Tom Francis

2013.03.27 - Gunpoint Dev Log: I am now an independent game developer for three months
- 2:55 - Making the game wasn't taking too much of a toll on him until he tried to finish it, and realized how much work was left to do.
- 3:07 - "The amount of work I'm fine with, I've actually, I've sort of made my peace with the fact that games take a long time to finish. And I'm not at all bored of Gunpoint, I really like working on it. I'm really excited about finishing the thing. The only time it becomes at a negative thing is when I look at what I've got left to do and I can't see how it's going to cram into the time that...like, I don't have a hard deadline, but I always have a mental deadline. Like, 'It can't take another year...it can't take another YEAR.'"
- 3:40 - "I never actually feel like, 'Oh, god, this next thing I've got to do is just boring.'...There are boring tasks in it, but when the reason I want to finish Gunpoint is that's what I want to do (...) The really big thing pressing on me every day is, I want to know if I really can do this, as a job."
- 5:19 - "If I start to assume Gunpoint is going to do well, there's no good that can come from that. Because then it either meets my expectations or it doesn't."
- 8:00 - "The only unpleasant thing about doing Gunpoint is [that I don't get weekends off]."
2015.07.20 - What it's like showing Heat Signature to the press
- 1:50 - Turn off the tips, because the players aren't going to actually read them. You're just going to explain stuff yourself.
- 2:50 - He finds that watching press play is different from watching non-press play.
- 3:05 - He takes his game to 'Rezzed' and 'EGX' (conferences?) just to watch people play. He takes notes on what they get stuck on, what doesn't work. But he doesn't think about what features it needs.
- 3:40 - When you're showing the game to the press, all that matters is, 'Did something cool happen? And if not, shouldn't it have?' And, 'How can I make it happen?'
- 4:15 - If he's showing a game to someone who has already seen it, and he shows a trailer that shows all of the new features he's added since he last showed it, then what will the press person get from playing it?
- 4:40 - He spent time talking with someone from RPS who he knew, and they were talking about whether there was any change to the game that was substantial enough to warrant an article.
- 6:00 - One of the ways you can improve a game is to make it feel nicer to play, but the press won't be able to write about that. They write about features. The readers won't care to hear that the game feels nicer. His point: "What previews well and what makes a good story aren't necessarily the same thing."
- 8:50 - It's sort of rude to ask a journalist if they like the game because it puts them in an awkward position.
- 9:30 - There was a feature he added (re: strategy) that he didn't feel like the journalists really needed to play through, because they could just get the idea from the trailer.
- 11:35 - What he wants to see is that when he is having someone demo the game and he stops them from playing, the person doesn't want to stop playing.
2017.02.05 - Heat Signature dev log: new country, new office, new team
- 17:00 - end - He explains that he's just recently realized that the 'interior game' (ie what happens when you're in the spaceships) is really the core of the game, and that the spaceflight is really just a framing device for that core gameplay. He says he spent 2.5 years working on the framing device (the space stuff), and now has to focus on the gameplay for when you're in the spaceships.
- "at the end of the day I don't think it matters if I fuck that [the personal/final mission] up, or if I just do a lackluster job. I think that's a part of the game that can afford to be only OK. And the interior game cannot–it must be brilliant. And that's kind of like a revelation I've come to over...this far into Heat Signature, like way, way, way too late I've discovered that this whole idea of going inside spaceships is not the core of a game, it doesn't–by itself–sort of, form a good basis for a game, like, that's not what you're gonna...the actual moment you dock, it's cool, but that's not the core of what you do, right? It has to be what happens after you dock, or something else; it could have been the space game, or whatever. But the way it ended up is that the interior game is where all of my interesting ideas ended up being. And so what I've really made is a really fancy framing device for a top-down stealth game with, sort of, emergent elements and hopefully a very-wide toolset and interesting challenges. And that's cool; it's good news, 'cuz I can make that game, but I haven't made that game yet. I mean, I kind of have now, like since Stugen...Stugen 'til now I've been working on that game. But for the other two-and-a-half years I wasn't working on that game. I was working on the framing device for that game. So, it's a useful piece of information to have. And that's what [unintelligible]."