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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By me. Uses Adaptive Images by Matt Wilcox.
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The Grappling Hook Game, Dev Log 6: The Accomplice
I’ve decided to let people play this prototype of my Grappling Hook Game at IndieCade East in New York next month, partly to force me to focus on what it really needs to be a playable game. After a week and a bit, here’s what I’ve got.
There’s now a second character who can cut through glass, and the grappling hook character can pull them up and swing them around to get them where they need to be.
The test level now has three buildings and five stealable objectives, just to give a feel for some situations and spaces that might come up. Obviously these buildings would have armed guards and staircases rather than holes in the floor. These won’t be the only two characters, either, though you won’t have to take them all to every job.
I don’t know if the game will be multiplayer – obviously that would be cool, but it all depends how hard that is to do. It will definitely be designed for single player first.
It’s starting to feel cool, now. Dangling from a rope to break glass or snatch things feels very heisty, and that’s the main thing I want to achieve at this point. It’s going to be interesting to balance that with the silliness: the grappling hook is just sort of inherently nuts, and leads to wacky stunts that don’t look realistic but are sort of hilarious. I’m not gonna worry about that clash until it really feels like a problem – there will be fall damage, and that might make some of these hilarious deaths rather than repeatable madness.
I’m posting occasional shots from development on Twitter.