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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

Trust Me With Your Ears: Volume One

Sound is sort of a menace on the internet – we browse at work, we browse when we’re tired, we browse when other people in the house are asleep, and sometimes we browse shortly after watching a video whose sound was really really quiet, so we’ve turned up the volume really, really loud. And there are some sites, people and link-sources that you can’t trust not to point you to something loud, obscene, offensive, terrifying or Rick Astley. Even the venerable Waxy.org is guilty: Andy once posted one of those links where everything seems normal, then a giant zombie face appears and screams at the top of your speaker’s volume.

I would like James to be trustworthy. I hope that it already is for a small portion of the people reading this. So I’d like to leverage, possibly confirm, and possibly expand such a trust by occasionally posting sound files with absolutely no explanation. I think it would be nice to sometimes hear something without any clue what it’s going to be, only that someone thought it was worth sharing, and do so knowing that it’s not going to be a nasty shock.

They will sometimes be speech, sometimes just sound, sometimes music, but when they’re music, the music itself won’t be why I’m posting it. Music is too divisive, I want these things to be interesting or entertaining independent of your tastes. Sometimes you’ll find out what they are when you listen, sometimes they’ll leave you with no clue. I’ll wait a few days then explain what they were in the comments, so don’t read the comments before listening.

I hope you’ll also trust that I would not find embedding a Rick Roll at the end of this post even vaguely amusing.

[audio:Trust01.mp3]

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