One of the things that's struck us over the last few years of being in indie game dev is how very few teams seem to be using rigorous methods for running their business. (Or, if they are, they aren't talking much about it.) We've attended some great talks at conferences by Finji and watched videos like Simon Roth's "Killing the 'Lucky Indie' myth: How to build a sustainable microstudio", but beyond that the most consistent opinion we've seen is "Make strategies based on data."

Problem is: where is that data?

We have about 12 different sites or parts of sites that could have outages and two of us to manage them. Some of these have been up for years, and some are newer. Some applications require special installation or debugging, and some must be on differently-configured servers.

When one of those goes down, we both need to know how to diagnose and fix it as soon as possible. So how do we manage that?

Our plan for the last few years has been to work on multiple projects at once. When Gregory worked full time on Future Proof projects, this kept them from feeling drained working on the same thing day in and day out. Now that we're both indefinitely part time, however, we're finding it near-impossible.

Our 2017 plans seemed reasonable. They were in line with what we've tried to do in the last couple of years, but incorporating the data from previous years: actual dev time for new Exploit: Zero Day story jobs, actual time needed for marketing, conference schedules, etc.

With that in mind, we set ourselves up to work on two high intensity projects and a low-key one: EZD, Majesty of Colors, and Rosette LARP, respectively.

We're very pleased to announce that we will be publishing a rule book for live-action role playing (LARP) based on the Rosette rules and philosophy! Rosette LARP will be available digitally and in print from DriveThruRPG and digital-only from itch.io by summer.

"Headless Swarm" (the first paid story for Exploit: Zero Day) now has the fourth hacking job in the season, "Internet All the Things." In this job, find out what the two antagonists are up to by hacking someone's house.

We've also published two side jobs that you might get access to as you aggravate or placate the two parties. These jobs don't have puzzles, but provide insight into a few of the characters in the EZD saga. Those were really fun to write! One is from an antagonist introduced in "Headless Swarm"; the other is Chamunda, a long-time EZD character that's a loyal employee of Samsara Digital with a low opinion of hackers.

While we continue to write the next segment of "Headless Swarm", we've been fixing bugs and making small enhancements to the overall Exploit: Zero Day game.

This weekend, we released an accessibility improvement: text links in EZD now have underlines. It's a small change, but having a second visual ...

As part of the remastering of "(I Fell in Love With) The Majesty of Colors", we're making a sweep of the sounds in the game. We aren't finished yet, but here's an example of some of the sounds of the opening from the original Flash version of the ...

"(I Fell in Love With) The Majesty of Colors" has been greenlit on Steam!

Thank you so much for your votes, your support, and for spreading the word.

This is big for us, because we means we'll be able to launch "Majesty" on Steam from day 1 in ...

Our web-based cyberthriller puzzle game Exploit: Zero Day lets you play as a hacktivist, uncovering and battling against oppression and exploitation. It's been in closed alpha for a while, but soon it will be available without waiting in line thanks to our prelude season of paid story: "Headless Swarm." This ...

In 2008, Gregory created "(I Fell in Love With) The Majesty of Colors", a game about love, loss, and balloons where you embody a sinuous creature from beneath the ocean who discovers the beauty and hazards of the surface world.

Today we're excited to announce that we're bringing ...