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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The Shadow Line Lines In The Shadow Line
The Shadow Line is finished now, and it was good until it got a bit wanky at the end. It’s nice to have something with a plot that genuinely requires some processing between episodes, and the cast has made me a fan of four of five actors I’d never seen before.
But a lot of characters felt the need to laboriously explain how the plot related to the broader themes the writer intended to touch on, some could not leave a room without valedicting six to ten separate times, and more than ever before, they would not stop trying to get the words ‘shadow’ and ‘line’ into the same sentence.
OK: “I might have a shadow on a line” is part of the plot, and if you tell me that’s the real cop lingo for an inside man on a drug deal, I can’t dispute it. But it’s so close to the title that no-one can hear it without a reflexive immersion break of, “Hey, that’s like the title of the show!” And it isn’t actually the title of the show.
I mean, it doesn’t explain it or give it any extra meaning. If a shadow is an inside man and a line is a drug deal or recurring drug deal, what’s a shadow line? A sentient drug deal that agrees to tell the police about itself?
So it gets painful when they mix four or five of these mentions with awkward references to “crossing the line”, “finding the line”, and subsequently attempting to “walk the line”, all while having to “live in the shadows”, “run to the shadows”, or “write significant-sounding dialogue for a show named The Shadow Line. From the shadows. Line.”
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