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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.

Theme

By me. Uses Adaptive Images by Matt Wilcox.

Tom’s Timer 5

The Bone Queen And The Frost Bishop: Playtesting Scavenger Chess In Plasticine

Gridcannon: A Single Player Game With Regular Playing Cards

Dad And The Egg Controller

A Leftfield Solution To An XCOM Disaster

Rewarding Creative Play Styles In Hitman

Postcards From Far Cry Primal

Solving XCOM’s Snowball Problem

Kill Zone And Bladestorm

An Idea For More Flexible Indie Game Awards

What Works And Why: Multiple Routes In Deus Ex

Naming Drugs Honestly In Big Pharma

Writing vs Programming

Let Me Show You How To Make A Game

What Works And Why: Nonlinear Storytelling In Her Story

What Works And Why: Invisible Inc

Our Super Game Jam Episode Is Out

What Works And Why: Sauron’s Army

Showing Heat Signature At Fantastic Arcade And EGX

What I’m Working On And What I’ve Done

The Formula For An Episode Of Murder, She Wrote

Improving Heat Signature’s Randomly Generated Ships, Inside And Out

Raising An Army Of Flying Dogs In The Magic Circle

Floating Point Is Out! And Free! On Steam! Watch A Trailer!

Drawing With Gravity In Floating Point

What’s Your Fault?

The Randomised Tactical Elegance Of Hoplite

Here I Am Being Interviewed By Steve Gaynor For Tone Control

A Story Of Heroism In Alien Swarm

One Desperate Battle In FTL

To Hell And Back In Spelunky

Gunpoint Development Breakdown

My Short Story For The Second Machine Of Death Collection

Not Being An Asshole In An Argument

Playing Skyrim With Nothing But Illusion

How Mainstream Games Butchered Themselves, And Why It’s My Fault

A Short Script For An Animated 60s Heist Movie

Arguing On The Internet

Shopstorm, A Spelunky Story

Why Are Stealth Games Cool?

The Suspicious Developments manifesto

GDC Talk: How To Explain Your Game To An Asshole

Listening To Your Sound Effects For Gunpoint

Understanding Your Brain

What Makes Games Good

A Story Of Plane Seats And Class

Deckard: Blade Runner, Moron

Avoiding Suspicion At The US Embassy

An Idea For A Better Open World Game

A Different Way To Level Up

A Different Idea For Ending BioShock

My Script For A Team Fortress 2 Short About The Spy

Team Fortress 2 Unlockable Weapon Ideas

Don’t Make Me Play Football Manager

EVE’s Assassins And The Kill That Shocked A Galaxy

My Galactic Civilizations 2 War Diary

I Played Through Episode Two Holding A Goddamn Gnome

My Short Story For The Machine Of Death Collection

Blood Money And Sex

A Woman’s Life In Search Queries

First Night, Second Life

SWAT 4: The Movie Script

Let Them Eat Facts

It’s that bi-annual tradition of looking through the top twenty search results that lead people here, noticing that they’re all wildly misleading, and in the spirit of giving people what they want, or at least what other people once wanted, trying to address those curiosities. In descending order of wantedness!

wii controller
Yeah. I was pretty wild about the idea, but I was dreaming of something more precise and reliable than this. Without those qualities this can’t replace the mouse in the way I wanted it to, but it’s still vastly more pleasurable to use than any other console controller. That’ll prove its main contribution to games: making individual actions pleasurable, rather than more sophisticated or artful, and there’s masses of unexplored territory there for games about smashing things up, hitting stuff and chucking it around. In other words, exactly the kind of off-the-wall concept-driven stuff Nintendo can do well.

ah that wonderful ability sylar script heroes
You refer, I imagine, to Sylar’s line to Eden in episode 11:

“That wonderful ability – the power of persuasion – and all this time you were the girl next-door.”

There is no preceding “ah”, but you are spelling Sylar right so I’ll let you off. The line precedes an extraordinary moment in that episode, but… this is going to be another Can I Just Say? Can I just say that Sylar already has the power of persuasion: he was about to make an FBI agent shoot herself in the head in his first proper scene, until he was himself shot. It’s not inconceivable that someone with mind-control could still admire the functionally very similar ability of vocal persuasion, but his lust for it in that scene is hard to understand. Ditto for his obsession with obtaining Claire’s power, when he’s already demonstrated many times that he’s impervious to physical harm just like her.


extra life omlette aliens
Okay, I lost you at ‘omlette aliens’. Extra Life is a section of our magazine that I contribute to, but if you’re looking for omelette aliens you may have meant ‘extra-terrestrial life’. You’re mis-spelling omelette, too, so I’m not going to try very hard to find out what you were looking for, find it or bring it to you.

711391
My unfaithful friend. This is the woman whose search-engine usage over the three months for which AOL decided to publish her and three-thousand other people’s personal data painted a picture of a sad, broken modern life, quite literally warts-and-all. She’s a loathesome, deceitful, callous woman, but reading those search queries gives you such a comprehensive understanding of her life, thoughts and motivations that it’s impossible not to understand her. And understanding, it turns out, really does lead to a strange kind of forgiveness, or perhaps just acceptance. If you knew with this level of certainty, this level of insight, why everyone did what they did, it’d be hard to ever truly hate again. She probably won’t go down as a victim of one of the most heinous breaches of privacy, but I think she warrants the title most complete, most merciless, most interesting.

“rhetorical bombast aside”
Okay, hands up who searched for this. I mentioned it as something I was particularly pleased to see written on this site, by commenter Jason L, and it looks from this search like there’s only one other site in Google’s brainbanks that’s ever used the phrase. I didn’t search for it, until just now. DID HE?
 
i donloaded a video file with bittorrent but it is a blank white page
Okay well your first mistake was to donload, rather than download, it. Your second was probably to open the .torrent file as it were the movie, or perhaps just open it with the wrong program. Your third was to confess to what was almost certainly a crime in a search string. Next time try “I hear movie pirates sometimes find that the video files they download with BitTorrent come up as blank white pages, and that there is a solution to this problem. I wonder what that solution is, so that I can undermine it, in order to scupper pirates, whom I hate.”

battlefield 2142 disc doesnt recognise
I know! It’s a complete dick. My Battlefield 2 disc was clasped so tightly in its case that it cracked before it would come out, and now my 2142 one goes completely unrecognised on about half the machines I’ve tried it on. I wouldn’t care if EA’s digital distribution system worked in any goddamn way whatsoever, but my legitimate copy on that has never once launched successfully, and their tech support guys have simply given up trying to help me. I was only trying them to see what they’d do – I’ve got access to a working disc that I can use to play anyway – and they failed utterly. I should expose them, if only that were the kind of thing anyone would care to read.

“zombie zombie zombie” virus virus flash
I can’t decide which is more intriguing, what this person was looking for or the fact that I must, once, have said “zombie zombie zombie”. Without that second ‘virus’ he could almost be searching for an infection his PC has suffered that involved printing the undead triplet somewhere, but as it is he seems to be penning a tribal chant for our times, to be sung around bonfires while stomping and bouncing in a slow-moving circle.

delicious pentadact
Aren’t I just, though?

getting windows to recognise a wiimote
I believe you need Glovepie. I have no idea what it is. Those are just words to me, and ones that need a space between them at the very least.

just cause where is the fighter jet
I actually can’t answer that one. I did find it, but I don’t recall where and our review code has now expired. Guides online are surprisingly rubbish, too. If it’s any consolation, the only time the jets are really fun are on the missions when you’re given them to begin with – the rest of the time there’s not much to chase. You could always get in a lot of trouble with the cops and grappling hook one.

primer movie wikipedia
 
I’m going to assume you found what you were looking for, and not mock you for using Google to find something when you already knew where it was. I use Firefox’s Google-powered address bar to virtually describe where I want to go and assume that it’ll jump me straight to the right page. Addresses are so passé.

replacement nintendo sensor bar
I hear a candle works. I hear it’s actually a bit of a misnomer – the bar isn’t sensing anything, it’s putting out IR for the Wiimote to detect, and it’s the controller itself that works out where it’s pointing and sends that info to the console via the same Bluetooth link the accelerometer uses.

incurably ill dvd
Get a new one?

last episode of dexter
Pretty good, wasn’t it? I loved the confetti bit right at the end, it needed to go back to how fucked up he was.

morrowind sexy armor for females mod
I could help you, since my staggering knowledge of the later Elder Scrolls series extends even to things I would rather not know, but I get the impression you’re not the kind of person I want to help.