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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

Post 500

Quickly, drink this. I just found a retroactive excuse for tonight’s pina coladas: I’ve posted 500 things on this site?

This 500th post calls for MINIMUM CONTENT and MAXIMUM STATS. They start from when the site moved to Pentadact.com in February 2008, and the graph looks a bit like this (click for readable size):

Special thanks to Chris Livingston for being my biggest human referrer, which will make him vital when the robot referrers rise up against the human referrers and we need some muscle. He’s also writing about film and TV as well as games these days, with his wife – bafflingly also called Kris Livingston. It is awesome to have him back on the blogonets, and some of his amazing old stuff like his Merchants of Brooklyn screenplay is finally back online.

BACK TO STATS.

Apparently- wow, the Left 4 Dead gnome thing is my most visited post ever? Here’s the confusing list:

1. I Played Through Left 4 Dead 2 Holding A Goddamn Gnome
The only thing I know about how StumbleUpon works is that it rewires the internet so that this post is disproportionately popular, forever.

2. I Played Through Episode Two Holding A Goddamn Gnome
My SEO seminar is entitled Goddamn Gnomes and How Holding Them Can Grow Your Demographic.

3. Team Fortress 2 Unlockable Ideas
Proof that if you can’t do something well, do it anyway.

4. Ending BioShock
Imagine this post spluttered loudly and indecipherably by a drunk, and you know what I’m like to hang out with.

5. This Is All I Can Think During StarCraft 2’s Cut Scenes
Can’t help noticing the popularity of posts in which I write little or nothing at all.

6. Fallout Girl: Striking Out
Thousands of people saw this! Almost none of them were inspired to read the next or previous entries! Ouch.

7. Far Cry 2: Impersonation Of A Buddy
Thanks to a celebrity cameo in the comments – cheers, Clint!

8. Plants Vs Zombies: Lawns I Have Loved
Wow. OK, no idea.

9. The Best And The Worst Of Mass Effect 2 (Spoiler Safe)
Venting pent up opinion from not getting to review it.

10. A Stab At Meet The Spy
Which, as everyone pointed out, was too long. Then Meet The Spy actually came out, and was more than twice as long as every other video in the series. IN YOUR FACE, people with a reasonable point!

More importantly, we just passed 10,000 comments, and that is tough to comprehend. Even after six years, this place almost never gets a “first!” or a “meh”, so that’s 9,900 worthwhile contributions – more than I’ll ever make myself. Thanks, everyone.

*hic*