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 World Of Goo Soundtrack Is Out, Free, And Amazing
A few things to say about this:
- As delightful as the game’s squishy look is, I’d still love it if the artwork was mediocre. But without the magnificent, booming, haunting, spacious music, this would have been a very different game, and a much less exciting one.
- Free, downloadable, and with full versions of tracks you hear only parts of in-game – this is the way to do it. A commercial disc priced to squeeze a tiny trickle of money out of your most devoted customers, lacking the tracks people are likely to buy it for because of licensing restrictions – this is not. Soundtracks are promos. The people who already have the game can just rip the music from its files, even if you’ve tried to stop them.
- There are lots of highlights, but my favourite track in the game is still the music to the Red Carpet level (pictured). I had the chance to ask Kyle about the music a few weeks back, and I said this one sounded like a bad dance track slowed down, which somehow made it majestic. He explained that it is a bad dance track slowed down, written as a joke on the awfulness of nineties music, and the full version on this soundtrack includes sections played at normal speed. Witness the shift from glorious to obnoxious and back again:
[audio:KyleGabler-RedCarpet.mp3]
According to the liner notes, the vocalist is “an astrophysicist named Jessica. I gave a her a chainsaw for her wedding and we never spoke again. The end.” I thought she was a keyboard sample.