TOM FRANCIS
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Heat Signature, A Stealth Space Game About Temperature

Here’s the first video of Heat Signature, a temperature-based space stealth game I’ve been making the last two days. It’s about sneaking up on ships while keeping your ship cool enough to fool their sensors.

So you can jet around an infinite galaxy super fast, but your thrusters generate heat, and enemies can detect that from far away. The closer you want to get to them, the cooler you have to stay, and the more precise you have to be with your thrusters. And to take them out, you have to physically clamp onto their hull and shut down their systems.

GHGC is still my main project, I’m just taking a break from the brutal process of learning Unity to make something quick in Game Maker, where I already speak the language. How far I take this depends on how the next few features work out.

Heat Signature’s Space Birthday Update Is Live!

Heat Signature is one Space Year old today! To celebrate, we’ve released a big free update we’ve been working on for five months, with over 20 features – including our own twist on a Daily Challenge.

Click through for details on each:

• Character Traits
• 7 New Hazards
• Glory Missions & Clients
• Upgraded AI & Reworked Alarms
• Player Story Trading Cards
• Contractors: 4 Unique Enemy Types
• The Daily Challenge
• 10 Quality of Life Features

Continued

Heat Signature’s Launch, And First Player Legend

I reshuffled this post a bit so I can link this part more easily:

Update On The Everything Gun

It’s been great to see how much people are loving this very silly weapon, and how excited people are to send us shots of them finding it. One thing I didn’t forsee was that for a small number of people, it could cause anxiety: the fear of missing out, or even when they have it, the fear of somehow losing it. So we’re going to simplify it: Continued

Heat Signature’s First Four Objective Systems And Why They All Sucked

I’ve been designing and trying various ways for you to make progress towards your objective in Heat Signature, and four bad iterations have led me to a surprising conclusion.

Heat Signature’s Fair Points Update: Reacting To Good Reviews

I was too nervous to read Heat Signature reviews for two weeks after launch. I was relieved to see the scores were great, and after 3.5 years of work, that was all I wanted to hear: I didn’t want to know what their caveats were.

Once I calmed down and read them, though, I was delighted: they were not only very positive, but they told entertaining stories and made intelligent points. And almost every critique I read I thought was a fair point. Hence this: Continued

Heat Signature Will Be At Rezzed 2016 Next Week

Hello! I’ll be at Rezzed in London next week, 7-9 April 2016, and you can come and play Heat Signature while I watch, panic, and frantically patch it on a different PC. Saturday’s sold out, but Thurs and Fri tickets are still available. Our artist John Roberts made this fantastic piece for our booth: Continued

Heat Signature Trailers

I think if I embed a YouTube playlist, I can make this post always show the latest Heat Signature trailer even when I change it in future.

Heat Signature Screenshots

Here’s what Heat Signature looks like these days! The new art is by the multi-talented John Roberts, who also did art for our last game, Gunpoint. Next week I’ll put up a trailer to show all this in action. For those who haven’t seen it moving yet, there’s no break between inside and out: you zoom smoothly from the scale of these interior shots to the big-scale space battles.

When I have new shots in future, I’ll add them on this page and take down any outdated ones. I’ll keep the first three as reasonably representative ones, then below them it’ll be newest-first. Everyone has permission to use these shots in any articles or videos, print or online, as long as you make it clear what game they’re from. Continued

Heat Signature Release Date And Launch Celebrations

Heat Signature will be out on Steam 21st of September 2017! At time of writing, that’s Thursday of next week. It’s for Windows PCs, other platforms will depend on how this one goes.

We don’t do pre-order bonuses because I don’t want to pressure you to buy before reviews are out. But I am super grateful to those who buy at launch, because our whole future depends on how we do that first week. So we’re doing a few special things to celebrate it and thank those of you who are joining us: Continued

Heat Signature Playable At EGX And Fantastic Arcade

Heat Signature will be playable at two different events next month, in the UK and the US!

18-21 September: Fantastic Arcade at the Alamo Drafthouse in Austin, Texas, US
25-28 September: Eurogamer Expo (EGX) in Earls Court, London, UK

I’ll be at both events to talk you through it and answer any questions with “I don’t know,” “No,” or “We’ll see.” I’ll also be doing some form of presentation at each, probably involving playing the game myself and explaining my plans.

Earlier this year I also made a game with artist and designer Liselore Goedhart, in which two players steer the tongues of anteaters and battle each other like disgusting slithery light-cycles as they compete for ants. That’s SimAntics: Realistic Anteater Simulator, and it will also be playable at Fantastic Arcade!

And for EGX, I commissioned my friend and graphic designer Natalie Hanke (who I worked with on Distance) to create this spectacularly pink poster! Continued

Heat Signature Needs An Artist And A Composer

I’ve now made enough of Heat Signature to be fairly sure of what it is, which means a) here’s a new trailer!

And b) I’m ready to start looking for an artist and a composer to work with!

Update: the deadline has passed and applications are now closed! We got a lot! More as I sort through them.

I’d like to do it the same way I did for Gunpoint, with Open Submissions. That means anyone can send in a sample of what they can do, and I’ll pick the best artist and the best composer based on that. In this post I’ll explain loads about what we’re looking for, but the highlights are:

✓ Paid!
✓ No experience required!
✓ Work from anywhere!
✓ Flexible hours!
✓ Game already works!
✓ Application deadline: [EXPIRED!] Continued

Heat Signature Is Out!

Or you can buy it from the Humble Store.

Supporter’s Edition

There’s also a Supporter’s Edition, which comes with a bunch of fun extras: Continued

Heat Signature Factions Trailer, Working At Valve

Surprising news!

• I made a new video showing off John Roberts’ excellent new art for the game’s four factions! (Not that surprising)
• I’m looking for a programmer in the Seattle area to help me finish the game! (Seattle part seems surprising)
• … because I’m moving to Bellevue to work on the game at Valve’s offices! (Extremely surprising but now the Seattle thing is less surprising)

Here’s the new video, which also shows what teleporters and the What Now? screen add to the game:

If you haven’t already, put it on your Steam Wishlist so you hear about it when it comes out. Also, if you were in on a Steam beta, it was probably taken off your wishlist because Steam briefly thought you owned it, so check. And if you want to be in on future tests, make sure you’re on the mailing list (top right). Continued

Heat Signature Development Time-Lapse: 5 Months In 2 Minutes

The reason it’s been a while since I last showed off my space stealth game, Heat Signature, is that I want to use the next video to put out a call for artists and musicians to hire. So it needs to show enough new stuff that the press might cover it, people might share it, and it might get seen by more people.

Don’t apply for either of those jobs yet, though! The other thing I need to do before then is nail down enough of the game’s underlying tech to be sure of precisely what kind of art and music it needs. The way it’s coded right now is rather glitchy, so now I have to investigate whether it’s the fixable kind of glitchy, or the “Fuck this and try a different method entirely” kind of glitchy.

Time lapse

So I’m not going to show much of its current state, but I did put together a time-lapse of everything I’ve done so far: Heat Signature’s five month development in 2 minutes. Continued

He’s Gone Too Far

That’s it, Intro Guy. You are now so bad that you entirely counter-act the greatness of the programme that follows your intolerable gloat. I actually regret watching this episode, the intro was that bad.

It’s not just that an intro is unnecessary, it’s this intro in particular. It’s an intro made by people who don’t just look down on their audience, they actually hate them. It’s the kind of intro I’d produce for I’m A Celebrity And The Suffocating Numbness Of My Life Has Driven Me To New Lows Get Me Out Of Here. It’s openly an advert for the very thing it is a part of. It doesn’t stop at explicitly summarising the themes and symbolism of the preceding season, it actually explains in bullet-point form what’s going to happen in the following episode, and shows clips of it. At first you think it’s going to insult your intelligence, but it quickly becomes clear that the disdain, the spite its authors hold for you far exceeds their restraint, and the insult is merely an appetiser for the flurry of gashing, wrenching, deep and bloody wounds they plan to inflict. And the salt in your mutiliations is a voice-over whose patronising sickly smarm is so drippingly viscious you could choke on it.

There’s no mistaking the venemous cynicism behind this – I spend most of my days feeling it – but attached to something as great as Heroes it becomes an even darker spectre. This is disdain for one of the few remaining wonderful things on television, and only the blackest of burnt, drowned, dead, dead souls could feel it with this level of vacant dispassion. I don’t know who writes these, but I can tell you that they have no irises – their obsidian pupils fill the entirety of their lidless and unblinking eyes.