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Author archives: Gregory

Setting Rewards for Player-Created Puzzles

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?

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Learning Is a Game

Learning Is a Game

An educator friend of mine recently shared this article lamenting the gamification of schools. I found it infuriating. According to the author:

The problem is gamification’s premise. It suggests that we should capitulate to a generation of students who supposedly can’t muster interest and curiosity on their own.

There ...

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The Inspirations for Exploit: Zero Day

The Inspirations for Exploit: Zero Day

People often ask creative folks what their inspiration for a project was. It's a weird question to answer, because most projects have many inspirations. They evolve out of the primordial soup of your experiences and the state of the medium you're working in. Sometimes, though, there are specific works that ...

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Ossuary 50% Off for Bureflux: Sep 21-27

Ossuary 50% Off for Bureflux: Sep 21-27

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, ...

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The Defining Phrases of Rosette

The Defining Phrases of Rosette

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 ...

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Storytelling in Exploit: Zero Day

Storytelling in Exploit: Zero Day

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 ...

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