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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

This Is The Winter Of Our Disco Tent

You demand some awesome new music to listen to on a loop for the coming weeks and thereafter associate with Christmas forever! It is a reasonable demand, and I shall do my best.

I cannot stop listening to Upon This Tidal Wave Of Young Blood by Clap Your Hands Say Yeah, which even if you don’t particularly like me you have to admit can only be amazing from the title and band name. I can’t point to anything specifically Christmassy about it, but it still seemed seasonal even the first time I heard it. It is way better than This Home On Ice, which I think is a better-known song of theirs. The guy’s voice is so immediately unmelodious that you have to get over any problem you might have with it in the first few seconds, and after that, the way its loose, sharp, narcoleptically over-casual sound droops off the stiff, lush music creates a weirdly pleasing harmony. How about that.

Destroyer. You can’t go far wrong with Destroyer. The name is misleading, they’re not rubbish metal, although I’m not quite sure what they are. Craig would class them as “gay medieval music,” but that goes for more or less everything I listen to. Suffice to say they can make the line “Students carve hearts out of coal, and I just thought I’d let you know” catchy. That doesn’t really suffice at all, and I don’t have a link except to this rather unrepresentative song, but if you think you might like a band with verses like “It’s just Crystal Country showing us that everything must break to be beautiful, and honey, that’s what I meant when I called and said ‘This is fucked.'” – you’ll probably get along just fine.