We’re working on something new! Can’t say for sure if it’ll work out yet, but the core combat part of it is shaping up nicely already, and I wanna show more of the process as we go than I did with Wizards.| Tom Francis Regrets This Already
Hi! Here’s the game we’ve been working on for 6.8 years! You can see the launch trailer and all the details on the store page, but for some reason what I feel like sharing here is the very quickly knocked together trailer I made for the developer commentary, which comes with the Special Edition of […]| Tom Francis Regrets This Already
I could never find a work/break timer that worked quite how I wanted, so I made my own. Lately, though, I’ve had RSI issues, and now my focus is on just ensuring I don’t work too long without taking a break to stretch. My old timer half-worked for that, but to get really consistent, I […]| Tom Francis Regrets This Already
It’s snowing, and I have a mic that make me audible outdoors! So I got mildly snowed on while I rambled about board games as roguelikes, what matters when making games ‘different every time’, and how Dune Imperium pulls it off so well.| Tom Francis Regrets This Already
Blundered into a board game design lately, and it’s coming together. Here I am talking about it on a cold, sunny, noisy (sorry) day! Will show it in action once some little rules things solidify.| Tom Francis Regrets This Already
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. As far as I understand, there aren’t new terms that would prevent them from pulling this same trick in future, but the fact that the outcry turned […]| Tom Francis Regrets This Already
8 years ago I made a little timer app to sit in my taskbar and track how long I’d worked or not-worked. I’ve used it pretty regularly ever since, and every now and then my need for some extra feature or tweak outweighs my laziness and I make a new version. I’ve just made v5. […]| Tom Francis Regrets This Already
My chess variant stalled a while, cos I rarely felt like coding when my work day was done. So I bought a chess set and some plasticine to try some ideas lo-fi style. What follows is how my first game of this iteration of Scavenger Chess played out. The board: littered with precious items and […]| Tom Francis Regrets This Already
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. But it’s not for everyone, and I’m one of the people for whom it’s not. So what I’m interested in is: what needs […]| Tom Francis Regrets This Already
Badminton is the best sport – and I’ve tried easily six of them. Here’s what’s good about it: Sound effects: hitting a shuttlecock (they call them birdies here) doesn’t just make a great sound, it makes a whole range of them. You’ve got your gentle pongs, your lively thwaps, all the way up to the […]| Tom Francis Regrets This Already
Update: the position’s been filled, thanks everyone! We’re looking for someone to make a roughly 2 minute trailer of Tactical Breach Wizards, preferably by the 9th of May. We have a new chapter of the game to show off, but we don’t want to do our usual in-depth talkthroughs because it would start to get […]| Tom Francis Regrets This Already
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. What’s there all still makes sense to me though, so I’m just gonna make it about the 3 things I did cover and throw it out there: Void Bastards is […]| Tom Francis Regrets This Already
Update: Applications are now closed! It’ll take some time to go through them all. Update: We’ll continue taking applications for the composer position until noon Pacific Time on Wednesday this week! This link should tell you when that is for you. Original post: We’re looking for a composer to handle the music for Tactical Breach Wizards! […]| Tom Francis Regrets This Already
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. My first try, about a month ago, didn’t work. But on Sunday I had a new idea, and with one tweak from me and another from my […]| Tom Francis Regrets This Already
Nowhere Prophet has a power where each turn you can choose 1 card from your hand to discard, and draw another to replace it. Slay the Spire has a power where you draw 1 extra card per turn, then must discard 1 of your choice right after. Slay’s power is straight up better: you get […]| Tom Francis Regrets This Already
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. Info like this tends to get passed around between established devs, at events and in closed circles, but newer devs and […]| Tom Francis Regrets This Already
When Gunpoint did well, in 2013, I thought: “I should give some money to charity. But this might have to last me the rest of my life. So I should wait til I have a second game out, and see how that does.” When Heat Signature did well in, 2017, I thought: “It’s doing great […]| Tom Francis Regrets This Already
This year I’ve started tracking the hours I spend programming, because generally once I start tracking something I naturally start to optimise it. I’m not a workaholic – I’m at greater risk of not putting in the hours than of putting in too many, and I’d like to make sure I’m putting in enough. Programming […]| Tom Francis Regrets This Already
Heat Signature is one Space Year old today! To celebrate, we’ve released a big free update we’ve been working on for five months, with over 20 features – including our own twist on a Daily Challenge. Click through for details on each: Character Traits 7 New Hazards Glory Missions & Clients Upgraded AI & Reworked […]| Tom Francis Regrets This Already
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. You let them dehydrate until they’re 98 percent water by weight. How much do they weigh now? A: 50kg It’s not a riddle or a trick, it’s literally […]| Tom Francis Regrets This Already
I love Deus Ex, System Shock 2, and Dishonored 2, and the name for these games is dumb: they’re ‘immersive sims’. If you asked me what I liked about them, my answer would be a phrase almost as dumb: ’emergent gameplay!’ I always used to think of these as virtually the same thing, but of […]| Tom Francis Regrets This Already
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. It’s too early to know if this is my next big project or not – my prototype […]| Tom Francis Regrets This Already
I was too nervous to read Heat Signature reviews for two weeks after launch. I was relieved to see the scores were great, and after 3.5 years of work, that was all I wanted to hear: I didn’t want to know what their caveats were. Once I calmed down and read them, though, I was […]| Tom Francis Regrets This Already
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. Bleeding out, suffocating, or being incinerated in an exploding pod will permanently turn you into a living […]| Tom Francis Regrets This Already
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. One thing I didn’t forsee was that for a […]| Tom Francis Regrets This Already
Or you can buy it from the Humble Store. Supporter’s Edition There’s also a Supporter’s Edition, which comes with a bunch of fun extras: Play through Heat Signature’s development with 8 early prototypes from its 3.5 year development. Watch 9 developer commentary videos showing and explaining its evolution: from drilling through hulls to liberating empires. […]| Tom Francis Regrets This Already
This story starts exactly like the last great mission I had in an XCOM game: I kinda took on two missions at once. And everyone got tired from the first one, so we had to send our B-team on the other: to rescue a VIP. – Part 1: The Fight Almost immediately, they run into […]| Tom Francis Regrets This Already
Heat Signature will be out on Steam 21st of September 2017! At time of writing, that’s Thursday of next week. It’s for Windows PCs, other platforms will depend on how this one goes. We don’t do pre-order bonuses because I don’t want to pressure you to buy before reviews are out. But I am super […]| Tom Francis Regrets This Already
The start of Prey is one of very few narrative-based game intros that really worked for me. And it comes not that long after one in the same genre that especially didn’t: Mankind Divided. So I thought it might be interesting to replay both and compare what works and what doesn’t. Not to pick on […]| Tom Francis Regrets This Already
I released Morphblade last week, which is a game I made in direct response to Michael Brough’s Imbroglio. They’re both games where you move around a grid of different tile types, and the one you’re standing on determines what you can do there. I’ve also been playing a lot of XCOM 2 lately, and dreaming […]| Tom Francis Regrets This Already
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. It’s crystallised into something I really enjoy playing, so I asked testers what they thought it was worth. The average answer was $5, so $5 it […]| Tom Francis Regrets This Already
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. Until they’re taken down. I put them on Streamable in the hope they’ll stay up longer, which has the side-effect that they loop when they’re done. […]| Tom Francis Regrets This Already
Surprising news! I made a new video showing off John Roberts’ excellent new art for the game’s four factions! (Not that surprising) I’m looking for a programmer in the Seattle area to help me finish the game! (Seattle part seems surprising) … because I’m moving to Bellevue to work on the game at Valve’s offices! […]| Tom Francis Regrets This Already
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 only doing them for my own benefit, so they’re not mega interesting and I don’t do one every day I work – only when I think it’ll help.| Tom Francis Regrets This Already
I’m in a cabin in the woods in Sweden for seven weeks, with 20ish other game developers, all working on our own games. This is Stugan. None of us have finished yet, but we have successfully developed the following non-digital games along the way, and I release them to you now: Throw A Rock […]| Tom Francis Regrets This Already
I got an e-mail today from a developer who’s having trouble making any of their prototypes fun. I’m posting my reply here in case it’s of help to anyone else. This developer was writing because they liked Gunpoint, so that’s why all my examples are from that. I would suggest three things to bear in […]| Tom Francis Regrets This Already
They’re releasing the new Hitman game bit by bit: one mission a month, set in a new and sprawling location. Good Hitman missions have always been replayable, but this time the whole game is built around it: a Challenges list tells you of the dozens of different ways to take out the target, an Opportunities […]| Tom Francis Regrets This Already
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. Keys went out to the first 2,000 people to do so, but I’ll also be keeping the testing list active and inviting people to future alphas from there, so […]| Tom Francis Regrets This Already
Hello! I’ll be at Rezzed in London next week, 7-9 April 2016, and you can come and play Heat Signature while I watch, panic, and frantically patch it on a different PC. Saturday’s sold out, but Thurs and Fri tickets are still available. Our artist John Roberts made this fantastic piece for our booth:| Tom Francis Regrets This Already
I was not at all ready for how gorgeous Far Cry Primal is. I walk around it in a daze, gawping at god rays and moon beams and frantically switching weapons and HUD elements* to get them out of the way long enough to take a screenshot. Even twenty hours in it’s still staggering me […]| Tom Francis Regrets This Already
The Witness is a very pretty island with hundreds of puzzles on iPad things. Some of those puzzles are brilliant, most are decent, many are repetitious or boring, some are aggressively irritating. Luckily none of the good ones are locked off by bad ones. That’s my review, I’m mostly making this post to put up […]| Tom Francis Regrets This Already
What’s snowballing? In XCOM, if your troops survive the mission, they get stronger, tougher and get more abilities, which makes them more likely to survive future missions and get tougher still. If they die, they’re replaced by vulnerable, weak rookies, who are likely to die and be replaced by vulnerable, weak rookies. If you’re finding […]| Tom Francis Regrets This Already
I took on a ‘Very Difficult’ mission in XCOM 2 earlier, to protect some device from attacking aliens. I was determined to do it because the reward was a Scientist, and they’ve been impossibly rare in my campaign so far. We immediately ran into two groups of very tough enemies, and though we had good […]| Tom Francis Regrets This Already
I just read Zach Gage’s post proposing some changes to the IGF. My summary of his problems with the current system would be: For ‘best audio’, it’s not clear whether jurors should a) prioritise audio alone, or b) take into account the quality of the rest of the game and how important audio is to […]| Tom Francis Regrets This Already
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’. You ask if anything actually happens at those zooms. It doesn’t! I rejig the zoom system to skip them. […]| Tom Francis Regrets This Already
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. I enjoyed it a lot! It sounds like all my bigger-Star-Wars-fan friends did too, which is great. I’ll keep this spoiler-free and then let people who’ve seen it click […]| Tom Francis Regrets This Already
Update: Solved! See bottom of post for details. Hello, more experienced programmers than me! I could use your advice. There’s a code-pattern I’ve been using for a while and I’ve just discovered a problem with it, but I can’t see a great alternative either. I will explain by example: What I’m doing Right now I’m […]| Tom Francis Regrets This Already
I just played my first full game of Tales of Arabian Nights, with my friends Chris and Pip. It’s a board game that’s very story driven: each turn you have an ‘encounter’, and choose a vague verb for how to deal with it: aid, pray, rob, follow, avoid, etc. Then another player looks up and […]| Tom Francis Regrets This Already
My summary of where we are after the last ship-generation post would be: The Drunk Snake is probably the best algorithm so far, for generating the amount of branching and length of critical path we want while looking fairly pleasing. But! There’s a lot of room for improvement. But! Improvement is getting harder: we don’t […]| Tom Francis Regrets This Already
