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.
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By me. Uses Adaptive Images by Matt Wilcox.
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Let Us Mumble You Through Our Supreme Commander Game
We finally got around to turning one of our many SupCom matches into a video you can watch. It’s the one written up in the latest mag, six of us versus two cheating AIs.
M83 – Midnight City
I love this. It’s their usual shimmering synth with spacey squeaks, and then at some point it just seems unable to contain its excitement and goes all-out eighties sax. It’s one of the best things to go.
The MP3 is free to download if you sign up for their newsletter or whatever.
You Can Sell Your Diablo 3 Loot For Actual Money
I was at Blizzard last week to play a bit of Diablo 3, and find this out: it has an auction house where players can buy from and sell to each other for real money.
It’s both crazier and slightly less evil than it initially sounds: it’s not Blizzard selling this stuff, and while they take a transaction fee, it’s not proportional to the item value. They say they expect it to break even.
The crazier part is that you could actually make money from this system, with no risk: you get a few free listings a week, and you can use them to sell items you found for real money without even having given Blizzard your credit card.
Lots more details, screenshots and quotes from Blizzard in my piece on PC Gamer. I am broadly negative about it.
Update: I’m in a podcast with Graham and Tim discussing what we think of all this.
Update: My preview of the Diablo 3 beta is also up now. The game itself is really, really good I’m afraid.
Update: Now we’ve done a video where me, Tim and Graham talk you through what’s going on in the latest footage.
You Can Now Knock Guards Through Windows
If you jump at them hard enough. I forgot the guards would need a falling animation for this, so it wasn’t on John’s list. It’s cool though, I’ve got it covered.
Update: John’s proposal to fix this:
Update: What we actually ended up with.
Maybe Back Up Your Google Stuff?
This tale of abruptly losing a Google account without explanation, via roBurky, made me realise I should be backing this stuff up. Not so much because “It happened to him, therefore it will happen to me!” Just because the story makes you realise how boned you’d be if Google did shut you out, and how absurd it is to have total faith they never could. In all probability someone hacked this guy’s account and did something bad without his knowledge, in which case it has nothing to do with anything he did. Continued
Google+ Is The Exact Opposite Of The Social Network We Need
Or: I’m Completely Misunderstanding Google+
The main part of Google+ is a social updates feed like Facebook or Twitter. With Facebook, you have to confirm someone as your friend before they see your updates. With Twitter, anyone can see your updates without asking permission, unless you make a special ‘locked’ account. With Google+… Christ. Continued
Gunpoint Delayed To… I Don’t Know, Christmas?
Game release dates should probably be phrased as “I don’t yet know why the game won’t be ready in July.” I’m changing this for Gunpoint to “I don’t yet know why the game won’t be ready by Christmas.”
It’s going well now, actually. But here are the two things I didn’t know when I predicted July:
- Rewriting the collision system, which I had planned for, would take an amount of time I had not planned for. It would also send me quietly mad on Twitter.
- Integrating new art and animation, which I had planned for, leaves the game pretty much unplayable until it’s done. This, I hadn’t planned for.
2 means I can’t make much progress on the game’s levels while John is still working on the character art, because you can’t make what you can’t play. He’s burning through it super fast, though, and it’s starting to look awesome in-game. The player character, Conway, has just the right mix of super-spy suave and silliness. Here’s one of my favourite animations for him so far:
All the basic movements are already done for the player character, so all I really need is for one guard type to be jumpable-on and punchable-in-the-face. That’ll be enough to make actual levels that work, even if a lot of the poses and sprites are placeholder. As before, I really have no clue how long that part will take.
Meanwhile Fabian has been creating a gorgeous logo concept – one that combines an elegantly simple icon I can’t believe I didn’t think of, but in the context of a sumptuous image that gets across the rainy city atmosphere. I’m not quite ready to show that yet.
80% of development takes 10% of the time you think it will, and 20% takes 800%. It’s much easier and nicer working without fixed deadlines, so I’m not worried about how long it takes. There’s no feature-creep: my idea of what the finished game will be has been fixed for a long time now, and we’re getting significantly closer to it all the time.
So let’s say Christmas, and I’ll tell you why it isn’t Christmas this Christmas. Sorry it’s been a while, by the way – follow @GunpointGame on Twitter for more regular updates and face-palming.
Adventure Time
Years back, Craig linked me to a pilot for a cartoon about a boy and a shape-shifting dog voiced by Bender from Futurama. It was eight minutes long, and amazing. Here it is: Continued
The Shadow Line Lines In The Shadow Line
The Shadow Line is finished now, and it was good until it got a bit wanky at the end. It’s nice to have something with a plot that genuinely requires some processing between episodes, and the cast has made me a fan of four of five actors I’d never seen before. Continued
Understanding Your Brain
My last post about happiness was about why success isn’t a good way to be happy, and three things that are.
In the comments, Johannes Spielmann said this:
Johannes: Great article!
For a more nuanced (and scientifically proven) view on the topic, have a look at this Google Tech Talk by David Rock.
The video he links, the one I’m about to embed, has changed the way I think. It’s like being given the owner’s manual to your brain after 29 years of muddling along with the default settings. It’s not only spectacularly improved my understanding of how people behave and why we feel what we feel, it’s actually made me more consistently happy. Continued
What Makes Games Good
A few times lately, non-gaming friends and relatives have asked me: what’s the appeal of games? Good question! The people who don’t ask it seem to assume it’s something terrible, like bloodlust, or it’s some unknowable new drug they will never understand. Continued
Supreme Commander All Czars
Sometimes winning isn’t enough. Sometimes 50 of the largest unit in the game, the Czar, is not enough. Those times, 51 Czars will generally do it.
Death beams are cool, but Czars are so huge that they can do even more damage by just falling on you. And you can manually suicide them to make that happen.
