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 ...

We have a gameplay trailer for Exploit: Zero Day! This is a general trailer that hopefully will give people a feel for what the game is about. Share it with your friends and enemies. Thank you to the current players who gave us feedback on earlier trailer drafts.

Exploit: ...

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 ...

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 ...

Exploit: Zero Day, our cyberpunk social puzzle game, has been in "Alpha Zero" state for almost six weeks now. A select few players have been poking at the core of the game while we prepare the framework that it will be embedded in.

Within the next month we plan ...

For a long time, we planned for Exploit: Zero Day, our social hacking puzzle game currently in closed alpha, to use a "free-to-play" or "freemium" approach to money. Not anymore.