Tom Francis writes for PC Gamer, and he's creating Gunpoint in his spare time. He is apparently doing this just to make the rest of us feel bad about not crafting tense, enjoyable indie games for our own enjoyment. This is his first game, and he's had to teach himself how to code. Francis' goal may be to make James Franco appear lazy.

Gunpoint puts you in the shoes of a spy with preternatural jumping abilities, and it's your job to break into a series of buildings, steal files from a computer, and then escape. You can jump on top of the guards to knock them out, or grab them and go through a window to deliver a killing blow. If they see you, they pull their gun and shoot you dead. This unforgiving mechanic is one of the joys of the game.

"I feel like games sometimes miss the point of guns: they want the big flashy shooty things from the movies, but they can't let them actually kill people right away because that would make the game too easy," Francis told Ars. "So instead they knock off hitpoints, and all that noise and muzzle flash ends up feeling a bit impotent."

The challenge is to treat guns with respect, and play up their lethal power. "The reason guns add so much drama to a scene in a book or a movie is the threat. We all know that if it goes off, someone is probably going to die," Francis explained.

In Gunpoint a guard will shoot you dead in a moment unless you have it at gunpoint as well. Guns actually introduce tension into the game, which is a rare thing in modern action titles.

The spy you control has an almost supernatural ability to jump and fly through the air, and the primary way of removing opposition is to tackle the enemy guards and knock them out with a few punches. This action feels both satisfying and brutally violent, even with the game's retro-style graphics. You can actually tackle a guard through a window if you time things correctly. When I told Francis these mechanics worked well, he seemed relieved.

"I'm not a programmer by training, so I wasn't sure if I'd be able to achieve something as subtle as a good 'feel' to these bits," he told me. "It turns out the coding side isn't too hard, it's much more about understanding what makes games feel good. A little slip and slide in the right places makes a huge difference in how convincing the movement feels, and I think that's really important in making something fun to play."

He said it was tricky to code the glass, to create a surface that would break in some cases and not in others. "I just really, really like breaking fragile things, and videogames seem like the least expensive place to do it," Francis said.

8-bit noir

The YouTube video below shows a very basic art style, but the version of the game I played looked much better. "In that video I asked for art help, and amazingly about 30 artists offered their services," Francis said. He was drawn to the work of John Roberts, who was tapped to provide the game's graphics. "Gunpoint is set in a dark, noir-inspired city, but the stuff that can happen in-game is sometimes ridiculous and slightly slapstick. So art that looked realistic, but also captured a lot of character in a few pixels, worked really well."

Another artist, Fabian von Dommelen, designed the glowing cityscape seen in the background. Francis has never met either of the two artists directly.

The game allows you to switch views in order to see how the switches and electric devices are wired together, and you can then change the connections. You can wire a door on the second level of a building to a switch on the third level, causing a guard to inadvertently open a back door as he runs to check out a disturbance you caused. Controlling the guard's behavior and each level's entrances, exits, and lights by using violence and your ability to rewire the environment is how you solve each puzzle.

"Something that's surprising me is that very hard puzzles sometimes aren't as fun as easy ones, even to someone who can do both. I guess there's an assumption in games that challenge is always good, but I'm finding it sometimes feels restrictive," Francis told me when we talked about puzzle design. "Most of the moments that have made me laugh, or jump, or feel really good about my solution have arisen from the less-predictable elements of the game. Those are the ones you have to cut out if you want to make a puzzle really tough while ensuring it's not impossible."

The levels are nearing completion, and we can expect the game to be released on the PC close to Christmas. I was able to play an early version of the game to test out a few levels, and the game is both violent and funny in equal measures. It's also scary in places; if you time your moves incorrectly, you often find yourself at the wrong end of a bullet.

You can reload each level with a single button press, so the cost of failure is low. The game features simple graphics, basic action, and the first level teaches you everything you need to know about the game's mechanics. In minutes I felt like a capable killer, and began skulking around each level like a pro. The full release can't come soon enough.