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.

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.

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.

As indie devs, we leverage a variety of services to keep track of keys we've given out, press we contact or want to contact, vendors we've talked to, customers we've interacted with, and fellow developers/artists/etc. we follow.

Here's our list:

• Highrise: a free-for-small-setups Customer Relationship Manager (CRM) in which we store customer, press, and vendor contacts and email discussions. Highrise was originally developed by the makers of Basecamp and Campfire, and still has that clean UX.
• Promoter: a free-for-tiny-setups system to track press mentions of your games.
• presskit(): a free, self-hosted PHP tool to create a presskit for your company and its games — descriptions, screenshots, videos, press quotes, awards, etc.
• distribute(): a free, centrally-hosted tool that houses game keys and provides an interface through which press can request them. Requests are vetted to ensure they aren't from randos, and shows the reach/audience size of the folks requesting keys.

All four of these services can talk to each other, but it's not always the clearest to figure out how.

The original Exploit is a game written in ActionScript 3 (Flash) that lives entirely within its Flash container on a web page, whether that be on our site or a Flash portal.

With Exploit: Zero Day, we want to build something browser-based, but more than just puzzles. The puzzles themselves are still in a box on a web page, but that's not the entirety of the game — nor is there any Flash involved.

It's time for Exploit to spread beyond its box and become more complex and social, and that means changing the technology.

Exploit: Zero Day — our in-progress cyberpunk puzzle game — now has all the features it needs for the kinds of stories we want to tell.

We have a lengthy list of story ideas that we'll be implementing over the next many months of the game, but here are a ...

With Exploit: Zero Day in closed alpha, we’re hard at work on two other projects, LORE and an untitled game about a car’s adventures.

You play an adorable car that gains sentience and finds itself wanting to do things its owner does… like see a movie at a theater. It ...

Both of us attended GDC Next 2014 November 3-4. It was a cozy conference, focusing primarily on non-development topics: marketing, social media, business development. Both of us feel pretty lacking in these areas, and so eagerly hopped on too-early flights to attend.

Rather than give a boring session-by-session description of what I attended and learned, here's discussion on some of the highlights:

I gave my first-ever conference talk at BlendConf on web accessibility, titled "Simple Accessibility: The Bare Minimum for Compassionate Development". The slides are over on Speaker Deck, and embedded after the jump.