Hello! I'm Tom. I'm a game designer, writer, and programmer on Gunpoint, Heat Signature, and Tactical Breach Wizards. Here's some more info on all the games I've worked on, here are the videos I make on YouTube, and here are two short stories I wrote for the Machine of Death collections.
By me. Uses Adaptive Images by Matt Wilcox.
The issue of PC Gamer that’s just gone on-sale in the UK is the one with my eight-page review of Oblivion in it, so I’d like to a) encourage you to look at it and go ‘woo!’, and b) explain why it’s structured the way it is, and how it came about. It was a huge honour to be the one to review it, and I’d actually been looking forward to writing it almost as much as getting to play the game itself. But it turned out to be one of the hardest things I’ve ever written, up there with an eight-thousand word philosophy thesis on the morality of killing replicants.
I spent a week in Eton playing the game all day every day, with one other journalist (Ryan from X360 magazine) in the demo room with me. I wrote scraps of the review on a laptop in my hotel room each night, but generally fell asleep before I got much done, or changed my mind about what I’d said within the first five minutes of playing the next day. By the end of the week, I’d written around half the review’s length, none of which made it into the final piece. Cumulative wordcount: 2,500.
Back at the PC Gamer office, I wrote the whole review quickly, but wasn’t sure if I’d talked about all the important things. Graham read it, and suggested that I may have become hung up on the details a little. I re-read it, and I appeared to have written a manual. A step-by-step guide to what Oblivion is and what happens in it is all info I’d find fascinating if I hadn’t played the game, but as a review it was fussy, dry and missed the point. Cumulative wordcount: 6,000.
I’d been wrestling with the decision of which aspects to talk about, resigned to the fact that you couldn’t cover all the important ones in a small book, let alone a magazine article. I’d also been writing up some of the best bits of my adventures as little stories, to go in separate boxes throughout, but it became clear that these were actually making the one essential point. Oblivion is hugely complex and entirely free-form, so you can’t give an impression of what it’s like to play by attempting to describe it. The only way to give a real feel for how rich with possibilities it is, and why that makes it great, is with examples. So they’ve become a chunk of the main text, punctuated by the normal business of reviewing. Cumulative wordcount: 10,500. Final article: 3,943.
Feedback so far has been really good, and much more importantly I’m now officially mentioned on Wikipedia. What I’m really looking forward to is the game finally coming out. Apart from wanting to get back to it, I want to hear what everyone else gets up to when they play.