TOM FRANCIS
REGRETS THIS ALREADY

Naming Drugs Honestly In Big Pharma

I’ve been playing Big Pharma, a game where you design production lines to manufacture cures to sell for maximum profit, or to genuinely help people, as your fancy may dictate. It’s excellent and I have become hopelessly addicted to it, but my favourite part is having to come up with names for the often double-edged drugs your imperfect process has produced: Continued

Pedestrian-Cyclist Tensions Reach A Flashpoint On The Canal Path

Today I cycled along the canal, which is neither a cycle path nor a footpath but a Resentment Path: one where both types of traffic are permitted but each feels the other is rather overstepping its bounds. Pedestrians resent the bike’s speed, its hard metal frame, and act like making way for it is a much bigger imposition than yielding to a jogger of equal pace and width. Cyclists resent the habit of pedestrians to expand – like a gas – to fill whatever sized vessel they find themselves in. In this way two people can entirely block a four-person-wide path, and even when they grudgingly accept the need to compress to allow something to pass, will immediately re-expand thereafter, maximising the number of times this huffy dance is necessary. Continued

Gunpoint Exclusive Edition Owners Now Have A Two-Week Alpha Of Heat Signature

If you own the Exclusive Edition of Gunpoint on Steam – or the Exclusive Extras as DLC – you now have access to a Windows-only, very rough and time-limited alpha test version of Heat Signature!

If you don’t, though, I don’t recommend buying it just to get in on this! This is very unfinished, very unoptimised, and time-limited: I will close it down in two weeks and then you won’t have it anymore. It exists purely to help me find problems with the game and get people’s thoughts, not necessarily to give them the best experience or one I’d charge for individually. Continued

One Problem With Open Game Development

In general I really like open game development – talking and writing publicly about what I’m working on – but I do have one problem. The time when I want to share what I’ve been making is when, after an exhausting amount of work, I’ve finally created something I’m happy with. But sharing it invites critique: anyone who sees a way it could be better will generally tell you about it. Continued

Vapour Trail Experiments

It’s Sunday, so I’m allowed to work on things that aren’t important. This started as a test for an idea I have of how to create a ‘wake’ that expands behind you, something I ultimately want to use to cut through some layers of cloud as you fly. But I accidentally made a cooler version of the existing contrail, so I tried randomly colouring it, and here we are.

Not sure what to do with it from here. I like everything about it except the end, it has what I call ‘fat tail’ problem: no matter how gently I tell the alpha to fade out, the final, big chunk of vapour always looks like it ends rather suddenly, like your ship just has this big fat tail following it.

I like the idea that breacher ships of different factions would have different contrail colours, though. And I think engine upgrades will probably affect this too.

Here are a million shots: Continued

Spot The Bug

My current task in Heat Signature is to tweak the airlocks so there’s room to put a closed door between you and the rest of the ship when you board. That way, you have as much time as you like to plan out your attack and wait till the guards are where you want them.

I needed the airlocks to clear 4 squares on the ship’s collision grid, to give you room to stand. But I hit a weird bug: some of them, maybe a third, did not clear. I checked the ‘clear grid’ function was executing on each of them, but still some of them ended up blocked. Continued

Eurogamer Play Heat Signature

I let Eurogamer play Heat Signature and sat in the back seat to passive-aggressively criticise! It went great!

This is both a slightly better looking build than the last trailer, and a longer vid – shows the whole disrupt/isolate/capture cycle.

What It’s Like Showing Heat Signature To The Press

I used to be press! Now I’m a developer. So I’m showing them my game, and trying to figure out if what I’m showing is exciting. Here’s what that’s like. I would like it known that I really am saying ‘Alec’ when I refer to Alec but it sounds a bit like Alex because of a mouth thing. A similar mouth thing to when I appear to say ‘intereted’ right after.

Writing vs Programming

Writing is like having a conversation with someone who can’t reply until you’ve finished.

Programming is like having a conversation with a robot who screams at you if you pause in the wrong place, electrocutes you if you change your mind, and explodes if you ever use the future tense.

Let Me Show You How To Make A Game

After 7 months, 25 episodes, and about 16 hours of total running time, my tutorial series is complete! I talk you through making a game, from writing your first line of code, to releasing and selling it. It’s aimed at absolute beginners, it only uses free software, the tutorial itself is free, ad-free, the game we made is free, and it’s in fairly digestible 45-minute episodes.

Hope it’s of use! Here’s the game we made:

Back Up Your Stuff

My Twitter-friend Chelsea may have lost a truly heartbreaking amount of work when a powercut somehow wiped her hard drive. She and probably anyone following the awful saga have resolved to be more zealous about backing stuff up online, so I thought I’d do a post about what I use and what I think of it. Continued

New Heat Signature Video: Galaxies, Suction And Wrench-Throwing

As always, follow it on Twitter or sign up to be told when it’s out, or ready for testing, here.

I also made a short montage of all the ways I fucked this video up in previous takes: Continued

What Works And Why: Nonlinear Storytelling In Her Story

What Works And Why is a thing where I dig into the design of a game I like and try to analyse what makes it good, hopefully to learn from it but also because I love this stuff.

Spoiler-free

Continued

Tiny Design

Tiny Design is a good blog about tiny design choices and why they were (probably) made. A lot of them are things you might not consciously notice, which made me think that there may be others you still haven’t consciously noticed. So here’s one you might not have noticed in Gunpoint! Unless you followed its development, because I tweeted about it 5 years ago. Continued

Thoughts On Neon Struct

In the new podcast I discuss what I thought of Neon Struct, a retro first-person stealth game by Eldritch creator David Pittman, with very conscious nods to Deus Ex and Thief. Here is the part where I do that!

I didn’t like it at first but then I did. A few people have asked if I’ll do a Let’s Play: I tried, but as you’ll hear, level 1 did not go well and took a very long time, so I stopped. Steve Gaynor’s playthrough here is much how mine went: we both tried the same thing and had the same problems.