When the historians of the future cast their cyber-eyes over the deluge of stupidity we encrusted upon the primitive internet, they will see that our fables, our moral storytelling, was mostly conducted with flashing colours and double-jumps. Yes, videogames have adopted the moralistic finger-wagging of fairytales and Victorian novels, for better or for worse. They have taught us a lot about ourselves and our place in the world. Here are 13 of the "best" moral lessons from PC games. Yes, you may take notes.
]]>Heat Signature is about plans going wrong. Oh, you were going to burst into that room, grab the hostage, activate your slipstream and leg it past the guards? Tough luck, you've dropped him. Now there's a bullet heading for your sternum, and no time to do anything but pick the hostage back up and throw him in the way. Now you've been shot down anyway, mission scrubbed, tossed out of an airlock with your tail between your legs.
Ah well. There are plenty more bounties in space.
]]>Tactical Breach Wizards has come a long way since its early days as an in-joke turned prototype from Gunpoint dev Tom Francis and pals. Now it looks like a clever little tactical puzzler in the vein of Into The Breach, only instead of giant robots pushing aliens into volcanoes, it's modern-day wizards pushing criminals out windows. There's still a lot of work to be done on the game, with some great early art direction hiding many development sins, but today's eleven minutes of new footage are absolutely worth a look. Check out how a Witch Cop upholds Witch Law in the video below.
]]>It's not fair. I only get a handful of presents when it's my birthday, but Heat Signature gets more new features than I can squeeze into this intro. To celebrate one year of sneaking around spaceships, today's update adds a daily challenge, playstyle-defining character traits, four special enemies and new mission types and hazards. The AI has been taught some new tricks, too.
The update officially goes live at 6pm UK time alongside a 40% discount, but I've already been poking around in the beta branch. If you liked Heat Sig, it's definitely worth revisiting. And if you didn't.
]]>You might know Tom Francis as the designer of noir rewire-'em-up Gunpoint and the stealthy spaceship invasion of Heat Signature. You might know him as the writer of the What Works And Why column around these parts. At this year's EGX Rezzed you can know him by hearing him talk on stage with Adam about the challenges of building a procedural galaxy, his design philosophy, and the plans for his next game.
]]>Sometimes an in-joke is too good to not share. Tom Francis (of Gunpoint and Heat Signature fame) is playing around with some new concepts for his next game. One of them, Tactical Breach Wizards, is a running joke from his days as PC Gamer turned real.
Four modern-day mages with kevlar-lined robes and scoped tactical wands, fighting urban crime one room at a time in XCOM inspired turn-based combat. What's not to like?
]]>What Works And Why is a new monthly column where Gunpoint and Heat Signature designer Tom Francis digs into the design of a game and analyses what makes it good.
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 course they're not. Immersive sims usually have a whole list of traits, things like:
]]>It's that time again already - 2018's Independent Games Festival hands out its best-in-indie gongs on March 21 (as part of the Game Developers Conference), and these are the games in line for a prize. And, more importantly, a big shot at success thanks to the profile, although it should be noted that a fair few of these have done rather well for themselves already.
Scooping the most nods at 4 is veritable brain-frying, rule-rewriting puzzler Baba Is You, while the singular, surreal climbing game Getting Over It... With Bennett Foddy and charming, cups-on-ears narrative adventure Night In The Woods both boast a respectable three, followed by FTL follow-up Into The Breach with 2. There are many more lovely, lovely things on the full list of finalists below.
]]>Well, here's an excellent idea. Tom Francis, the fella behind Gunpoint and Heat Signature (and various journalistic endeavours back in the day) has released an update for Heat Signature that takes 'fair points' from reviews and adds a feature or an item to address each of them. They're all simple tweaks to the 'plans gone wrong space-heist 'em up', but the update lured me back into the game last night and its surprising just how much of a difference they make.
]]>Oh no, you've tripped the alarm. Now the terrifying RPS podcast, the Electronic Wireless Show, knows you're here. It's going to hunt you down and force you to listen to it. Quick! Think of a way out of this, before you hear all about Adam becoming an accidental mass murderer in Dishonored, or John obsessively re-loading his way out of a bad situation. If you don't escape, I'll have to tell you about the time I threw a gun at someone's head in Heat Signature, to absolutely no effect. This week, you see, we're talking about Things Going Wrong.
]]>The man who killed my mum is floating off into space. Should I feel glad? I was supposed to bring him in alive. I put a trap down in the corridor of his spaceship and the moment he stood on it, he was teleported into the void. That might not sound like the best way to bring somebody in alive, but it was part of the plan. Running to the nearest window and blasting myself out after him? Also part of the plan - my trusty pod would pick us both up before we suffocated. But then it all went wrong and now I am slung over a guard's shoulders while my target is drifting away, dying.
This wasn’t part of the plan, but in Heat Signature [official site] plans crumble like biscuits dunked too-long in tea. Technically, I’ve failed the mission, but at least my mum is avenged.
]]>The things-go-bad genre has received another bumbling anti-hero today with Heat Signature [official site]. It's the top-down, spaceship-hijacking, prisoner-capturing, soldier-assassinating, star system-liberating game from Gunpoint creators Suspicious Developments. I've only played a couple of hours but in that time I've come a cropper in some terrible ways. Yesterday, I threw a handgun at a man's head. It bounced right off, and only seemed to make him more angry.
]]>Spaceship hijacking sim Heat Signature [official site] is coming out on Sept 21, says creator and Gunpointer Tom Francis. Like its spiritual predecessor, it involves infiltrating places you shouldn’t be, sneaking around like a cheeky space burglar, and completing missions for one of the galaxy’s factions. But ultimately it seems to be about panicking as all your plans and preparation go terribly awry. I asked Francis why he was proliferating the Things Go Badly Wrong genre and he said that "most games with challenge" fitted that description.
"The part I like," he said, "is 'But There Might Be A Way Out Of It'."
]]>I'm not sure if Heat Signature [official site] will be labelled as a comedy game when it goes on sale, but I haven'y played a funnier game in recent years. Your role in each brief life that you lead is to earn money by completing missions that involve kidnapping, assassination and theft, so that you can use the money to buy information regarding an end-game mission that is personal to your character. Get that job done and your character can retire happy. Fail and you're most likely a popsicle drifting through the void.
Here's how it all works, and how my most recent character died.
]]>It has been many moons since we last looked at the sneaky, top-down spaceship invading of Heat Signature [official site] but work has not ceased. A new trailer shows some new looks for the different factions you’ll be encountering, as well as explaining how a few of your hero’s teleporter skills work. In the process, creator Tom Francis fails to sneak through a high-difficulty level, proving that the game will fit neatly into the genre of Stealth But Things Go Badly Wrong.
]]>The latest series of The Great British Bake Off has come to an end, causing those of us hooked by its cream-filled buns, end-of-the-pier puns, and oddly sincere celebration of the human spirit, to feel as empty inside as an incompletely prepared batch of jam donuts. After a few days spent facing a future free from sugar, gluten, and the strange tension between Paul Hollywood and hosts Mel & Sue, I decided to do something about it. I emailed some game designers and asked them a question: if you were charged with making a computer game of The Great British Bake Off, how would you do it?
The answers are below.
]]>Heat Signature [official site] is an action/stealth game in which you can go inside the spaceships, from the team behind Gunpoint. I played a recent build last week and spoke to its lead designer Tom Francis about how how it's grown into a game of factional war, if it can ever be finished, comedy wrench KOs and the awkwardness of journalists covering ex-journalists' games. By which I mean: disclaimer - I used to work at the same magazine company as Tom, and we socialised on occasion.
Heat Signature's pratfalls-in-space concepts were a giggle already, but the scope has expanded dramatically since the first time I saw it, less than a year ago. It's becoming Galactic Civilizations as well as this sort of high-speed, outer space heist game. Gunpoint's use of physics as both freeform puzzle and source of Three Stooges comedy ethos is very clearly in there, as is a shared determination to ensure the player is doing their own thing in any given second of the game, but as well as stealing procedurally-generated spaceships you now get to play galactic factions against each other in a persistent universe. This wasn't the original plan.
]]>This new Heat Signature [official site] video dev diary/walkthrough is giving me some serious "Hotline Miami in space" vibes, and I'm totally digging it. Developer Tom Francis has made some significant updates to the game since we last saw it 220 days ago. Watch as he talks us through a few missions, resets the universe a couple of times, and nails precision rebound wrench throws.
]]>Judging by the new trailer for Heat Signature, two things are essential in a Tom Francis game - manipulation of interconnected systems and comical physics. Gunpoint's infiltration often involved tapping into electrical systems and adopting a smart tactical overview, but usually ended with trouser-propulsion and instinctive defenestration. Heat Signature's procedural spaceships provide similarly fertile ground for both forward planning and farce. The video shows two missions in full but really comes into its own when Tom decides to hijack a ship for no good reason, plotting a route to the cockpit and isolating the crew by sealing doors. Once he has the helm, explosions occur.
]]>Important proviso - all screens and video in this piece show placeholder art. The finished Heat Signature will apparently look very different - there are some hints to its possible final appearance here, however.
"I think the subtitle of the game should be 'You Can Go Inside The Spaceships'," jokes Heat Signature dev Tom Francis as he shows me his follow-up to break-out hit Gunpoint at EGX last week. "I can already tell it's going to have the Gunpoint problem where I say 'I made a game called Gunpoint' and they say 'I don't think I've heard of that', then I explain what the game is and they're "oh yeah, I've heard of that, but I just didn't remember the name because it has nothing to do with what you do in it." A pause. "This does have heat in it, at least."
]]>You can learn a lot about someone from the games they make, I'm told. Tom Francis's first game, Gunpoint, was about breaking into places, punching people out, bodging their wiring, stealing stuff, then leaving through a window. But look, his second game was a free game about gaily swinging on a grappling hook. That made the score 1-1 in Evil vs. Lovely. To settle the tie, today he released a new video showing a prototype for his third game, Heat Signature. It's about, ah, sneaking up on spaceships, boarding them, sneaking around, punching men out, then stealing their stuff. Oh Tom.
]]>Last week's DevLog Watch was an hour-long GIF of me, sat on my couch, stuffing my face with a bank holiday-worth of olives and chocolate. Development stalled when I became too full to eat anymore, but the column is back this week with new games from old developers, new developers, old journalists, and, uh, new sources of old archives...
Stealth Breakout! Stealth spaceships! Unconcealed Escher!
]]>Tom "Who Made Gunpoint" Francis is making a new game! In fact, Tom "who I worked with for eight years" Francis is making two new games simultaneously and making videos about both as development progresses. One of those games is about a grappling hook and that's all we know. The other, called Heat Signature, is a space game about sneaking up on spaceships and that's all we knew.
Knew, because Tom "I still do a podcast with him every week and we're good friends" Francis just released a video in which he reveals ship-boarding and explains the objective of the game more fully.
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