TOM FRANCIS
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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.
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By me. Uses Adaptive Images by Matt Wilcox.
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Plan B Is Complete
Thirty-five hours of play, six hundred and fifty billion people dead, sixteen game-years passed, fifteen thousand words written, a month and ten days in the uploading, and it is done.
The game did right by me again, generating a story worth writing about, creating drama, and saving the toughest problem – and hence my most obtuse solution – till the end. The final clash really did last exactly seven turns, too, letting me add a Half-Life 2 reference to the Star Wars, Star Trek, Babylon 5, Iain M Banks, Futurama, Douglas Adams, Eddie Izzard, Team Fortress 2 and Penny Arcade references.
The first thing I wanted to do after finishing that preposterous game was to play a nice and small one – just a couple of races, a dozen or so stars, only a few billion dead, no hard feelings. Playing on the Immense scale is like a mental gymnasium: there’s really no limit to how much there is to think about or how hard you want to go at it, except your own willingness to work your brain muscles out. Playing on a small scale after that, I felt like my ears were still ringing from the data noise of the galactic apocalypse.
It was kind of nice.