Thomas Kewell - Games Designer

 Hi.  I'm Tom.  I've been working as a games designer since 2009.  Over the years I've worked on a number of games for various consoles and PCs, including some famous names like Sea of Thieves, Elite Dangerous and Star Citizen.  I'm currently a Lead Designer at Lucid Games. I've really enjoyed stepping into the role of a lead. Being able to provide direction and advice, as well as highlighting design methodologies and opportunities to my team, and seeing them grow in confidence and ability as a result is a real privilege.  I still really enjoy getting hands on with the design of a game, and am keen to keep my technical skills up to date, but empowering a team of designers to do great work is it's own reward. As a developer, I take a problem solving approach to design.  This can be applied to larger, higher level problems, e.g. "Players are disengaging from X feature of the game", or to smaller details "Weapon Y is dominating matches", and all...

For this project I wanted to create an interactive version of my CV and portfolio, where the viewer can select from an assortment of the various game and studio mugs that I have acquired (usually legitimately) over the course of my career.  Explore a represenation of my career in game development expressed in mug form!  Scroll up and down to view the ever growing mug tree, and click on a mug to get a virtual cuppa and read more about that studio or game. Play Mugs Portfolio on itch.io   For the more old school, here's a text version of my current CV: Tom Kewell Games Designer linkedin.com/in/thomas-kewell – http://tkewelldesign.blogspot.com/   I am an experienced lead games designer who has worked across multiple genres, helping to deliver experiences that players love, and build and nurture games that have helped shape the modern gaming landscape.  I prioritise empowering designers in my team to create their best work. KEY SKILLS NURTURING – Prioritising the...

 I've worked on several AAA games over the course of my career. Here you can find a list of those games, along with a few details, and links to dedicated pages on those games.   Sea of Thieves https://www.seaofthieves.com/   Explore a vast open world in the ultimate pirate adventure game. Sea of thieves is a first person game for PC and consoles where players form crews and explore the high seas.  Magical foes and valuable treasure await them. Working as a Senior Designer, I worked on Season 14: Pirates of Mischief, adding a stealth mechanic to the game, as well as several darts for the new blowpipe.  I also worked to prepare existing areas of the game for the new grapple gun, ensuring players couldn't break existing content with this powerful new traversal tool.  The season was very well received by players, who enjoyed new ways to engage with the games AI enemies as well as each other.   You can read more about my work on Season 14 in A PAGE I H...

 This article describes some of the post launch content we released for Elite Dangerous Odyssey.  If you want to read some more about the initial development and launch content, you can find lots of detail in these posts - TKewell Design - Elite Dangerous Odyssey  and TKewell Design - Elite Dangerous . After the initial launch of Odyssey, we identified several areas of the game that we wanted to make improvements in.  These ranged from smaller quality of life changes and bug fixes, to larger content additions, such as missions and mechanics that were not ready for launch. One of the key areas we identified as needing improvement was how the 3 areas of the gameplay, ship flight, ground vehicles and on foot interfaced with each other.  This ultimately lead to the development and release of one of my favourite pieces of content I've ever worked on, the Scorpion SRV. We started with the initial problem: players who were on foot and in ground vehicles are overly vuln...

Released: 19th May 2021 PC - Cobra Engine   Elite Dangerous Odyssey invites you to disembark from your ship's seat and set foot on unexplored frontiers.   Elite Dangerous Odyssey builds on the epic galaxy of Elite Dangerous, and adds the ability to depart your ship on foot.  Alongside this new perspective were added settlements, station interiors and many other locations to explore. Early Prototyping The foundations for odyssey stretch all the way back to the planning stages of Elite Dangerous, where we were careful to build things with a human scale grid based system in mind.  This was done with a view to "future proof" early parts of the game, and ensure that everything we made was based on an on foot human as a building block guide.  Not everything we planned out in early stages has gone on to be a feature in Elite Dangerous, but many of the locations and features found in Odyssey were facilitated by this careful early planning. True prototyping work ...

Elite Dangerous - Beyond As part of the Beyond series of updates, I returned to Elite Dangerous.  Part of my work on this update was to seed the galaxy with discoverable, non-sapientalien life forms for players to search for and learn about.  Exploration content is something in Elite that I am really passionate about, and it was really fun to create something for our explorers that was so evocative and mysterious.  Elite Dangerous often throws up galaxy sized design problems to solve, and in this post I'm going to discuss a few interesting elements that came up when developing this content. What is Elite Dangerous?     A quick refresher on Elite Dangerous: Elite Dangerous is set in a procedurally generated simulation of the Milky Way galaxy, in the 34th century.  Players are charged with blazing their own trail across this galaxy, and can participate in a variety of activities to earn credits, rank and reputation. The Codex The Codex menu ...

The first game maker's toolkit Jam set the challenge of creating a game within 48 hours.  Inspired by the gun boots of Downwell, simultaneously stalling the players fall and attacking enemies below, the theme of the jam was dual purpose game mechanics. Working with friends, we produced Star Thruster.  The player's aim is to fly through all the coloured gates in each level before the timer runs out.  The player's ship's speed increases over time, increasing exponentially when the player changes their colour setting. I developed and expanded the groups original design, and scripted the game's mechanics using C# in Unity, as well as providing a little additional art support.  Although I've prototyped game ideas with Unity before, I took this opportunity to move outside my comfort zone and stretch myself.  Although I wouldn't say the game's concept is fantastic for the brief, I am very pleased with what I was able to achieve technically over the short cou...