TOM FRANCIS
REGRETS THIS ALREADY

Games I Plan To Make #1: The Randomised Strategy Game

Hey Tom, why are you always cooking noisily when you make videos? Because I am finishing my videogame, so vidbloggiovlogging kinda has to cram into any downtime I get. Hope the noise isn’t too annoying.

Gunpoint Steam Achievements

Gunpoint has 44 achievements on Steam – that’s only 5 less than Deus Ex 3. Only one is inevitable in a given playthrough, and that’s for completing it.

The rest are a mix of acknowledging very distinct playstyles, encouraging you to try new gadgets, recognising insane, obsessive or impressive decisions, letting you know certain feats are possible, and in one case helping you understand what just happened (some testers don’t realise what’s happening when they make an infinite loop in Crosslink).

A few are secret to surprise you, and a few are secret to avoid plot spoilers. These are the rest, with their magnificent icons by our artist John Roberts: Continued

Gunpoint Trailer: Gadgets And Steam

Gunpoint is coming to Steam! Here’s a video with some gadgets!

As ever, I don’t have a release date, but you can join the mailing list to be told when it’s out.

Thief: Deadly Shadows Development Quotes

I love these – files developers make of things said during development, taken out of context. This one, via Randy Smith, is for Thief: Deadly Shadows, and I’ll paste my favourites below. Continued

Gunpoint Video Blog: Story Vs Games

I talk a bit about games vs stories: how they end up ruining each other, and how I’ve tried to avoid that in Gunpoint.

I mention the gender of the main villain in Gunpoint in this, but it won’t tell you much.

My Short Story For The Second Machine Of Death Collection

My second piece of published fiction will be out in July this year, as part of This Is How You Die: the second collection of stories about a machine that can predict your death.

But! Editor David Malki is also Kickstarting a card game based on the same concept, and since it’s blown its funding goal by over 1000%, they’re releasing a few stories from the anthology to say thanks.

One of them is mine! You can read it now! Here it is!

It’s about a supervillain’s henchman tasked with the job of having their enemies killed in a way that doesn’t contradict their predicted deaths. It is called: LAZARUS REACTOR FISSION SEQUENCE!

If you can’t read it, go here.

Gunpoint Dev Log: From A Broken Mess To A Working Game

A quick update on how Gunpoint’s going.

I AM SO SORRY I LEFT AUTOFOCUS ON! I will remember to disable it next time. My camera is great at everything except detecting how far away an almost stationary human in the center of the frame is.

Five Hours With BioShock Infinite And Ken Levine

“It has the atmosphere of a cheerful village fete, but in a village that couldn’t exist. At one point, we seem to be in a cloud: a thick haze turns everyone in the street to silhouettes, picked out by spectacular rays of golden sunlight. Confetti floats through the air, and hummingbirds pause to probe flowers. Two children splash each other in a leaking fire hydrant.”

“Half an hour later, for reasons I won’t go into, I’m ramming a metal gear into a man’s eye socket until blood geysers all over my face. I’m drenched. Everyone’s screaming. Four more men are coming for me, and this blunt steel prong is all I have to kill them with.”

My preview and interview is up now.

The Calamitous Pacifist In Gunpoint

I’m trying to see if it’s possible to do this level without punching anyone. Not for the first time, my conclusion was: “Nope. Hmm, unless…”

I have to get to those stairs. The guard will shoot me if he sees me. I can’t open the building’s other entrance from the outside. Continued

Not Being An Asshole In An Argument

I don’t argue on the internet anymore. The short version is: it usually gets hostile, and that drives everyone further away from changing their minds.

But I spend a lot of time thinking about whether there’s a way to contribute to a discussion without derailing it. Whether there’s some way of knowing, in advance, that what you’re about to say will make you look like an asshole, start a fight, or be outright wrong.

I think there is. Continued

My SimCity City

The closed beta test of the new SimCity is out, for those in on it. I am! There’s the city I built!

You can see and read about Tyler’s city, built in a different region to the beta, here.

It’s a very demo-y beta: you only get 1 hour before you have to start from scratch. My first one was a single long road, but I quickly discovered that having industrial stuff anywhere near your residential zones poisons everyone and, more importantly, reduces the land value. Continued

Old Tweets

It hasn’t rolled out to everyone yet, but for some, if you go to Settings in Twitter, you’ll get the option to download an archive of all your tweets.

This is cool mainly because Twitter is so terrible at finding or letting you access old stuff: search only works for incredibly recent stuff, and I don’t know of any way to see the start of someone’s timeline, short of scrolling down and hoping the JavaScript doesn’t break any of the 6,000 times it needs to load the next set of tweets.

Anyway, I got mine, and I wondered if I could use it to make old stuff more accessible. Continued

Playing Skyrim With Nothing But Illusion

“In Skyrim, a mage is an unstoppable storm of destruction. In real life, a mage is just an illusionist: they can’t do much except trick you. If one of them turned out to be the world’s only hope of salvation, hijinks and sudden death would inevitably ensue. Since these are my two favourite things, I’ve decided to try playing this way.” Continued

Welcome To Site 7

Look, I changed everything! I usually redesign my blog a bit at the start of every year, but this one is the first time I’ve built a completely new one from scratch in more than eight years. As is now tradition, I’ll give you a song to listen to while you snoop around. Continued

How Mainstream Games Butchered Themselves, And Why It’s My Fault

Published a long while back, don’t think I ever linked it here. A long-suppressed rant at mainstream action game design.

“The instant the first character speaks, I reflexively want them to shut up. If there’s text on screen, I’m not reading it. If there’s a cut-scene, I’m skipping it. If there are no enemies to shoot, I shoot my friends, and if I can’t shoot my friends, I shoot just next to my friends and then swing my crosshair onto them as quickly as possible in a lame attempt to glance them with a bullet I know won’t do anything. I thought that was normal.

Then, playing Bulletstorm the other night and hating every second of it, I had an awful realisation: this is my fault. I’m the reason games suck now. I’m the lazy, belligerent jerk every mainstream shooter seems to be designed for, and it’s because of gamers like me that they’re built this way.”

The creative director of Bulletstorm responded to me, which led to an interesting discussion.