This was originally an essay in our newsletter. Subscribe to get essays like this when they're originally released.

As soon as we first started making a sequel to Gregory's old Flash game Exploit, we were discussing what we wanted to change about the game's nodes. As the core of the puzzles, they are the building blocks for what's possible in the game.

In the end, we settled on relatively few changes. The mostly-superfluous Directory node from the first game was replaced with the Flipflop, which allowed for changes in puzzles' state that didn't wear off over time (and eliminated the need for the "antiblocker" added to Exploit in a post-release update). That was the state of the game in 2014 when we welcomed our first players.

This was originally an essay in our newsletter. Subscribe to get essays like this when they're originally released.

In Future Proof Podcast episode 035, we talked some about how we track player choices in Exploit: Zero Day. As we actively work on the final job in "Headless ...

February has come and gone, but this episode is coming out anyway! You can listen below, read the transcript, or watch the video.

We don't mention it in the podcast on account of the timing of our recording, but you still have a couple days to pick up the Bundle for Ukraine over on itch.io. Almost 1000 games (including ours!) for a minimum of $10, with all proceeds going to the International Medical Corps and Voices of Children.

Games mean things. It's unavoidable with any art form that meaning and feeling arises from a work. However, game design involves enough details and interlocking parts that it's easy for the design to become muddled and say something that's either unclear or different from what the designer would intend. This ...

Often, the most effective ways to communicate a work's tone are also the most subtle adjustments. In digital games, creators too often put off or overlook background sounds, even though they immediately set a mood.

Our roleplaying game sourcebook Rosette Diceless doesn't come with a soundtrack, but books have a ...

Our cyberthriller puzzle game Exploit: Zero Day has a single puzzle type right now, which we call a Matrix puzzle. It's a minor refinement of the puzzles found in my old Flash game, Exploit. It's always been our intention to have multiple kinds of puzzles for the sake of ...

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?

It's hard to write story for a massively multiplayer game. You need story that can be played by thousands of people. In some cases they're playing it simultaneously, and in other cases they're playing it months or years apart. You want players to feel like their efforts matter, but you ...

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 ...