TOM FRANCIS
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Spelunky Strategy Guide: Finding And Defeating Anubis

Gunpoint Half-Price Sale, Edition Upgrades, And Trading Cards

Short version: Gunpoint is half-price for two days, you can now upgrade between editions, and we’ve added trading cards. Here’s a video explaining all that:

Continued

GDC Talk: How Reviewing Games For Nine Years Helped In Designing Gunpoint

My talk from GDC Europe is now online for free! It has slides so I don’t think I can embed it – I’ll just say the title again and you can click that.

How Reviewing Games For Nine Years Helped In Designing Gunpoint

Tom And Nika Vs The Necromancers Of Monaco, Parts 1-5

I’ve been playing Monaco co-op with Nika, and we’re YouTubing the whole fiasco. We’re up to Part 5 now, click the listy button in the top left to skip to an episode.

I struggled to get into Monaco when it first came out: I found it visually confusing, and most of the classes seemed bad. But over the course of these videos it starts to really click, and at its best it’s a hilarious, calamitous caper.

Spelunky Explorers’ Club

Each day, Spelunky generates one set of levels that’s the same for every player. Each day, we play them. Some of us make videos of our attempts. You can browse mine above (click the listy icon in the top left), or see everyone’s on the blog we set up at https://spelunkyexplorers.wordpress.com/.

On the rest of this post are the earliest dailies we posted. Continued

Comparing Notes In Spelunky’s Unique Daily Adventures

Spelunky is out on PC again! The fancy version this time, and with a new feature that is obsessing me more than ever before. Every day, there’s one set of randomly generated levels that’s the same for every Spelunky player. Everyone gets one try at it, and when they die, that’s it, they can never play it again.

The scores for each person’s attempt are ranked, of course, but I don’t really care about that. The reason it’s so fascinating to me is that it takes a generative game – one that’s different every time – and gives it one of the most appealing things about pre-scripted games: being able to compare notes with your friends. Continued

Gunpoint: What I’m Working On

To keep you up to speed, here’s a breakdown of what I’m working on at the moment:

1. Fix the last few Gunpoint compatibility problems

I fixed a lot of bugs pretty quickly in the first four patches, but the last ones left are tougher. Most of them aren’t mistakes in my scripting, they’re fundamental incompatibilities between the engine I used and certain PC configurations. So fixing them means porting Gunpoint to a new engine, and exactly how we do that is a big, complex, important decision for the future of the game. Continued

Learning Unity

My day job is now trying to fix things in Gunpoint and writing e-mails, both of which I’m pretty bad at, so in my spare time I’ve been learning Unity. Not making anything in particular yet, just following tutorials – my test project above has been charitably described by my friends as Thomas Was At Gunpoint.

I have a question, for anyone who uses Unity. Continued

Round Up Of Contemporary Television Dramas About Two Women Who Switch Identities

There are a lot of these, and I think I’m watching them all. Let me know if I missed one, I will watch basically anything with this concept. Continued

Taking The World With Tourism, A Civilization V Story

I just finished my first game of Civilization V with the Brave New World add on, which is focused on culture and stuff. Here’s how it went. Continued

Half-Life 2 Speedrun Is Beautiful, Ugly

The part where players invent unpowered human flight, and the part where they use the HEV suit’s optical zoom to look at a butt, are the two defining acts of the hardcore gaming zeitgeist.

YouTube commenter nobody960814 explains the trick:

“To prevent bunny hopping, valve created a system where repeated jumping should slow you down. Unfortunately they implemented it by applying a force on you in a direction opposite to the way you’re facing, not the way you’re going. So by bunny hopping backwards, you can accumulate ridiculous momentum.”

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

First Time Using An iPhone

When the iPhone was announced, I laughed at the notion of spending SIX HUNDRED DOLLARS on a phone. You should imagine that laugh attenuating, bitterly, over six and a half years of me using the cheapest object Nokia can produce, until Gunpoint launched. Then I stopped, and thought, “Huh, I can actually afford to be one of the assholes who have these things now.” Continued