TOM FRANCIS
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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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The Giant Issue Of PC Gamer
The latest PC Gamer UK is about 50% bigger than usual, has the coolest subscriber’s cover I think I’ve ever seen, and is probably the best issue we’ve done in years. Also you get a free Team Fortress 2 hat with it.
We finally got to the point where the perceived value of the coverdisc was less than the value of the extra pages we could make with the money it costs, and dropped it. As a former disc editor of PC Gamer, I will say this: thank fuck.
We’ve done lots of new stuff with the extra space, but I’m particularly happy that this issue is packed with diary-type stuff. It’s my favourite kind of writing both to read and write, and I got to do loads of it this issue, and read loads more by better people.
My main thing was a 10-page Skyrim diary – I got a nice long session with it, so I just wrote up the whole weird story of my experiences with it. It’s awesome. Properly fresh, huge and new. And like Oblivion, rough, crazy and over-ambitious. In the 2-page interview that follows, Todd Howard tells me what happened on his wedding night.
The other big diary feature is about Artemis, a multiplayer game where each person mans one station on a Star Trek style bridge. I was the engineer, O’Francis, and it was honestly the nerdiest thrill of my life. Tim asked me how long repairs would take, I estimated half an hour, then got it done in five minutes. It doesn’t get more authentic than that.
Then there are 8 Now Playing pieces, our shorter diary bits about whatever we’re up to. Great pieces from a few less common faces in there this issue, including Chris Impossibly Nice Donlan on Super Crate Box, Duncan I Also Work For Wired Geere on Universe Sandbox, and Phil Octaeder Savage on Frozen Synapse.
Normally I’d suggest you grab it from our online shop, but rather embarrassingly we’ve already run out of stock for individual issue sales. It was a bit of an experiment, and it went better than expected. You can still subscribe, though I don’t know which issue it’ll start with.
We’ve just launched with this issue on iTunes’ new Newsstand, and we’re already on Zinio. I’m not totally sure if and how the hat comes with the various digital options – in the physical mag, it’s a printed code. And in the UK at least, shops still exist.
Gunpoint In The Press
Gunpoint got lots of wonderful write-ups when I put up the first batch of shots two weeks back. In fact, the reaction took me by surprise a bit, and I’ve been struggling to keep up with all the interesting e-mails that have come in since.
I wasn’t expecting anyone to cover this, so I didn’t really talk to anyone beforehand. If you work for a site or mag and are interested in covering Gunpoint, just drop me a mail at pentadact@gmail.com.
I’m always happy to sort you out with a recent build so you can have a play, and answer any questions. I managed to do this with Ars Technica, so their piece is a preview. Here are some quotes from that, and some of the other lovely words people wrote about Gunpoint.
Gunpoint hands on: an intelligent indie spy thriller—with breakable glass
“Guns actually introduce tension into the game, which is a rare thing in modern action titles… In minutes I felt like a capable killer, and began skulking around each level like a pro. The full release can’t come soon enough.”
Ars Technica
Gunpoint Points Out Its New Look
“In between murdering trees and optimising for search engines, Tom’s drafted in some artists to dramatically overhaul the game’s look, which results in the rather eye-catching, Flashback-y aesthetic…”
Rock, Paper, Shotgun
Secret agent indie Gunpoint makes being an electrician cool
“From plumbers and farmers to … Noids, video games have a long tradition of elevating blue collar jobs to rockstar status. Now, after eying these new Gunpoint screens, it looks like we’ll be adding “electrician” to that list when Tom Francis’ secret agent game arrives this Christmas.”
Joystiq
This Indie Game is Giving me Flashbacks of, Well, Flashback
“It looks wonderful, in a “Deus Ex meets Canabalt” kind of way. It also helps the game has photocopiers. I love games with photocopiers.”
Kotaku
Stealth Platformer Gunpoint is Looking Mighty Fine!
“Gunpoint looks absolutely glorious.”
IndieGames.com
Gunpoint’s Graphics Now As Awesome As Its Concept
GameSetWatch
Gunpoint Screenshots
This is a split shot showing how the same level looks normally and in Crosslink mode. Crosslink mode is what you switch to to rewire the electronic bits of a building: you can see what everything’s hooked up to, and drag these connections around to make the level work the way you want it to.
Everyone in Gunpoint dies in one gunshot – even you – and the guards are extremely accurate. A good plan doesn’t involve giving them the chance to shoot at you. This – this was a bad plan.
The colours that devices glow tells you what circuit they’re on. Things on different circuits can’t be linked to each other, and some high security circuits require you to get to their circuit box and tap into them manually before you can rewire stuff. There’ll be a colourblind mode where circuits are distinguished by symbols, too.
If you can get the jump on them, you can throw yourself into guards pretty hard. Windows won’t stop you.
Guess I got shot a lot testing this level.
You can use Crosslink mode to set up ridiculously elaborate chain reactions, and even infinite loops of devices triggering each other. I try to make sure that the super advanced stuff is never necessary to progress, but there are always extra things to achieve with finesse solutions. This one isn’t a finesse solution, it’s just me connecting a bunch of shit up to make the wires look pretty.
You slide a bit when you land from a powerful jump. I don’t have anything intellectually interesting to say about this, it just feels really cool – particularly if you slip off the edge of a roof and land flat on your face.
My Deus Ex: Human Revolution Review
My review of Deus Ex: Human Revolution is finally online. It is the greatest thing. The game, not the review. Kind of a big one, so I hope I explained it well enough.
Gunpoint Art Progress
Got three levels done and the bare bones of the environment art for this setting in. It’s pretty far off the lovely mock-up right now, but already it feels awesome to be working with stuff that looks good. I’ve never built anything that didn’t look like a programmer’s prototype before.
Gunpoint Art Style Mockup
Edit: This isn’t new, just separating it out from this so it can live on the new Gunpoint site.
Gunpoint’s at a really exciting stage now – character animation for the player and the basic guard type is done, so the game has a lot of its final ‘feel’. And John’s just passed over the first set of environment art, along with a mockup showing all of it crammed into one showcase level – a real one would be less busy. And check it the hell out (click):
It looks way too good. Now I feel like I’ve got to make a proper game or something. The background is obviously just a stretched version of Fabian’s original at the moment, but the rest just looks done. Which means I’m way behind on the coding side of things.
So by the end of this weekend, I want to have all of Gunpoint’s Act One working: that’s the first for or five levels, which mostly use this tile set. It’s sort of about escape anyway, come to think of it. By the end of them, the player should understand all the basic mechanics and have played around with crosslinking a bit – enough to see the point of it.
It’ll also kick off the plot, and resolve the most immediate part of it, but how much of that will work at this stage I don’t know. I’ll certainly get the actual dialogue in there – so far, writing has been the easy bit.
The Escape Game I’m Not Going To Make This Weekend
The 48-hour game-making competition Ludum Dare is back on this weekend, and the theme is Escape. This is the 21st compo – I entered the 19th with Scanno Domini, and regretted not entering the 20th.
Gunpoint’s at too exciting a stage right now to take time off from it. If I was making a game about Escape this weekend, though, here’s what it’d be.
Escape Velocity
You’re a small escape pod with a single thruster, jetting around an infinite randomly generated space. Planets of randomly generated size attract you with their gravitational pull. If you land on one, you’ll find your thruster isn’t powerful enough to let you escape.
You can, however, press down to burrow through the crust of the planet into its gooey core. Your pod automatically sucks up the molten minerals in the centre of the planet to use as fuel. The bigger the planet, the more intensely its fuel burns, and therefore the more powerful your thruster can get if you suck up its whole core. It’s just enough power to escape the gravitational pull of a planet this size, so from now on you can escape any planet that isn’t bigger than this one without boring to its core.
As soon as you start sucking up a planet’s core, though, it becomes unstable and will soon explode. It also gets lighter, reducing its gravitational pull. You have to judge how long you can afford to keep sucking up its core before you need to start escaping. The longer you suck, the more powerful your thruster and the weaker the gravitation pull it has to overcome, but the closer you get to the planet’s detonation.
You have to leave the crust through the hole you made on your way in, or take a second to drill a new one. Provided you get outside the fatal radius in time, you can ride the blast wave of the explosion for a speed boost that’ll last till you next hit a planet, or thrust in a different direction.
You’re trying to get to the galactic core, a direction indicated on-screen, by progressively increasing your thruster power and armour to increase speed and skip more and more planets on the way. You want to get there to suck the whole thing up and use it as fuel to escape spacetime or whatever THE END.
A Cheating Supreme Commander AI’s Base
If you saw our final assault on the red base in the last big PCG game, imagine that being crushed. It didn’t even take them long to rebuild. Hopefully we’ll have time to make a video of this one too.
Let Us Mumble You Through Our Supreme Commander Game
We finally got around to turning one of our many SupCom matches into a video you can watch. It’s the one written up in the latest mag, six of us versus two cheating AIs.
M83 – Midnight City
I love this. It’s their usual shimmering synth with spacey squeaks, and then at some point it just seems unable to contain its excitement and goes all-out eighties sax. It’s one of the best things to go.
The MP3 is free to download if you sign up for their newsletter or whatever.
You Can Sell Your Diablo 3 Loot For Actual Money
I was at Blizzard last week to play a bit of Diablo 3, and find this out: it has an auction house where players can buy from and sell to each other for real money.
It’s both crazier and slightly less evil than it initially sounds: it’s not Blizzard selling this stuff, and while they take a transaction fee, it’s not proportional to the item value. They say they expect it to break even.
The crazier part is that you could actually make money from this system, with no risk: you get a few free listings a week, and you can use them to sell items you found for real money without even having given Blizzard your credit card.
Lots more details, screenshots and quotes from Blizzard in my piece on PC Gamer. I am broadly negative about it.
Update: I’m in a podcast with Graham and Tim discussing what we think of all this.
Update: My preview of the Diablo 3 beta is also up now. The game itself is really, really good I’m afraid.
Update: Now we’ve done a video where me, Tim and Graham talk you through what’s going on in the latest footage.