TOM FRANCIS
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Heat Signature Playable At EGX And Fantastic Arcade

Heat Signature will be playable at two different events next month, in the UK and the US!

18-21 September: Fantastic Arcade at the Alamo Drafthouse in Austin, Texas, US
25-28 September: Eurogamer Expo (EGX) in Earls Court, London, UK

I’ll be at both events to talk you through it and answer any questions with “I don’t know,” “No,” or “We’ll see.” I’ll also be doing some form of presentation at each, probably involving playing the game myself and explaining my plans.

Earlier this year I also made a game with artist and designer Liselore Goedhart, in which two players steer the tongues of anteaters and battle each other like disgusting slithery light-cycles as they compete for ants. That’s SimAntics: Realistic Anteater Simulator, and it will also be playable at Fantastic Arcade!

And for EGX, I commissioned my friend and graphic designer Natalie Hanke (who I worked with on Distance) to create this spectacularly pink poster! Continued

Gunpoint Mac And Linux Ready For Testing

Update:

The game is now out on Mac and Linux!

Old post:

The fine folks at Abstraction have finally got Gunpoint working well enough on OSX and Linux that we’re ready for you guys to give it a try and see what breaks.

If you already own Gunpoint, right-click it in your Steam list and go to Properties. Under the ‘Betas’ tab, choose ‘maclinuxbeta’ and ‘OK’. The game should update.

If you don’t already own the game but would like to help test it on Mac or Linux, add yourself to this mailing list: if I can, I’ll get some time-limited beta keys to let you guys in too.

If you find any problems, post in the Mac or Linux support forums to tell us about them! Tell us as much as you can about your system, what you were doing, and what happened.

Caution! The Mac and Linux versions are in beta, so I don’t recommend buying the game yet if that’s what you’ll be playing on!

To make sure everyone has the latest fixes, the beta is Steam-only. When they’re ready, the Mac and Linux versions will of course be available DRM-free for people who bought here or on the Humble Store. And buying it from anywhere at any time on any of these three platforms means you own it on all three.

It’s Time I Did Something About This ‘Gunpoint Ripoff’

Someone named Tomasz Waclawek is making a side-scrolling stealth game, with mouse-controlled jumping, set in office blocks with smashable windows, and which he himself describes as a “Gunpoint ripoff”. The game is called Ronin, and it’s time I did something about it. Specifically, it’s time I did a Let’s Play about it, because it’s really fucking cool. Continued

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

This is a list of games I’ve worked on or am working on and the things people usually ask me about them. Continued

The Formula For An Episode Of Murder, She Wrote

My life has changed in many ways since working for my own company, but perhaps the biggest is that I can now watch Murder, She Wrote over breakfast and/or lunch. This is great, but it’s also ingrained the show’s weirdly specific formula in my brain, and now I feel I must write it down. The following is how about 70% of its episodes go – the exceptions are kind of nuts. Continued

Heat Signature Needs An Artist And A Composer

I’ve now made enough of Heat Signature to be fairly sure of what it is, which means a) here’s a new trailer!

And b) I’m ready to start looking for an artist and a composer to work with!

Update: the deadline has passed and applications are now closed! We got a lot! More as I sort through them.

I’d like to do it the same way I did for Gunpoint, with Open Submissions. That means anyone can send in a sample of what they can do, and I’ll pick the best artist and the best composer based on that. In this post I’ll explain loads about what we’re looking for, but the highlights are:

✓ Paid!
✓ No experience required!
✓ Work from anywhere!
✓ Flexible hours!
✓ Game already works!
✓ Application deadline: [EXPIRED!] Continued

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

I started making Heat Signature mainly to figure out if the mechanics would be as fun as they seemed in my head, so I built all its systems in the cheapest, fastest, simplest possible way. That worked – it’s now got to the point where I’m laughing out loud at something ridiculous happening most times I play.

But the slapdash way I built it has the following problems: Continued

Heat Signature Development Time-Lapse: 5 Months In 2 Minutes

The reason it’s been a while since I last showed off my space stealth game, Heat Signature, is that I want to use the next video to put out a call for artists and musicians to hire. So it needs to show enough new stuff that the press might cover it, people might share it, and it might get seen by more people.

Don’t apply for either of those jobs yet, though! The other thing I need to do before then is nail down enough of the game’s underlying tech to be sure of precisely what kind of art and music it needs. The way it’s coded right now is rather glitchy, so now I have to investigate whether it’s the fixable kind of glitchy, or the “Fuck this and try a different method entirely” kind of glitchy.

Time lapse

So I’m not going to show much of its current state, but I did put together a time-lapse of everything I’ve done so far: Heat Signature’s five month development in 2 minutes. Continued

Gunpoint Patch: New Engine, Steam Workshop, And More

Our big Gunpoint patch has just gone live on Steam! It converts Gunpoint to a whole new engine and adds Steam Workshop, so you can see all the awesome new missions people have been making in the level editor. They are nuts. We’ll make a version of this update available for non-Steam users as well, but obviously Steam Workshop support only works in Steam. Here are the major changes:

• New engine, implemented by Abstraction Games. Should fix many technical issues and make the game run faster for everyone, and it’ll enable us to develop Mac and Linux versions next.
• Steam Workshop added, for browsing and sharing user-made levels. Yes, we listened to the 1,779 post petition you guys started even after we’d already announced we would do it.
• Option to turn off swearing. Up to you whether this makes “Grow a ####ing #### and shove it up your ###” kid-safe.
• Reconfigurable keyboard controls.
• Vertical sync option. I didn’t know we needed this, but the folks at Abstraction added it and now the animation is at least 23% more beautiful.
• Level editor. The level editor has been in there since launch, but some people still ask for one so I’m just going to keep announcing I’ve added it until everyone knows it’s there.
• You can now place multiple elevators in a level without it crashing. That’s more than I could do when I was making the game, so I expect your levels to be at least twice as good as mine.
• If you have any technical troubles with the new version, you can still use the old one by going to Properties > Betas and selecting ‘oldversion’. Post your issue on the forums too, so we can fix it.

It’s also 75% off for 48 hours! That’ll end 10am Pacific Time on 19/06/2014. That discount applies to all editions, too, so you can upgrade for $2.50 or £1.50. And we reduced the UK and EU prices from the Steam defaults to better match their USD equivalents.

Get it here!

Header image is a screenshot of Breakin 1.2, by [NL] Omgertje.

Floating Point Passes 70,000 Players

As of today, 70,163 people own Floating Point, the free game about grappling hooks I released last Friday. 31,700 of those got it on day 1, and the count is now growing steadily at around 3,000 new players a day.

This is pretty amazing. I didn’t contact any press about it, and the only promotion I did was the long and rambly videos I’ve been posting here, if you can call them that. Being free, unsurprisingly, makes a big difference. More interesting stats: Continued

Floating Point Development Breakdown

(Screenshot by player QBAEY)

Floating Point is based on some grappling hook code I made for a game that I still plan to continue with some day. Since I was using version control for that, and hence for this, I have a log of every ‘commit’ I made during development: basically, all the times I felt my progress was worth backing up, and what that progress was.

With a bit of hackery, I’ve pulled out a list of those in chronological order to make a sort of diary of the game’s development, showing which days I worked on it and what I did. Obviously this contains some references to things only I’ll understand, but most of it’s in English, and it gives you an idea of how the game evolved and how long it took. I’ll highlight major developments or revelations, and add in when I tested and with how many people. Continued

Distance: A Visual Short Story For The Space Cowboy Game Jam

Natalie Hanke, Jukio Kallio and I have just released Distance, a short, semi-interactive, mostly visual piece for the Space Cowboy game jam. Natalie wrote, designed and arted it, Jukio did the sound and music, and I was the programmer. Continued

Raising An Army Of Flying Dogs In The Magic Circle

The Magic Circle is an indie game in development by Jordan Thomas, Stephen Alexander and Kain Shin. It takes place inside an unfinished game, one you can see being built around you. And when I tested it, for reasons I won’t go into, my objective was to ‘Ghost the Sky Bastard’. Continued

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

Floating Point is out on Steam now, for Windows, Mac and Linux, and it’s free!

It’s a peaceful game about swinging gracefully around randomly generated levels. It’s played entirely with the mouse, it’s easy to play, you can have fun with it in five minutes, and it has relaxing digital music by the excellent Form & Shape.

Here’s a trailer, and some info on why it’s free. Continued

Floating Point Is Coming To Steam – Tomorrow

Here is the news:

• Floating Point is coming to Steam!
• Tomorrow!
• On Windows, Mac and Linux simultaneously!
• And it’s free!

It’s a peaceful game about swinging gracefully around randomly generated levels. It’s played entirely with the mouse, it’s easy to play, you can have fun with it in five minutes, and it has relaxing digital music by the excellent Form & Shape. Continued