Thanks to the sniper on the final level, I finished the game in two different ways the other night. Great stuff.
Gunpoint has sold well enough that Tom “Pentadact” Francis has left PC Gamer after 10 years.
What’s he left to do? Roll around in the hordes of cash?
(I wish I could do that)
Make games full time. I’m kind of torn, to be honest. If we get more stuff like Gunpoint, then great, but I’ll really miss his writing too. That GalCiv diary is pretty much my favourite piece of games writing ever.
2 dead? TRY HARDER!
Those were the inevitable story deaths.
Good news from Mr. Francis: “I can now make games full-time for the foreseeable future”
So, I quit my job.
In fact, I think I have quit jobs, as a concept.
I started Gunpoint as an audition piece to get myself a position at a developer, but designing it has been so creatively satisfying that I no longer want one, and so commercially successful that I’ll never need one.
I haven’t been retweeting praise or flaunting any actual sales figures, but if it’s not going to sound too horribly braggy, I’ll share the one part of Gunpoint’s success that you might actually care about:
I can now make games full-time for the foreseeable future
More amazingly, I can do it with total creative freedom. There’s really no pressure for my next thing to make a particular amount of money, so I can do whatever I think will be most exciting.
It also means I can afford to keep being nice. I didn’t let anyone pay for Gunpoint until I was ready to put a free demo out, so everyone would have a way to make sure it ran OK on their system and that they liked it before giving me any money.
The game is very good indeed. I think he earned every penny of it.
I liked it, but it was kinda short. Not too sure about replay value as most puzzles have minimal complexity.
for ten bucks, the witty writing is enough.
I just sat down and and finished it in a sitting (minus a dinner break). I didn’t whack anyone until the end mission. I also didn’t buy any of the gadgets other than the required ones. I agree with the comments above - the dialog was whitty, items like the laptops too small, clever rewiring gameplay but not that challenging. Glad I picked it up, it was a good game - but I didn’t need any more content unless he changed it up somehow. I’m glad to see a guy make and deliver a game he wanted to make while getting rewarded for it. Wish I had the discipline and talent to make something others enjoy and good enough that people would actually want to pay for it- it would give me something to do with my software development experience. Warms my heart when I see someone like this succeed!
My Gunpoint ending: http://www.pentadact.com/category/conwaysblog/?K=4&U=24&C0=3&E1=1&C1=1&E2=2&C2=4&C3=3&C4=1&C5=2
I’m feeling slightly weird in that I kind of want Tom to do a game with less gameplay. Much as I love Gunpoint as a game, I’d love to see his writing in an old school adventure game. I was getting a big Gemini Rue vibe from Gunpoint that I’d love to see fleshed out.
I just finished it as well, and agree with robc04. I wanted the crosslink puzzles to require some sophisticated thinking, and they never did. I wanted Rube Goldberg machines, and all too often the solution was “hook light switch to door.” Only once or twice did I have to do something like have an elevator trigger something else because I needed particular timing on a vault door.
I liked the writing, but I suspect that’s partly because there wasn’t too much of it. When there were bigger blocks of exposition it lost some of its charm. The passages of short punchy back and forth worked better.