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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

Phew

Turns out the last item on my Redesign To-Do List – “Shoehorn old text into new template” – was the hardest. I still have bits to add to the Film and Television sections, but they’re bits I don’t care an awful lot about, so it’s debatable that I should waste your time with them.

Checklist for the new design:

  • Fills screen
  • Co-opts ‘trendy’ rounded corners
  • Mutilates WordPress to own evil ends
  • Heavy Flickr exploitation
  • Comments over-promoted

I think that’s most of it. The last one means that your comments appear on the front page, letting you graffiti and deface this site as you please. The main purpose of this drawn-out conversion to WordPress was to enable comments, so please scrawl on everything, especially the ‘Best X’ type pages. You don’t need to log in, all fields are optional and comments are unmoderated so they’ll appear right away.

If I could also direct your attention to the rewritten Games section, the three new Philosophy sections, and the new Comics and Blogs links. The free MP3s linked in the top right there will get updated (in fact, they already have been before this went up, so I’ll switch the old ones in after a while). Brace yourself for the odd broken link there, because I’m pointing you to other people who’ve uploaded them, and they may get scared. To my knowledge they’re legally free tracks, but you never know.

I discovered there’s been a new trailer for the Firefly film, Serenity, since the one I saw. Head over to Television for a link. I could paste it here, of course, but I’m trying to get rid of you.

Apologies to anyone who disliked the crazy-long nature of the old design – I honestly thought WordPress would automatically curtail the main page and archive old posts, but it doesn’t seem to. I’ll work out how to do it manually before it gets too long.

Lastly, the reason all the posts here are about specific things is just that I’ve been posting and reposting the content for the media sections – normally it’ll be mostly more traditional blog-style posts here.