gaussgunner
Arcane
Or eating da poo poo?
-
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Cain on Games - Tim Cain's new YouTube channel
- Thread starter Goral
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S.torch
Liturgist
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People who said Arcanum is not High Fantasy & wasn't influenced by Tolkien SEETHING forever.
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- 99,624
__scribbles__
Educated
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- Aug 1, 2015
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- 517
Picking your range of damage numbers means setting subsequent ranges for health/bonus stats/ weapon damage.
A lot of what he said about skill and attribute ranges are valid here so a lot of it will sound familiar.
Big numbers make people happy, they like seeing 20/200/2000, not 2. If you think it doesn't really matter between doing 2 damage to a 10 HP monster vs doing 2000 damage to a 10,0000 HP monster, you're thinking with your brain not your heart. A lot of people don't think about it. You can dismiss this, but perception is important. This is why a lot of old arcade games have the basic points for shooting an alien start at 100 so your final score inevitably has at least two 0s at the end of it. Why not just make each alien 1 point, and end with 211 points instead of 21100? People like the big numbers. The goal of the game is to make people have fun.
Random numbers seem to confuse and anger people, what they really want is 'fair' or 'uniform'/well distributed. If Damage is considered the same way, they don't want proportional, they want a feeling of power.
Big numbers have the advantage where if you want to do anything as a percentage (Such as a weapon that increases damage by 5%), if your damage is 1-10, 5% doesn't mean much. Even if you hit 10, the additional 5% is 10.5, probably not what you want.
The way Cain does damage value is he picks a range of what he wants to do, such as say 1-20, because he wants some percentage values in there. Than you just spread out the design from there, if a sword does 1-20 then he can have a club do 1-12 and a dagger do 1-5. He can have damage bonuses of +1-+3. If he wants Strength to also give bonuses, then he has to consider if you could get half of the total range just from weapon and strength bonuses. Now it's more like 11-30 instead of 1-20. You may be fine with that, you may not like all that impact coming not from the weapon, the character could pick up a dagger and still do a lot of damage.
Maybe you decide to swap to 1-100 after that, but now you are dealing with an enormous range. Maybe more randomness than you want because someone could do 3 and someone else could do 97. Perhaps instead, you do d10x10. No one will ever do less than 10, and on average you will be doing 55. Percent bonuses work on these larger numbers. So multiples of ranges like that might work.
Sticking to that idea, and spreading out the design, how much HP should the enemies have? How long do you want combat to last? If you want relatively low monsters to go down in 3 hits, than in the 1-100 range, with 55 average, probably give them 100/110 HP. Definitely won't go down in 1 hit, 2 hits probably will get them, 3 hits should, maybe 4 or 5 hits at the most. What about bosses? If a regular creature goes down in 3 hits with around 100 health, should he have 1000 health? Should he have armor, with damage threshold or damage reduction?
The converse to this is how much damage is the creature doing to the player. You may want those in parity, but there are more monsters than there is the player, so they'll need more health. Maybe some monsters do less damage, but then what if you give some monsters magical spells or weapons, or other enemies that buff the monsters?
Pick one damage range, and calculate everything. Put numbers in for all of those and see if you like the output. If you don't, go back to the first thing you did, maybe damage range, and tweak that, then see how you like the new outputs. Maybe it's good everywhere except the damage on bosses and player, than you could tweak how armor changes that. Lots of designers Cain knows use spreadsheets for just this reason.
You won't create a perfect design in 10 minutes, you'll work on how all of your choices affect future choices and if you don't like the effect, change the choice.
Maybe you do all of this, like the numbers, then you put it in, and you start getting feedback like the bosses are too easy. Do you give the boss more armor, add damage threshold just to bosses, increase the health? No one right solution, very much try and see.
Keep in mind what Cain said about percentages. If you don't want percentages or big numbers, that's fine, but expect a bad reaction from many players.
Tl;DR : Pick what you like, see where it leads in your design. If something you don't like is a result, go back and start tweaking. Try it and see, that's what all the designers do.
A lot of what he said about skill and attribute ranges are valid here so a lot of it will sound familiar.
Big numbers make people happy, they like seeing 20/200/2000, not 2. If you think it doesn't really matter between doing 2 damage to a 10 HP monster vs doing 2000 damage to a 10,0000 HP monster, you're thinking with your brain not your heart. A lot of people don't think about it. You can dismiss this, but perception is important. This is why a lot of old arcade games have the basic points for shooting an alien start at 100 so your final score inevitably has at least two 0s at the end of it. Why not just make each alien 1 point, and end with 211 points instead of 21100? People like the big numbers. The goal of the game is to make people have fun.
Random numbers seem to confuse and anger people, what they really want is 'fair' or 'uniform'/well distributed. If Damage is considered the same way, they don't want proportional, they want a feeling of power.
Big numbers have the advantage where if you want to do anything as a percentage (Such as a weapon that increases damage by 5%), if your damage is 1-10, 5% doesn't mean much. Even if you hit 10, the additional 5% is 10.5, probably not what you want.
The way Cain does damage value is he picks a range of what he wants to do, such as say 1-20, because he wants some percentage values in there. Than you just spread out the design from there, if a sword does 1-20 then he can have a club do 1-12 and a dagger do 1-5. He can have damage bonuses of +1-+3. If he wants Strength to also give bonuses, then he has to consider if you could get half of the total range just from weapon and strength bonuses. Now it's more like 11-30 instead of 1-20. You may be fine with that, you may not like all that impact coming not from the weapon, the character could pick up a dagger and still do a lot of damage.
Maybe you decide to swap to 1-100 after that, but now you are dealing with an enormous range. Maybe more randomness than you want because someone could do 3 and someone else could do 97. Perhaps instead, you do d10x10. No one will ever do less than 10, and on average you will be doing 55. Percent bonuses work on these larger numbers. So multiples of ranges like that might work.
Sticking to that idea, and spreading out the design, how much HP should the enemies have? How long do you want combat to last? If you want relatively low monsters to go down in 3 hits, than in the 1-100 range, with 55 average, probably give them 100/110 HP. Definitely won't go down in 1 hit, 2 hits probably will get them, 3 hits should, maybe 4 or 5 hits at the most. What about bosses? If a regular creature goes down in 3 hits with around 100 health, should he have 1000 health? Should he have armor, with damage threshold or damage reduction?
The converse to this is how much damage is the creature doing to the player. You may want those in parity, but there are more monsters than there is the player, so they'll need more health. Maybe some monsters do less damage, but then what if you give some monsters magical spells or weapons, or other enemies that buff the monsters?
Pick one damage range, and calculate everything. Put numbers in for all of those and see if you like the output. If you don't, go back to the first thing you did, maybe damage range, and tweak that, then see how you like the new outputs. Maybe it's good everywhere except the damage on bosses and player, than you could tweak how armor changes that. Lots of designers Cain knows use spreadsheets for just this reason.
You won't create a perfect design in 10 minutes, you'll work on how all of your choices affect future choices and if you don't like the effect, change the choice.
Maybe you do all of this, like the numbers, then you put it in, and you start getting feedback like the bosses are too easy. Do you give the boss more armor, add damage threshold just to bosses, increase the health? No one right solution, very much try and see.
Keep in mind what Cain said about percentages. If you don't want percentages or big numbers, that's fine, but expect a bad reaction from many players.
Tl;DR : Pick what you like, see where it leads in your design. If something you don't like is a result, go back and start tweaking. Try it and see, that's what all the designers do.
- Joined
- May 29, 2010
- Messages
- 36,708
I agree that single-digit damage numbers are disappointing, but I prefer the two to three digit range, not so much thousands and thousands of damage.
Also prefer small ranges. Too much chaos and luck involved with extreme swinginess.
Also prefer small ranges. Too much chaos and luck involved with extreme swinginess.
deuxhero
Arcane
The real problem with single digit numbers is that they do not handle division or even subtraction well. If an ability removes a third of ~10 damage, a value that rounds up is much more powerful than one that doesn't (3 to 4 is over 133% effective) while if a value rounds down (always or closer) that will be noticeably less powerful which makes weird breakpoint stuff. If you introduce percentile values as real things, you might as well have gone with higher numbers in the first place.
I actually like how Bannerlord made the default human HP 100 and made bonus HP relatively rare. That made it so you instantly know how effective an attack is: ~33 HP is about three hits to kill a human, while 55 is a 2HKO. Triple digits also discourages +2% damage to targets wearing pink when on fire bullshit that always pops up once you get to that kind of value (and the last digits aren't cosmetic).
Of course, the whole discussion is predicated on HP with damage subtracting directly is actually the right choice for game design. A lot tabletop RPGs have moved to wound systems where damage over a certain value gives a character a wound, each wound gives a character penalties, and a certain number of wounds takes a character out of the action. It works better for certain kinds of combat (superheroes or pulp where attacks are either shrugged off or devastating and random minions absolutely aren't playing by the same rules as the player characters) than others (a prolonged boxing match where damage is cumulative and all combatants have equal plot armor). Savage Worlds does this and began as a western, showing it actually works fairly well for guns: A .38 Special or .380 always has a 34.38% chance of downing a human minion of average Vigor on a gut shot, 66% chance two to the gut, and one to the head has an 81.25% chance, which is far superior to the minion losing arbitrary amount of HP lost from an arbitrary HP total on every attack.
I actually like how Bannerlord made the default human HP 100 and made bonus HP relatively rare. That made it so you instantly know how effective an attack is: ~33 HP is about three hits to kill a human, while 55 is a 2HKO. Triple digits also discourages +2% damage to targets wearing pink when on fire bullshit that always pops up once you get to that kind of value (and the last digits aren't cosmetic).
Of course, the whole discussion is predicated on HP with damage subtracting directly is actually the right choice for game design. A lot tabletop RPGs have moved to wound systems where damage over a certain value gives a character a wound, each wound gives a character penalties, and a certain number of wounds takes a character out of the action. It works better for certain kinds of combat (superheroes or pulp where attacks are either shrugged off or devastating and random minions absolutely aren't playing by the same rules as the player characters) than others (a prolonged boxing match where damage is cumulative and all combatants have equal plot armor). Savage Worlds does this and began as a western, showing it actually works fairly well for guns: A .38 Special or .380 always has a 34.38% chance of downing a human minion of average Vigor on a gut shot, 66% chance two to the gut, and one to the head has an 81.25% chance, which is far superior to the minion losing arbitrary amount of HP lost from an arbitrary HP total on every attack.
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- Joined
- Aug 1, 2015
- Messages
- 517
When Cain started working in gaming in the 80s, you would be lucky if a new CRPG came out once a month, usually there were only a few a year. That was true for almost all the genres except the simplest like arcade like games. Compared to now, where if you included DLC and expansions and mobile, you could play a new RPG every day, Cain doesn't think he is exaggerating.
It has never been easier then right now to make a game, even to make it by yourself. As Cain has mentioned before, there are so many free game engines out there. Free tools for processing sound and video, asset stores with lots of stuff. Once you have made a game, instead of finding a publisher or having to worry about how to get it into market, you just bring it to digital distribution. Even if you just release in English there will be a lot of places that can buy it. Now the market is flooded. Competing not just with your peers or experienced developers that quit and are working from home, you are going up against the entire planet, such as China. There are so many games, and they hard to find, because of the lack of traditional gatekeeping. Most of the things that could block a game from release in the past are gone, Cain considers the pros and cons. Pros, now you get a lot of new games and experimental games, games with features you didn't see anywhere else, games in genres you have never heard of before and games that defy genres. You want a dating sim with realistic graphics set in a fantasy world, there probably is a game for you. There are non traditional games, games with unusual settings or aiming for a very narrow demographic.
The cons of (lack of) gatekeeping are numerous, now it is hard to find games or be found. You may make a great game, but if you lack a well known name or marketing budget you will get buried. There are no more editorial filters, you can put anything you want into a game. Cain has learned over many decades that just because you can think of an idea doesn't mean you should put it into the game. You have two ideas that contradict each other, or just don't belong in the same game. Often, that editorial filter is the publisher, or whoever is paying you (i.e the boss of your department.) Say, you want turn based and real time with pause in the game at the same time, your boss tells you no, pick one and make it work. You could call that censorship, but in a way it can be good for you, making you narrow your feature list and making them all good isn't a bad thing.
The lack of gatekeeping/editorial control has caused a torrent of really bad games. People say AAA is bad, they stick to indie, trust Cain, there are a lot of really bad indies. Bad games at every tier, because people are rushing to get them out, they are not applying filters, now you can just press a button and get the game on Steam, make money now, fix it later. A whole host of reasons those filters are gone, but Cain won't get into that right now.
Many games now, some of them are really bad, now you have to wade through them. This isn't just happening with video games, you'll notice the same thing in digital book stores. A lot of self published authors or publishing through Amazon/E-book. There are no editors, you can tell. Forget the spelling and punctuation errors (Stuns Cain to this day now that you have a button to fix that), there are so many horrible extra characters and meandering plotlines (No button for that.) Cain is bracing himself for the flood of AI-generated books.
If you have a streaming service, you notice all the movies coming out, and you notice there are a lot of bad ones. If you thought Asylum made bad ones, there are a whole bunch, and they are coming from everywhere, filmed on their iPhones, filmed with small production companies, overseas. Video services like TikTok/Youtube/Vimeo have so much bad stuff you are probably used to watching 10 bad videos to get 1 good video. Just going to get worse, AI books and videos on the way, expects AI generated video games soon. Has heard of tool that has AI generate you a game based on your requested feature set.
What's the solution to this? Cain hopes you won't take this as Pro-Censorship, but he thinks curation is the fix. Curation can happen on both ends, when you are making the game it is good to have a heart to heart with somebody who can tell you features you need to cut back on or time limits you need to obey. Instead of spending ten years on your magnum opus, maybe take a few years to make one game, get feedback, and then come back to make a second better game.
Curation can happen at the other end. Reviewers can look at the game after it ships, say if it is good bad/bad game with good features/good game with bad features. Cain has been using reviewers more and more for what he does. Books, movies games, Cain has his favorite reviewers online and will check what they think about something before he buys it. He checks how they feel about games he has a strong opinion of. Do they love games he love, do they hate games he hates. Helps him find reviewers that match his personal taste. Only way he has been managing to get games lately. Even some of his friends who suggest games are suggesting games Cain doesn't like, such as linear stories or premade protagonists. Still hasn't found the perfect reviewer but has found some reviewers he really likes. Not a day/week goes by where he doesn't add a book or game to his watch/play lists because a reviewer he follows liked it. Even then, his list is becoming too large for him to ever go through. Cain thought he could just play all the games he wanted when he retired, but there are still too many.
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ColonelMace
Educated
Thanks to curators, they can indeed.
- Joined
- Aug 1, 2015
- Messages
- 517
Very few people know the full details about this, nobody at Bethesda knows about it, most of the Fallout team either doesn't know it or heard it third hand and probably forgot the details. Cain took many notes, some things missing, he will get into that.
Back in 1995, development had Fallout had been going for about two years, marketing had hired an external advertising company to come up with the Fallout logo, the type font to use, and the box cover. When they got them, Cain went "Huh." They were pretty plain, nothing really Fallout about it, could have been any post apocalypse game. Wished he remembered the name of the advertising company. They didn't like it, so Leonard decides he will make a new one. That said, Leonard looked back at the company's previous work and really kind of liked the logo, just not how the cover used it. Made what would be Fallout's final cover.
Marketing did not like that cover, there was a meeting with someone Cain will not name (He remembers who it was, but certain elements of the channel's audience seem to shame anyone he names), He said they loved what Leonard did, but they would not be using it. Cain asked why, the marketing individual had several reasons, but what Cain remembers most is that they emphasized the importance of a face on the cover. Cain countered that the Power Armor guy was very distinctive , but Marketing insisted the face had to be visible. Keep in mind, there was no visible face on the box the advertising company made. He pointed that out, the marketing guy just said wellll there are rules. He kept talking, Cain wasn't looking at him, and was staring at something on a shelf behind the gentleman's desk. The other guy eventually turned to see what Cain was looking at: A copy of Interplay's #1 Best selling game of 1995, Descent (Picture of it at 4:08 in case you don't know what it looks like.) You may notice something about that cover, that there is no face on it. The other person had spent 10 minutes talking about the importance of a face and he could not approve Leonard's work because of it while the #1 selling game was just that. Cain said he didn't understand, and the other guy would say the exception proves the rule. First time someone told Cain that, but not the last time. Would come back in Fallout 2 when the design team was doing something Cain thought was pretty trope-y and they responded yeah but sometimes cliches work.
Cain is color blind, doesn't have much artistic sense, didn't like what the ad company did, did like Leonard's, Leonard cared a lot about it, so he decided to make an issue about it. He refused to sign off on the ad company's art. There was a room just for producers and other higher level people to sign off on stuff, he did put Leonard's art in there and signed off on it. Other people signed off on it, so it became the Fallout box cover.
Two years later, Cain is working on Fallout 2 despite agreeing Cain wouldn't do it. He is in charge of it, Leonard and Jason are handling the art. Leonard had a great idea for a cover that not only tied into the first box but connected to the tribal backstory of the second game (6:38 on the video and on the thumbnail.) Special thanks to reddit user FoxTrotNiner for cleaning up the art. This image became a loading screen in Fallout 2, obviously they did not use it for the cover. In a meeting, Cain discovered what would become the Fallout 2 cover we know was now the cover and Leonard's work would not be used. Cain protested he wanted the art his artists put together, and pointed out Leonard's art had that vital face that was theoretically needed for a cover and the company's box art didn't. The person on the other side was a new marketing individual, first she denied any knowledge on the idea that a face was important in a cover, then said that they had already decided on the new art, it was done, there would be no need for further discussion. People like to focus on several reasons Cain left Interplay, this was one of them. Someone with no experience with Fallout made a decision Cain didn't like, an important decision, without any feedback from him and completely ignored his complaints. This was not what Cain had spent years crunching for.
First, Cain thinks Leonard's would have been better, but it wasn't that Cain felt super strongly about that, but when you become a game director that means you have to fight fights that are not necessarily yours. Someone on your team feels strongly about something, you agree with that person, even if you personally don't think it's important, it is important to them, so you go to the mat for them. Cain is a colorblind programmer, he doesn't have much of a dog in artistic fights, but he fought for the artists.
Apparently there were other reasons to go for the Enclave box art, they had changed the box shape. He wasn't sure if the new one had a flap or not, but the first fallout box was more horizontal while the new one was vertical (Apparently this was how shelving worked in game stores.) They could have changed the tribal cover to fit that very easily, Leonard said he could have gone and done the change instantly as it was just a digital image. But nope, it had already been decided. Odd thing for Interplay to double down on, and gave Cain a bad feeling about the shape of things to come, stupid arguments with people who had nothing to do with creating a thing but suddenly want to be a big part of it.
If you ever make an IP, unless you own it, you will lose control of it, so brace yourself for being overridden like this.
Back in 1995, development had Fallout had been going for about two years, marketing had hired an external advertising company to come up with the Fallout logo, the type font to use, and the box cover. When they got them, Cain went "Huh." They were pretty plain, nothing really Fallout about it, could have been any post apocalypse game. Wished he remembered the name of the advertising company. They didn't like it, so Leonard decides he will make a new one. That said, Leonard looked back at the company's previous work and really kind of liked the logo, just not how the cover used it. Made what would be Fallout's final cover.
Marketing did not like that cover, there was a meeting with someone Cain will not name (He remembers who it was, but certain elements of the channel's audience seem to shame anyone he names), He said they loved what Leonard did, but they would not be using it. Cain asked why, the marketing individual had several reasons, but what Cain remembers most is that they emphasized the importance of a face on the cover. Cain countered that the Power Armor guy was very distinctive , but Marketing insisted the face had to be visible. Keep in mind, there was no visible face on the box the advertising company made. He pointed that out, the marketing guy just said wellll there are rules. He kept talking, Cain wasn't looking at him, and was staring at something on a shelf behind the gentleman's desk. The other guy eventually turned to see what Cain was looking at: A copy of Interplay's #1 Best selling game of 1995, Descent (Picture of it at 4:08 in case you don't know what it looks like.) You may notice something about that cover, that there is no face on it. The other person had spent 10 minutes talking about the importance of a face and he could not approve Leonard's work because of it while the #1 selling game was just that. Cain said he didn't understand, and the other guy would say the exception proves the rule. First time someone told Cain that, but not the last time. Would come back in Fallout 2 when the design team was doing something Cain thought was pretty trope-y and they responded yeah but sometimes cliches work.
Cain is color blind, doesn't have much artistic sense, didn't like what the ad company did, did like Leonard's, Leonard cared a lot about it, so he decided to make an issue about it. He refused to sign off on the ad company's art. There was a room just for producers and other higher level people to sign off on stuff, he did put Leonard's art in there and signed off on it. Other people signed off on it, so it became the Fallout box cover.
Two years later, Cain is working on Fallout 2 despite agreeing Cain wouldn't do it. He is in charge of it, Leonard and Jason are handling the art. Leonard had a great idea for a cover that not only tied into the first box but connected to the tribal backstory of the second game (6:38 on the video and on the thumbnail.) Special thanks to reddit user FoxTrotNiner for cleaning up the art. This image became a loading screen in Fallout 2, obviously they did not use it for the cover. In a meeting, Cain discovered what would become the Fallout 2 cover we know was now the cover and Leonard's work would not be used. Cain protested he wanted the art his artists put together, and pointed out Leonard's art had that vital face that was theoretically needed for a cover and the company's box art didn't. The person on the other side was a new marketing individual, first she denied any knowledge on the idea that a face was important in a cover, then said that they had already decided on the new art, it was done, there would be no need for further discussion. People like to focus on several reasons Cain left Interplay, this was one of them. Someone with no experience with Fallout made a decision Cain didn't like, an important decision, without any feedback from him and completely ignored his complaints. This was not what Cain had spent years crunching for.
First, Cain thinks Leonard's would have been better, but it wasn't that Cain felt super strongly about that, but when you become a game director that means you have to fight fights that are not necessarily yours. Someone on your team feels strongly about something, you agree with that person, even if you personally don't think it's important, it is important to them, so you go to the mat for them. Cain is a colorblind programmer, he doesn't have much of a dog in artistic fights, but he fought for the artists.
Apparently there were other reasons to go for the Enclave box art, they had changed the box shape. He wasn't sure if the new one had a flap or not, but the first fallout box was more horizontal while the new one was vertical (Apparently this was how shelving worked in game stores.) They could have changed the tribal cover to fit that very easily, Leonard said he could have gone and done the change instantly as it was just a digital image. But nope, it had already been decided. Odd thing for Interplay to double down on, and gave Cain a bad feeling about the shape of things to come, stupid arguments with people who had nothing to do with creating a thing but suddenly want to be a big part of it.
If you ever make an IP, unless you own it, you will lose control of it, so brace yourself for being overridden like this.
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rubinstein
Educated
- Joined
- Sep 12, 2022
- Messages
- 230
i hate soulless marketing golems with their graphs and statistical models so much its unreal
deuxhero
Arcane
I think it was almost 2 decades ago that all game publishers simultaneously admitted to the public "Everyone goes into the shop knowing what they're buying already. Box art doesn't really matter. In-fact we should make the cases as small as possible so the store can stock more and we have lower shipping costs"
luj1
You're all shills
Fallout 1 technically should have been Wasteland 2
The more I hear... What did they actually develop themself? I'm starting to think just the idea of apocalypse was it, everything else was a fluke, or someone else doing it. Kinda don't want to hear more development stories. He is killing the "magic".
ciox
Liturgist
- Joined
- Feb 9, 2016
- Messages
- 1,387
Sure, you could also make the argument that his preferred cover would be too similar to the cover of the first Fallout, featuring the same power armor twice.
I guess Tim saw it as another symbol of Fallout's future as a cash cow, detached from the efforts of the original dev team. I get his position but I can't help but feel that him leaving damaged Fallout, something similar to what happened when Ridley Scott and James Cameron both took a step back from Alien during the 90s, allegedly as a reaction to execs becoming interested in combining the Alien and Predator franchises. No one knows what could or would have happened, but you can't shake the feeling.
__scribbles__
Educated
- Joined
- Aug 1, 2015
- Messages
- 517
Wrote a second book in addition to his unpublished memoirs, actually made prints of this one and sent it to a bunch of people.
Moved to California in 1987, bought a house in 1995, soon after that his mom started sending him family photos, knew he was interested in family history and he was already doing primitive genealogical research. Moderate climate, only occasionally super hot, never really cold, constant temperature and humidity compared to other places, good place to store photos. Didn't recognize a lot of people in the photos, his mother told him who she knew, there were other ones she didn't know. Took as many notes as he could
Mother passed away in 2013, at this point Cain had 2000 photos, felt bad that he had all of these photos. Cain's husband bought him a scanner that let you put in multiple photos at once and scan them in as multiple jpgs. Took a while, but got all the images into a cloud repository and sent them to his siblings and other relatives so they could access them.
A few years later, Cain did 23AndAme, back when they did your genealogical history and medical history for a little vial at $99. Discovered he was British and Irish (Knew that), German (Sort of knew), French (Did not know), Scandinavian (Did not know), and Native American (Had never heard of that from anyone in his family.)
Lots of census records you can look at, other people did research you can connect with. Quickly found his great great grandfather was a Swede called Fensom, at Ellis Island they changed his name to Swanson. Married a woman named Mrytle and that side of the family is figured out. Found the German line, found the French line (Malote), found his last name comes from Ireland. No royalty, as far as Cain goes back it's just farmers. Mostly of his family went to Ohio except for a few that went to Pennsylvania. Found he was descended from the first baby born after the Mayflower landed in Provincetown (Cain vacationed and got married there), realized a few years later he was a few hundred yards away from where his great- by-nine's grandfather Peregine White was born. Searched and searched, but he can't actually find a Native American ancestor. Apparently such marriages were not recorded as Native American for a long period, may have found him/her and just not realized it.
Now knows a lot of the people in those pictures. The oldest photo he has is of his great great grandfather who fought for the Union and was probably the source of the current spelling of his name, That man's father or grandfather came from Cork Ireland with the spelling k a i n and at some point presumably to align with the biblical spelling changed to c a i n. That is the oldest photo, but the oldest person Cain has a photo for is great great great grandmother on his father's side.
All copies of the book except for one have been sent out, his nephew asked for a copy and Cain had to send him the pdf.
Some people asked if Cain has non-game related hobbies, and genealogy is one of them. Cain did all of the research, and the writing in the book, everything he could find out about the relatives. Pictures of their farms, pics from Google Street View of what the place they lived at look like now. Found some sketches of people who lived before photos were possible.
All of this work was done in 2018 while he was working on Outer Worlds, Cain would spend all day in the office and then go home and work on the book.
If you want to do something, you will find the time for it. That book is proof, he made time for that even while working on a new game in an unfamiliar engine. Working on a third book, the making of Fallout, trying to put together the definitive timeline, will do a video of it if he can (Presumably this is the video he mentioned releasing tomorrow.)
Moved to California in 1987, bought a house in 1995, soon after that his mom started sending him family photos, knew he was interested in family history and he was already doing primitive genealogical research. Moderate climate, only occasionally super hot, never really cold, constant temperature and humidity compared to other places, good place to store photos. Didn't recognize a lot of people in the photos, his mother told him who she knew, there were other ones she didn't know. Took as many notes as he could
Mother passed away in 2013, at this point Cain had 2000 photos, felt bad that he had all of these photos. Cain's husband bought him a scanner that let you put in multiple photos at once and scan them in as multiple jpgs. Took a while, but got all the images into a cloud repository and sent them to his siblings and other relatives so they could access them.
A few years later, Cain did 23AndAme, back when they did your genealogical history and medical history for a little vial at $99. Discovered he was British and Irish (Knew that), German (Sort of knew), French (Did not know), Scandinavian (Did not know), and Native American (Had never heard of that from anyone in his family.)
Lots of census records you can look at, other people did research you can connect with. Quickly found his great great grandfather was a Swede called Fensom, at Ellis Island they changed his name to Swanson. Married a woman named Mrytle and that side of the family is figured out. Found the German line, found the French line (Malote), found his last name comes from Ireland. No royalty, as far as Cain goes back it's just farmers. Mostly of his family went to Ohio except for a few that went to Pennsylvania. Found he was descended from the first baby born after the Mayflower landed in Provincetown (Cain vacationed and got married there), realized a few years later he was a few hundred yards away from where his great- by-nine's grandfather Peregine White was born. Searched and searched, but he can't actually find a Native American ancestor. Apparently such marriages were not recorded as Native American for a long period, may have found him/her and just not realized it.
Now knows a lot of the people in those pictures. The oldest photo he has is of his great great grandfather who fought for the Union and was probably the source of the current spelling of his name, That man's father or grandfather came from Cork Ireland with the spelling k a i n and at some point presumably to align with the biblical spelling changed to c a i n. That is the oldest photo, but the oldest person Cain has a photo for is great great great grandmother on his father's side.
All copies of the book except for one have been sent out, his nephew asked for a copy and Cain had to send him the pdf.
Some people asked if Cain has non-game related hobbies, and genealogy is one of them. Cain did all of the research, and the writing in the book, everything he could find out about the relatives. Pictures of their farms, pics from Google Street View of what the place they lived at look like now. Found some sketches of people who lived before photos were possible.
All of this work was done in 2018 while he was working on Outer Worlds, Cain would spend all day in the office and then go home and work on the book.
If you want to do something, you will find the time for it. That book is proof, he made time for that even while working on a new game in an unfamiliar engine. Working on a third book, the making of Fallout, trying to put together the definitive timeline, will do a video of it if he can (Presumably this is the video he mentioned releasing tomorrow.)
Last edited:
toro
Arcane
- Joined
- Apr 14, 2009
- Messages
- 14,791
spoiler alert: his bloodline ends with a childless faggot
Redshirt #42
Augur
- Joined
- Aug 13, 2009
- Messages
- 348
I think he mentioned in at least a couple of videos that he had an older sister. I'm not sure if I remember correctly, but she was supposed to learn programming for some subject at school, which is how Tim first learned about it, and he was way better at it than her.
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