Gunpoint: the journalist who made a game with $30

Who is Tom Francis?

Tom Francis is the creator of Gunpoint, and when he started the game he wrote about games: he was an editor at PC Gamer, a PC games magazine in the UK¹. He had no programming background¹.

What he did have was years of reviews. In them, he kept suggesting how a game could be better, and the idea for Gunpoint grew out of that habit¹. Wanting to make his own game was not new: he wrote that he had wanted to do it for most of his adult life².

How did a journalist with no experience start a game?

He started with one less excuse. In May 2010, Tom Francis wrote on his blog that Spelunky, one of his favorite games, had been made by one person, in a program called Game Maker². For him, that removed the last excuse not to try².

In the same post, he described himself as someone with "little time, less talent and no experience"². He even opened Spelunky's code to learn from it, and found it too hard for him². He predicted that just getting the character to move well would take about six months².

The program he chose was Game Maker 8, a game-making program that cost $30¹. It was the game's only direct cost, according to him³. Within about a month, there was already a first playable version, which he showed on his blog¹.

Did he make the game alone?

No. The code and the game design (the rules, the levels) were his, but the art and music came from outside¹. In 2011, he asked artists on his blog to send samples, got far more than he expected and picked two: John Roberts and Fabian van Dommelen¹. The music came from three musicians recruited the same way: Ryan Ike, Francisco Cerda and John Robert Matz¹.

All of this happened in his spare time, while he kept working at the magazine¹. The game came out on June 3, 2013, for PC¹. From the blog announcement to the release, it was about three years (our math).

How do you play Gunpoint?

You are a freelance spy who breaks into buildings to steal information¹⁴. The building is shown cut in half, like a dollhouse, with its floors, guards and wires in plain view.

The main tool is the Crosslink, a gadget that shows the building's circuits and lets you rewire one object to another¹. A light switch now opens a locked door; or it opens a trapdoor, and the guard who goes to turn on the light falls to the floor below⁴.

The fun is in that swap: the game gives you the pieces and you invent the way out. Guards carry guns, and being seen means instant death, a choice the author made so the guns would be taken seriously¹. At the end of each mission, you are graded on time, noise and how many times you were seen¹. The game also comes with a level editor¹.

Did the game succeed?

It did, according to the author and the critics. Tom Francis said the $30 for the program came back 64 seconds after pre-orders opened; counting promotion and contracts, the cost came back within a few hours³. Pre-orders beat his expectations, and he left the magazine to make games full time³.

Critics liked it: the Metacritic average, a site that collects magazine scores, was 83 out of 100¹. PC Gamer itself did not publish a score, to avoid a conflict of interest¹. In October 2026, 97% of the 8,238 English reviews on Steam, the largest PC game store, were positive⁴.

Then came Heat Signature, in 2017, and Tactical Breach Wizards, in 2024, from his studio, Suspicious Developments¹. In 2015, he released a video series to teach people who had never made a game how to start, with the same kind of program he had used⁵.

By the numbers

What does the Gunpoint story show, and what doesn't it?

It shows that someone with no programming background made a well-reviewed game, with a cheap tool, in his spare time. It also shows that the idea came from what he knew best: years of playing and reviewing games (our reading).

The other side

Gunpoint does not prove it is fast or easy. It was about three years of work outside his working hours, and the game was not made alone: it had two artists and three musicians. Tom Francis already worked in games, knew the audience and had a blog read by people in the field, which helped him find the team and sell. He did not share sales figures in the sources we read. And it is the story of a game that worked, told precisely because it is rare: most games that are released sell little.

What has changed since then?

This part is not about Gunpoint, which was made without AI. It is about the work.

Tom Francis expected six months just to get the character moving properly, and he learned to code along the way². Today, AI can do that part: you describe what you want and it writes the commands, which came to be called vibe coding. That does not make the work easy: testing, fixing and deciding are still up to you, and no one guarantees the result.

What AI does not bring is what he had plenty of: knowing what was missing in the games he liked (our reading). If you want to see other cases, read about people who made a game without being a programmer and the story of Masako Wakamiya, who made a game after 80. To understand the part that changed, see whether you can make a game without knowing how to code.