Tom Francis Regrets This Already

It’s rough in the games industry at the moment, and a lot of folks are spinning up their own thing.

We’re working on something new!

Hi!

I could never find a work/break timer that worked quite how I wanted, so I made my own.

It’s snowing, and I have a mic that make me audible outdoors!

Blundered into a board game design lately, and it’s coming together.

Update: Unity have since walked back the worst part of this threat: those of us using older versions won’t be subject to the new terms unless we upgrade.

8 years ago I made a little timer app to sit in my taskbar and track how long I’d worked or not-worked.

My chess variant stalled a while, cos I rarely felt like coding when my work day was done.

Firstly, of course: many folks I like and respect love chess, and I’m happy for them and have no interest in persuading chess fans to like it less or want something different.

Badminton is the best sport – and I’ve tried easily six of them.

Update: the position’s been filled, thanks everyone!

Note: this was written around the time Void Bastards was released, but languished in my Drafts for years because I’d planned to make it longer.

Update: Applications are now closed!

I thought it would be an interesting game design challenge to come up with a single player game you can play with a regular deck of playing cards.

Nowhere Prophet has a power where each turn you can choose 1 card from your hand to discard, and draw another to replace it.

Talking to people at GDC and Rezzed, especially people just starting in game dev, made me realise I’ve accumulated a load of non-obvious knowledge about how Steam works and how best to use it.

When Gunpoint did well, in 2013, I thought: “I should give some money to charity.

This year I’ve started tracking the hours I spend programming, because generally once I start tracking something I naturally start to optimise it.

After dad died, trying to be useful, we looked through his office.

Heat Signature is one Space Year old today!

I just learned about ‘The Potato Paradox‘, which refers to this surprising maths result: Q: You have 100kg of potatoes, which are 99 percent water by weight.

I love Deus Ex, System Shock 2, and Dishonored 2, and the name for these games is dumb: they’re ‘immersive sims’.

I’ve been tweeting GIFs of a game I’m prototyping in Unity for a while now, codenamed Tiny Ex-Cons, and recently did a video blog about the core elements I’m hoping to combine if I go ahead with it.

I was too nervous to read Heat Signature reviews for two weeks after launch.

For the duration of Space Halloween (27th of Space October to the 1st of Space November), life and death in the Drift will be a little different: Removed: Death Due to science, you cannot die during Space Halloween.

I reshuffled this post a bit so I can link this part more easily: Update On The Everything Gun It’s been great to see how much people are loving this very silly weapon, and how excited people are to send us shots of them finding it.

Or you can buy it from the Humble Store.

This story starts exactly like the last great mission I had in an XCOM game: I kinda took on two missions at once.

Heat Signature will be out on Steam 21st of September 2017!

The start of Prey is one of very few narrative-based game intros that really worked for me.

I released Morphblade last week, which is a game I made in direct response to Michael Brough’s Imbroglio.

This is the game I started last year, when I needed a break from Heat Signature, and I’ve continued to tinker with it on the odd weekend or evening.

These are all suspiciously recent so this is probably only the best three moments of the last few months, but that does at least mean I could get clips.

Surprising news!

As well as the update above, I’ve been putting up some day-by-day logs of what I’m working on in Heat Signature.

I’m in a cabin in the woods in Sweden for seven weeks, with 20ish other game developers, all working on our own games.

I got an e-mail today from a developer who’s having trouble making any of their prototypes fun.

They’re releasing the new Hitman game bit by bit: one mission a month, set in a new and sprawling location.

As promised on Twitter, I recently sent everyone on our mailing list instructions on how to get in on a new alpha test of Heat Signature.

Hello!

I was not at all ready for how gorgeous Far Cry Primal is.

The Witness is a very pretty island with hundreds of puzzles on iPad things.

What’s snowballing?

I took on a ‘Very Difficult’ mission in XCOM 2 earlier, to protect some device from attacking aliens.

I just read Zach Gage’s post proposing some changes to the IGF.

Excerpt from an e-mail I just sent to artist John: A brief history of zooming and backgrounds: We worry about how to make the game look good at all the zooms between ‘local’ and ‘galaxy map’.

If you can read this sentence, my method of hiding spoilers is not working for you and you should treat this as an entirely spoilery post.

Update: Solved!

I just played my first full game of Tales of Arabian Nights, with my friends Chris and Pip.