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.
Search
Concerned
The future is great. That’s actually kind of the outlook of Concerned‘s protagonist, trapped in the same Orwellian dystopia as Gordon Freeman but looking firmly on the bright side. But I mean, Chris Livingstone takes screenshots of Half-Life 2 using a free mod by a passive-aggressive sociopathic genius named Garry Newman, and makes a webcomic out of it. The result is that Chris, who is obviously a great writer but presumably not an artist in the traditional sense, makes my new favourite comic three times a week. Without the futuristic awesomeness of games and gamers, he might just be another writer who feels like he could probably do a webcomic but can’t draw. He would also have nothing to mock.
Concerned satirises Half-Life 2 with affection, though. The title refers to the protagonist’s pen-name – he’s the author of one of the letters Breen reads out on his compulsory telecast at the start of the game. That strip is probably my favourite of the many tie-ins with the experiences of Gordon Freeman, who presumably arrives a week or so later.
Probably not intentionally, the positive outlook of the main character also plays to my own subconscious desires to live in City 17. It says something about a game’s artists when they create a dystopia so beautifully it undermines the dystopian bit.