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.
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Chris Livingston’s Merchants Of Brooklyn Movie Script
I appreciate that many of you must already read his blog, but a) this is too good to go unlinked, and b) I never formally nodded to Chris’s excellent relaunch as First-Person Shouter, aborting one idea – itself the blog to accompany another aborted idea – to revive yet another aborted idea: a general games blog. Soft contrast designs with harmonious palettes, liberal use of colourful images and strictly logical layouts make my eyes happy.
Merchants of Brooklyn is an ultra-violent CryEngine 2 game about not so much Merchants as cavemen. Chris has not played or seen it, which makes his screenplay adaptation – Cloned Cavemen of Future Brooklyn: The Movie – all the sweeter. Let’s play a clip:
THE PRESIDENT OF BROOKLYN
How is the network of sky bridges coming along?
SCIENTIST
Incredibly well. As I suspected, cavemen are extremely
adept at building networks of sky bridges.
THE PRESIDENT OF BROOKLYN
So, no problems?
SCIENTIST
Well, we did have a setback. One caveman had his arm
cut off with a chainsaw.
THE PRESIDENT OF BROOKLYN slams his fists down on his desk.
THE PRESIDENT OF BROOKLYN
Dammit! We were so close to making this work.
SCIENTIST
It’s okay, we have, like, thousands of spare cavemen.
Too many, really. We’ll just get rid of him and replace
him with one of the many, many extra cavemen we have.
THE PRESIDENT OF BROOKLYN
Not on my watch. I want that caveman fixed and back to
work tomorrow. Give him a new robot arm that turns into
different weapons.