TOM FRANCIS
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A Snowy Ramble On What Makes Games ‘Different Every Time’

It’s snowing, and I have a mic that make me audible outdoors!

So I got mildly snowed on while I rambled about board games as roguelikes, what matters when making games ‘different every time’, and how Dune Imperium pulls it off so well.

Blundering Into Dead King’s Bluff

Blundered into a board game design lately, and it’s coming together. Here I am talking about it on a cold, sunny, noisy (sorry) day! Will show it in action once some little rules things solidify.

Unity’s Trap

Update: Unity have since walked back the worst part of this threat: those of us using older versions won’t be subject to the new terms unless we upgrade. As far as I understand, there aren’t new terms that would prevent them from pulling this same trick in future, but the fact that the outcry turned them around to this extent is a big relief for me. It suggests we at least have time to finish our current game, and do any essential patching, before they get desperate enough to try something like this again.

Unless there’s a legal guarantee of being able to stick with the terms that came with the version of Unity you use, though, this attempt at a scumbag pressure tactic leaves Unity a very risky prospect for future projects.

Original post:

Last week, Unity announced that they will soon start charging developers $0.20 each time their games are installed, past certain (high) thresholds. This came as a surprise to me and a few thousand other developers who chose Unity, invested in it, and paid for it in large part because they told us they wouldn’t take any of our revenue.

The reaction has been huge, but it’s not clear yet if Unity will make it right. The hasty, vague, conflicting clarifications they’ve offered all seemed aimed at reassuring people “No no, we’re not gonna steal much of your money, because you won’t be successful. Our plan is to steal that guy’s money.”

That’s not my issue, so I just wanna spell out exactly what my issue is. Continued

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

My chess variant stalled a while, cos I rarely felt like coding when my work day was done. So I bought a chess set and some plasticine to try some ideas lo-fi style. What follows is how my first game of this iteration of Scavenger Chess played out.

Continued

Five Problems With Chess

Firstly, of course: many folks I like and respect love chess, and I’m happy for them and have no interest in persuading chess fans to like it less or want something different. But it’s not for everyone, and I’m one of the people for whom it’s not. So what I’m interested in is: what needs fixing to make it a game I enjoy? And if you did that, who else might enjoy it?

I am gonna call these problems problems, though, because it gets exhausting to say “possible areas where there’s scope to broaden or mutate its appeal to a different set of people, without wishing to detract from or disparage the great enjoyment many already draw from the game as it stands.” And because some of them, from my perspective, for players like me, with all the caveats above, seem incredibly fucking stupid. Continued

Badminton

Badminton is the best sport – and I’ve tried easily six of them. Here’s what’s good about it:

• Sound effects: hitting a shuttlecock (they call them birdies here) doesn’t just make a great sound, it makes a whole range of them. You’ve got your gentle pongs, your lively thwaps, all the way up to the fearsome splack of a good overhand smash. I’d say the only sport that can claim more satisfying noises is archery, and in badminton no-one has to die.
• It involves a lot less walking around and picking things up: this is the main thing it has over tennis – even a ridiculously overpowered shot never goes more than a couple feet from the court, and in tennis even the gentlest shot can bounce to a neighbouring country if you’re not there to stop it. This is because of a secret feature of badminton:
• It has Bullet Time built in: a shuttlecock is a weird little contradiction – streamlined in silhouette but engineered to slur through the air like it’s treacle. The harder you hit it, the faster it slows – meaning, basically, go ham. You pretty quickly learn to lunge for shots you think you’ve already missed, because the proportionate slowdown is so extreme that you sometimes get them anyway. It almost feels like you’ve gone slightly back in time to get another chance.
• Extreme dynamic range: these hard shots – aim them up and they absolutely soar, giving your opponent plenty of time to get in position, but also plenty of time to overthink it and whiff at the last minute. Aim them down and it’s the opposite: an absolute bullet to the ground, brutally difficult to defend, but when they do come back it’s such a sudden reversal that all you can do is flinch in self-defense. And those are just the hard shots – at the other end of the spectrum, there’s a whole artform in barely touching the birdie so that it lazily bellyflops over the net and dribbles down the other side in a fatal fall that leaves them hurling themselves across the court to reach it and attempt an equally pathetic shot back.
• Comedy: that’s very, very funny. Even more so as a return to a much more dramatic shot. And even more so if you’re busy celebrating your genius when the fucking thing comes back with exactly the same smug lethargy. And these are just the shots that work – badminton is a masterclass in the taste of victory turning to ashes in your mouth. Pride, cleverness, and an ostentatious wind-up come before a public self-own every three shots. Sometimes a long-awaited serve just drops to the floor without even touching a racket. Sometimes your sneaky side shot goes so far out it’s a valid shot in the next court. Sometimes they set you up for the perfect unstoppable smash and you just beast it directly into the net. Sometimes you beast it under the net. Sometimes you just beast it directly into the ground, and look around at everyone like, well I don’t know what that was supposed to be.
• It’s exercise but I enjoy it? This is sort of self-referential and redundant – I like badminton because I like badminton? – but the last point was too long-winded to feel like a conclusion so here we are.

Void Bastards Vs Heat Signature: A Completely Objective Analysis

Note: this was written around the time Void Bastards was released, but languished in my Drafts for years because I’d planned to make it longer. What’s there all still makes sense to me though, so I’m just gonna make it about the 3 things I did cover and throw it out there:

Void Bastards is a roguelike first-person shooter about boarding randomly generated spaceships. I designed a top-down roguelike about boarding randomly generated spaceships, so it’s interesting to see how the two games tackled the same issues differently, and how well their solutions worked out! I picked three: Continued

Seeking A Composer For Tactical Breach Wizards

Update: Applications are now closed! It’ll take some time to go through them all.

Update: We’ll continue taking applications for the composer position until noon Pacific Time on Wednesday this week! This link should tell you when that is for you.

Original post:

We’re looking for a composer to handle the music for Tactical Breach Wizards!

• This is a contract position for this project only.
• Remote, paid – let us know your preferred rate. Ask for what’s fair, getting this done cheaply is not a priority for us.
• See below for the scope and nature of the work.
• We expect to be working on the game for at least 1 more year, so that’s the rough time frame for working on this.

We don’t care about years of experience or prestige of prior projects, all we need is to hear some of your existing work – whether it’s personal or professional. You don’t need to have worked in games before – the game-specific concerns are outlined here so you can judge if they’re gonna be a problem.

Instructions for applying are at the bottom of this post, but first I’ll give as much info as I can about the job: Continued

Gridcannon: A Single Player Game With Regular Playing Cards

I thought it would be an interesting game design challenge to come up with a single player game you can play with a regular deck of playing cards. My first try, about a month ago, didn’t work. But on Sunday I had a new idea, and with one tweak from me and another from my friend Chris Thursten, it’s playing pretty well now! In the video I both explain it and play a full game. I’ll write the rules here, but they’ll make more sense when you see it played: Continued

Making A Better Card Feel Worse With UX

Nowhere Prophet has a power where each turn you can choose 1 card from your hand to discard, and draw another to replace it.

Slay the Spire has a power where you draw 1 extra card per turn, then must discard 1 of your choice right after.

Slay’s power is straight up better: you get to see what the new card is before deciding what to discard, which both lets you factor it into synergy considerations, and allows you to discard the new card itself, if it’s worse than what you have.

But experientially, Nowhere Prophet’s feels more positive. You’re presented with a hand you can keep, or if you like you can get a do-over on the card you like least. Doing nothing is fine, but if you see a bad card you can chuck it for good odds of a better one. Yay! Continued

Steam Quirks For Developers

Talking to people at GDC and Rezzed, especially people just starting in game dev, made me realise I’ve accumulated a load of non-obvious knowledge about how Steam works and how best to use it. Info like this tends to get passed around between established devs, at events and in closed circles, but newer devs and those excluded from these groups don’t get access to it.

Everything marked ‘info’ was either learned by me first hand, or told to me by Valve at events with the express purpose of getting this kind of info out to developers, without request of confidentiality. I say this because I do also get told things confidentially – none of that is in here. Continued

Heat Signature’s Space Birthday Update Is Live!

Heat Signature is one Space Year old today! To celebrate, we’ve released a big free update we’ve been working on for five months, with over 20 features – including our own twist on a Daily Challenge.

Click through for details on each:

• Character Traits
• 7 New Hazards
• Glory Missions & Clients
• Upgraded AI & Reworked Alarms
• Player Story Trading Cards
• Contractors: 4 Unique Enemy Types
• The Daily Challenge
• 10 Quality of Life Features

Continued

Pitch: Tactical Breach Wizards

I’ve been tweeting GIFs of a game I’m prototyping in Unity for a while now, codenamed Tiny Ex-Cons, and recently did a video blog about the core elements I’m hoping to combine if I go ahead with it.

It’s too early to know if this is my next big project or not – my prototype doesn’t have enough to prove the concept yet – but I do want to start showing more of it. And I’ve been holding back part of the concept, and indeed the name. It’s not hard to describe, but it’ll only really work with the right art, so I didn’t want to talk about it until I was sure that side of things would work.

And hey, you know who’s good at art? Gunpoint and Heat Signature artist John Roberts! So he’s joined me again and sketched out some ideas for this new concept. Which is… Continued

Heat Signature’s Launch, And First Player Legend

I reshuffled this post a bit so I can link this part more easily:

Update On The Everything Gun

It’s been great to see how much people are loving this very silly weapon, and how excited people are to send us shots of them finding it. One thing I didn’t forsee was that for a small number of people, it could cause anxiety: the fear of missing out, or even when they have it, the fear of somehow losing it. So we’re going to simplify it: Continued

A Leftfield Solution To An XCOM Disaster

This story starts exactly like the last great mission I had in an XCOM game: I kinda took on two missions at once. And everyone got tired from the first one, so we had to send our B-team on the other: to rescue a VIP. Continued