TOM FRANCIS
REGRETS THIS ALREADY
Hello! I'm Tom. I designed a game called Gunpoint, about rewiring things and punching people, and now I'm working on a new one called Heat Signature, about sneaking aboard randomly generated spaceships. Here's some more info on all the games I've worked on, here's the podcast I do, here are the videos I make on YouTube, here are some of the articles I wrote for PC Gamer, and here are two short stories I wrote for the Machine of Death collections.
A Day’s Experimentation With Heat Signature’s Nebula Generation
John recently did some new sprites for us to construct nebulae out of, and I couldn’t help tinkering with the way we randomly generate your galaxy to make use of them. The ‘galaxy’ is what I call the entire game world, and a single clump of gas clouds within that is a ‘region’. I started with generating a single region from these sprites, combining two colours, then tried generating a bunch of those to make a galaxy. The latter part turns out to look awful if you use more than a couple of colours, so for now they each have a definite theme.
The green blob in some of these is your ship’s heat signature: it’s visible at any zoom so that you know where you are on the map. At some point I decided to let you turn this off for screenshots. The faint white dot is the cursor.
More Heat Signature
Crane:
So… beautiful.
They should have sent a poet.
*weeps tears of crushing despair before the majestic splendor of the void*
George:
Wow! I… Wow!
Turtle:
So much yes.
Alec Downing:
Having some sort of in game screenshot viewer would be nice considering the amount of beautiful screenshots we will all be taking.
Selwyn:
Really digging the clouds with the more defined textures. The stars just totally complete the picture.
Pretty.
Considered writing about it? How you’re doing generation, and maybe what the constituent sprites look like that you’re composing together to create the final images.
Shaddap:
This is brilliant Tom