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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 ...

We've updated Exploit: Zero Day to 0.52.3 as part of the "Acid Burn" release, although these items were unplanned due to being pressing bugs. Changes include:

• Email verification links from registration will go to a page where the player can click a button to confirm validation. This should help in ...

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 ...

In writing for Exploit: Zero Day, we need to have characters using hacking techniques that aren't too far off what we think is possible. Thing is, neither of us are (or have ever been) hackers.

I (Melissa), however, have some specific sources I use to seed ideas for tactics characters might use: cybersecurity news.

It sounds boring, like reading dry academic papers of new tweaks on cryptographic techniques. Or ho-hum, like yet another hospital attacked with ransomware.

But not only are there some unusual events going on, there are also witty commentary, well-crafted journalism, and surprisingly science fictiony techniques at play. It's pretty fascinating to keep up on, even if you aren't specifically writing in the cyberpunk genre.

So here's where I get my news in a pretty low-key way:

We're in the middle of taking part in LOWREZJAM 2019, a fun game jam where all the projects have to be at a resolution of 64x64 or less. That's a wildly small resolution; if you don't scale it up, it ends up looking this small:

As you can see, ...

We're happy to announce the completion of another Exploit: Zero Day named release. Implementation on "Cereal Killer" is done!

"Cereal Killer" contained some user-facing fixes as well as some stuff behind-the-scenes. The changelist includes:

• The addition of clusters to account pages
• Better emails and the option to subscribe to our ...

Part of our work to make Exploit: Zero Day easier for us to maintain and update was making a job editor for ourselves. Previously, we'd been creating jobs (the storyline missions for the player) using the Django admin interface, which is very nice but makes it difficult to have a ...

In keeping with our recent news, we're resuming more active work on EZD. We've updated Exploit: Zero Day to 0.31.0:

• We added a bug report link to all pages. Clicking on the bug icon in the upper right will link to a pre-filled bug report post on the forums. ...

If you listened to our most recent podcast, you heard us talk about what we've been up to in our work on Exploit: Zero Day. We haven't worked much on our social puzzle game about hacktivism for a while; we've been focusing instead on "The Majesty of ...