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TOM FRANCIS
REGRETS THIS ALREADY

Hello! I'm Tom. I'm a game designer, writer, and programmer on Gunpoint, Heat Signature, and Tactical Breach Wizards. Here's some more info on all the games I've worked on, here are the videos I make on YouTube, and here are two short stories I wrote for the Machine of Death collections.

Theme

By me. Uses Adaptive Images by Matt Wilcox.

Tom’s Timer 5

The Bone Queen And The Frost Bishop: Playtesting Scavenger Chess In Plasticine

Gridcannon: A Single Player Game With Regular Playing Cards

Dad And The Egg Controller

A Leftfield Solution To An XCOM Disaster

Rewarding Creative Play Styles In Hitman

Postcards From Far Cry Primal

Solving XCOM’s Snowball Problem

Kill Zone And Bladestorm

An Idea For More Flexible Indie Game Awards

What Works And Why: Multiple Routes In Deus Ex

Naming Drugs Honestly In Big Pharma

Writing vs Programming

Let Me Show You How To Make A Game

What Works And Why: Nonlinear Storytelling In Her Story

What Works And Why: Invisible Inc

Our Super Game Jam Episode Is Out

What Works And Why: Sauron’s Army

Showing Heat Signature At Fantastic Arcade And EGX

What I’m Working On And What I’ve Done

The Formula For An Episode Of Murder, She Wrote

Improving Heat Signature’s Randomly Generated Ships, Inside And Out

Raising An Army Of Flying Dogs In The Magic Circle

Floating Point Is Out! And Free! On Steam! Watch A Trailer!

Drawing With Gravity In Floating Point

What’s Your Fault?

The Randomised Tactical Elegance Of Hoplite

Here I Am Being Interviewed By Steve Gaynor For Tone Control

A Story Of Heroism In Alien Swarm

One Desperate Battle In FTL

To Hell And Back In Spelunky

Gunpoint Development Breakdown

My Short Story For The Second Machine Of Death Collection

Not Being An Asshole In An Argument

Playing Skyrim With Nothing But Illusion

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

A Short Script For An Animated 60s Heist Movie

Arguing On The Internet

Shopstorm, A Spelunky Story

Why Are Stealth Games Cool?

The Suspicious Developments manifesto

GDC Talk: How To Explain Your Game To An Asshole

Listening To Your Sound Effects For Gunpoint

Understanding Your Brain

What Makes Games Good

A Story Of Plane Seats And Class

Deckard: Blade Runner, Moron

Avoiding Suspicion At The US Embassy

An Idea For A Better Open World Game

A Different Way To Level Up

A Different Idea For Ending BioShock

My Script For A Team Fortress 2 Short About The Spy

Team Fortress 2 Unlockable Weapon Ideas

Don’t Make Me Play Football Manager

EVE’s Assassins And The Kill That Shocked A Galaxy

My Galactic Civilizations 2 War Diary

I Played Through Episode Two Holding A Goddamn Gnome

My Short Story For The Machine Of Death Collection

Blood Money And Sex

A Woman’s Life In Search Queries

First Night, Second Life

SWAT 4: The Movie Script

Supreme Commander

Another trailer of this has just been released, mixing some new game footage with an interview with Chris Taylor. Taylor’s one of those virtuoso game designers: all zeal and vision; and it’s always a pleasure to hear him talk. He has Quentin Tarrantino’s characteristic spluttering urgency in trying to describe all the cool things he wants to tell you about as quickly as he’s thinking of them. I got an absolutely wonderful but almost entirely useless interview with him at a party in Beverly Hills a few weeks before E3, in which he spent around half the time trying to explain the hydraulics of the system by which the leader of the Cybrans – a brain in a jar – could move around his tank of preservative by thought alone. I guess a brain in a jar does everything by thought alone. But it was as hard as ever not to share his enthusiasm.

The other reason you should watch this is that I’m still convinced it’s going to be the best thing ever. Chris says it’s hard to go back to limited-zoom RTS’s after being able to back all the way up to see the full map in SupCom – he’s putting it lightly. I’ve had a headache (manifested in my middle finger) from banging my cranium against that glass ceiling ever since first seeing the game. I’m a particular fan of the long-game, in general – I play out every important phase of DEFCON in real-time, much to the ennui of my opponents, and I’m always straining against the interface of a game to put my plans into action. That’s been most of the challenge of the RTS for a long time – synchronising assaults, tending to the progress of your base and telling it what to build next, exploring the map click-by-click with your forward groups. All three of those things can be defined from moment one here, which is a brave move. What if those were the fun? DEFCON succeeds by doing the opposite – automating less, forcing you be a frontline general by doing everything yourself. But SupCom’s usability enhancements are doing something equally appealing: promoting you. A Supreme Commander cares not for caretaking work. The interface between you and the game world is now a lieutenant in your army: you tell it what you need doing, and it takes care of the particulars. It flatters you somewhat by assuming you have higher things on your mind, grander schemes.

I came late to Total Annihilation, only playing it properly when it was already ancient. What’s almost as striking as its brilliance is how little it has influenced since – the RTS took nothing from its sublime formula, ignored every innovation except its least interesting one: 3D terrain. Playing it now is like uncovering an alien artifact that fell to Earth long ago – you can’t ignore how old it is, but that doesn’t explain how it can be so far in advance of everything we’ve done so far.

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