TOM FRANCIS
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Five Things I Learned About Game Criticism In Nine Years At PC Gamer

However bad at games writing I might be now, I was a lot worse when I started at PC Gamer nine years ago. When I first applied, my sample piece was so bad I didn’t even get an interview. I was hired as a coverdisc editor a few months later, and spent two years trying to worm my way into a writing job by volunteering for every piece I could get. Continued

Leaving PC Gamer

I haven’t actually done any work for PC Gamer since March, and I haven’t officially left until tomorrow. But I’ve been there nine years, it’s the only full time job I’ve ever had, and I felt like I should mark its end somehow.

So on Saturday we had a Gunpoint-themed pizza and bourbon leaving party. And melon. It was thematically confused, but excellent. Continued

Ending, An Interesting Roguelite Puzzle Game With Extraordinary Sound Design

Found via Mike Bithell and Dan Cook, Ending is a puzzle game where you move around a tile-based dungeon, one square at a time, and enemies only move when you do. That’s normal for Rogue-like games, but here it’s also used as a puzzle: it’s all about trying to get enemies to walk into your attack range before you walk into theirs.

There are a bunch of cool things about it. Continued

Gunpoint’s Release Date’s Release Date

An Announcement

I will be announcing Gunpoint’s release date here tomorrow, Monday the 27th of May.

To be clear, this is not an announcement of Gunpoint’s release date. As promised in our hit post Gunpoint’s Release Date’s Release Date’s Release Date, this is an announcement of Gunpoint’s release date’s release date.

Gunpoint’s release date remains unannounced, until tomorrow.

Games I Don’t Plan To Make: Relativity Paramedic

I forgot part of the plan for this: your near-lightspeed space ambulance would also be indestructible and have perfect inertial dampening. So to decelerate, you just try to crash into all the debris you were trying to avoid as you picked up speed. So it’d go:

• Accelerate away from planet – dodge debris!
• When you’ve gone far enough fast enough, decelerate – hit debris!
• Turn around.
• Accelerate towards planet – dodge debris!
• Crash into planet!

Thief: Deadly Shadows Development Quotes

I love these – files developers make of things said during development, taken out of context. This one, via Randy Smith, is for Thief: Deadly Shadows, and I’ll paste my favourites below. Continued

Five Hours With BioShock Infinite And Ken Levine

“It has the atmosphere of a cheerful village fete, but in a village that couldn’t exist. At one point, we seem to be in a cloud: a thick haze turns everyone in the street to silhouettes, picked out by spectacular rays of golden sunlight. Confetti floats through the air, and hummingbirds pause to probe flowers. Two children splash each other in a leaking fire hydrant.”

“Half an hour later, for reasons I won’t go into, I’m ramming a metal gear into a man’s eye socket until blood geysers all over my face. I’m drenched. Everyone’s screaming. Four more men are coming for me, and this blunt steel prong is all I have to kill them with.”

My preview and interview is up now.

My SimCity City

The closed beta test of the new SimCity is out, for those in on it. I am! There’s the city I built!

You can see and read about Tyler’s city, built in a different region to the beta, here.

It’s a very demo-y beta: you only get 1 hour before you have to start from scratch. My first one was a single long road, but I quickly discovered that having industrial stuff anywhere near your residential zones poisons everyone and, more importantly, reduces the land value. Continued

Playing Skyrim With Nothing But Illusion

“In Skyrim, a mage is an unstoppable storm of destruction. In real life, a mage is just an illusionist: they can’t do much except trick you. If one of them turned out to be the world’s only hope of salvation, hijinks and sudden death would inevitably ensue. Since these are my two favourite things, I’ve decided to try playing this way.”

My diary of an illusionist in Skyrim is now all online. Start from the first entry, or if you’re up to date, here’s the final one.

Hope you enjoy/enjoyed it. It totally reinvented the game for me, made the world feel dangerous in a way it hadn’t since I first started. And something about having no weapons or armour makes the experience more convincing – I found myself appreciating the scenery more, being happy to trudge through the sparkling snow on a sunny day.

It makes me really want a Skyrim Survival Mode. One where you remain realistically vulnerable at all times, and leaving a town is heart-thumpingly tense. You’d need to eat before you could sleep, and sleep once a day to stay sharp. The only impetus to risk the wilderness would be to hunt animals, gather ingredients, or hope to find something valuable enough to sell for food before you find something too fast to run from.

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

Published a long while back, don’t think I ever linked it here. A long-suppressed rant at mainstream action game design.

“The instant the first character speaks, I reflexively want them to shut up. If there’s text on screen, I’m not reading it. If there’s a cut-scene, I’m skipping it. If there are no enemies to shoot, I shoot my friends, and if I can’t shoot my friends, I shoot just next to my friends and then swing my crosshair onto them as quickly as possible in a lame attempt to glance them with a bullet I know won’t do anything. I thought that was normal.

Then, playing Bulletstorm the other night and hating every second of it, I had an awful realisation: this is my fault. I’m the reason games suck now. I’m the lazy, belligerent jerk every mainstream shooter seems to be designed for, and it’s because of gamers like me that they’re built this way.”

The creative director of Bulletstorm responded to me, which led to an interesting discussion.

Ibb And Obb, A Co-Op Game Where The Ground Has Two Sides

In a platform game, the screen is usually divided between solid land and empty space. The empty space is the fun bit – you can jump around in it, fight enemies, solve puzzles. Usually nothing very interesting happens inside the solid ground beneath your feet.

In Ibb and Obb, the solid ground becomes the empty space for another platformer, one that takes place upside-down.

My preview at PC Gamer.

What I Learned From Gunpoint, And How To Make A Game

I wrote a feature for PC Gamer in which I look at each of the easiest tools you can use to make a game, and interview indies who’ve made great things with them. It’s the Indies’ Guide To Game Making, and I’ve just updated it with some more detailed answers we didn’t have room for in the magazine.

Oi, aren’t you making a game?

I am, but I haven’t finished it yet. I’ve learnt a lot so far, though, and at Minecon in November, I gave a talk about what I’ve learned so far, and what I’d do differently if I was making my first game today. Here it is! Continued

Alcohol

This post is slightly fetishistic about booze later on, which if you’re a recovering alcoholic might be kind of annoying.

I like alcohol. I don’t get drunk very often, probably once a month on average, but I drink with an enthusiasm and regularity that makes me very conscious of one possible way this could go. I could become like a chocoholic, but for booze. Continued

Dishonored

I like Dishonored quite a lot. Here’s my review.

If you’re playing it now, you might want to know what counts as a kill, what the threshold for ‘low chaos’ is, and whether dogs seeing you mean you’re not a ghost. Here’s a guide. Continued

Adventure Time Game Post Mortem

On the weekend of the 15th, Fantastic Arcade held an Adventure Time-themed Game Making Frenzy. It meant anyone could make a game with Adventure Time characters for the purposes of that compo, which is rare, so I did.

I finished mine at 2am that Monday, left the next day for a work trip, then spent all of last weekend working on Gunpoint, so I haven’t had time to talk about how it went. Here’s how it went! Continued