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.
Search
Field Studies 6: The PC Gamer Sporecast
Update: I’m a complete fucking idiot. The image that was the whole freaking point of this post was still set to Private on my Flickr account, so I’m guessing no-one saw it. Here goes:
If you’re playing Spore this weekend, I made a thing you can subscribe to to get awesome stuff showing up in your game. Sporecasts are hand-picked collections of content, and they’ll take priority over random stuff when Spore is populating the galaxy.
I don’t really gain anything from people subscribing to this – if it were fame, love and comments I were after, I’ve already got those by making a pathetic toaster as my first ever building.
Sporecasts are just a way for uncreatives like me to feel like they’re contributing to the Spore community. Unfortunately the tool for making them is terrible right now, and flat-out refuses to acknowledge the existence of most buildings, vehicles and spacecraft, so I’ll have to add some of my favourites of those later. This is also why the vast majority of Sporecasts out there are just three or four shit monsters.
Not in the PC Gamer Sporecast, or any Sporecast, because Spore’s Sporecaster sucks.
ZomBuster’s behatted Antlion is in there, and I ran into him at the Space stage yesterday. I struck up a trade route with their race, but then one of my allies – the moustache bananas – started invading Antlion worlds. Naturally, their whole race had to die. I roped an Antlion ship into helping me – they’re nasty black Piranhas in my game – and went on a rapid bombing run to systematically exterminate every city on every planet in their empire. They surrendered pretty early on – I’m playing as the Stompwings, who achieved Galactic God status long ago – but I kept on bombing. I’m not sure if I mentioned, but I really like bombing.
Tip: get the Shield module for your ship as early as possible. It’s not some shitty 20% defense for 10 seconds, it renders you completely invulnerable for several minutes, enough to lay waste to an entire planet.
More Spore