knew we wanted to give out access codes to Exploit: Zero Day when we spoke to people. The easiest way to give out a code to EZD is with a link that includes the code and will guide the player to register, then apply the code.

I set out to create labels containing both a QR code and a shortlink that could be affixed to the back of our business cards. It took quite a bit of trial and error to make this process smooth, but a combination of a Google Spreadsheet, Excel, and Microsoft Word 2013/365 got the job done. Unfortunately, this process won't work with Word 2007 or 2010.

All this work is worth it, though, to have the back of my business card look like this:

Join me on this sweet and technical ride of mail merging.

As we work on Rosette, our tabletop roleplaying system, we've been working hard to focus on what makes our game distinctive. We really like tabletop games with a distinct focus. Especially with generic rulesets, you can end up with a set of perfectly fine rules that provide no compelling reason ...

I've just finished creating puzzles for the latest piece of free content in Exploit: Zero Day, and it was my first time doing a considered design of puzzles. I wanted a few levels of difficulty, but for puzzles to not just become obnoxious as the difficulty increased.

The puzzles I've designed will be going live later this week, and hopefully folks will like them. I iterated quite a bit on some of them as I tried out different tactics, especially the puzzle pictured with this post.

When it was all said and done—which took a while, since I was new to it—I was able to distill the tactics I used into this handy-dandy list.

Our work-in-progress Exploit: Zero Day is heavy in story. It's a social, cyberpunk puzzle game that explores conspiracies and oppression and questions who you can trust. The browser-based, intermittent format of the game makes it impractical to use traditional narration to tell our story, so we've employed a few interesting ...

At a local game developer's meetup this week, we were asked to talk a little about our approach to making money. Some people in the group are hobbyists, some want to go full time, and some already are. They're an eclectic and often very technical group. The slides from our talk are over on Speaker Deck or below.

Making trailers and other videos on a budget can be tricky. It's one of those topics that's full of people on the internet wanting to sell you things. Big-budget video editors and sketchy shareware screen capture utilities abound. At this point, though, we have a pretty solid toolchain for capturing ...

We have a gameplay trailer for Exploit: Zero Day! This is a general trailer that hopefully will give people a feel for what the game is about. Share it with your friends and enemies. Thank you to the current players who gave us feedback on earlier trailer drafts.

Exploit: ...