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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

Plants Vs Zombies: Lawns I Have Loved

Plants Vs Zombies is now out, and £7 on Steam. In it, you plant plants to stop zombies. It will enslave you like a delicious drug.

I’ve spent about forty hours of my life defending that little house from the undead through the craft of horticulture, and I liked it so much I’m actually quoted on that Steam page. Here are a few of the gardens I’ve landscaped in that time of which I happen to have screenshots on this machine.

field

Yes, this works. There’s a twist when you replay Plants Vs Zombies that encourages you to try stupid experiments like The Frozen Field Of Unending Spikeweeds here. The silvery ones are Spike-Rocks, secretly the most useful upgrade in the game, but for a reason that won’t be obvious at first.

roof

Wedge formation! Largely pointless. But Kernel-paults are so brilliant – “There’s butter on my head” – and so cheap that you can afford to try ultra-reinforced meshes of Tallnuts and Chompers on these levels.

Flag 24

AAAAAAH! Man, you should have seen this place before Flag 24. It was a work of art. It was a machine. And yet, it was a lawn.

Now it is ate.

Truly, your garden has not known horror until you get to the mid-twenties in Survival: Endless. That, and the mini-game that lets you play as the zombies, are responsible for most of that horrific play-time figure I quoted earlier.

PvZ takes its time to get going, but the stream of new wonders throughout that time is steady and thick. Do not play it if there are things on this Earth you still hope to achieve.