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 ...

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 ...

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.

I've noticed more talk about cultural appropriation lately, most of it scornful of the concept to varying degrees. Out of ignorance, people are claiming that "everything is cultural appropriation!" and "if cultural appropriation is bad, then X is horrible!" I want to talk a bit (as a white American) about my understanding of the concept, defuse a few toxic memes about it, and discuss how we might be guilty of it.

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 ...

Our tabletop roleplaying game is almost done. In "beta" and for most of its development, it had the working title LORE. However, with our vision for it solidified and the polish phase starting, it was time to pick a name that reflected what the game had become.

I present to ...

Exploit: Zero Day, our game about solving puzzles and conspiring against the Man, is in closed alpha testing at the moment. We're working on the version code-named Alpha One, which is planned to have all of the core features: puzzle solving and creation, jobs given by NPCs, full ...