(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 ...

2015 was a weird year. Somewhere in that year is a typical tale of an indie game studio underestimating project timelines and changing directions based on surprises and things they learned.

But I want to talk about budgets.

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

Changes:

• It now costs scryp to install a cluster as your home cluster. For the moment, this has no great benefit, but it will be more useful soon.
• Forum security updated

If you're seeing this but ...

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

Changes in 0.20.2 and 0.20.3:

• "Homecoming", the finale to Laurie Wu's story, has been released.
• We fixed the ability to single-click nodes on mobile devices. (This is necessary to create a puzzle with a flip-flip node ...

Here's a gif of us working to solve a system from one of the story missions in Exploit: Zero Day:

Want Alpha access to the game? Join the mailing list for a key when we send this month's newsletter. If you're a streamer, YouTuber, or member of the press, ...

We've released an update for Exploit: Zero Day as part of our Alpha Two phase of development.

This includes the following:

• Added two new kinds of mid-Job player choices: regex-validated text and password fields.
• Fixed a server validation problem with semaphore nodes in puzzles.
• Fixed an incorrect error when anonymous ...

Ossuary—which is currently 50% off on Steam, and will be 50% off next week on FireFlower—is getting an update soon to provide some user experience improvements.

One in particular that we noticed in watching folks play on YouTube is that colorblind players find the floor puzzles impossible to solve without brute forcing a solution through trial and error.

In early November, I attended and gave a brief talk at DevOpsDays Charlotte 2015, a conference dedicated to exploring ideas around the modern movement of operations informed by and possibly run with development practices.

The typical, most obvious example of devops is the automation of builds and deployments of ...

Exploit: Zero Day is still in Alpha, but we're getting a nice little base of enthusiastic players, who we greatly appreciate. While we're developing content and some nearly-core features, there's a bunch of user experience features that aren't implemented yet.

Some of those surround the new user experience, like more tightly integrated welcome guides for new users and intro cinematics. Others are general improvements, like tooltips on nodes when editing, better guidance during editing, and tighter integration with the forum to make it easier to get to people’s profile pages.

While those things aren’t done, we’ve created a couple of little tutorial videos for playing Exploit: Zero Day puzzles: