Cain on Games - Tim Cain's new YouTube channel

[NecroLord]

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.

"He had"
She is dead?

 

[Redshirt #42]

Maybe he's got a brother now instead, I didn't want to assume anything.

 

[Old Hans]

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.

"He had"
She is dead?

it's pretty obvious Tim murdered her, because she was actually the better programmer

 

[StrongBelwas]

Put together from about five years of notes.
1991, started making computer tools for GURPS, did them for fun. Send the Star System Generator to Steve Jackson Games and they let him use the license to release, can maybe still find it somewhere if you look.
Middle of 1993, Rags to Riches just shipped, after it shipped Cain was assigned to different things here and there, worked on some installers, worked on Stonekeep and a few other games, but was also working on engines. Voxel engine, 3d engine, and an isometric 2d sprite engine.
Early 94, Interplay announced at a company meeting they were looking for a tabletop RPG to license, an excited Cain suggests GURPS, believes the weekly sessions he was having helped push the idea, the only other suggestion he heard was licensing Earthdawn.
Already had a way of getting hold of Steve Jackson games, so he mailed them.
Early March of 1994, Steve Jackson visited the studio in person and was shown an early version of the game, basically the isometric 2D engine and GURPs character creator. Went to lunch at Club 33 (Would later take the fallout team there when they shipped) and sat down and played Illuminati, the card game. Was interesting because at one point Steve Jackson and Floyd Grub (An Interplay employee) got into a rules argument and Floyd was right.
March 28th, 1994, Cain sent Steve all of the recent Interplay titles. Not sure exactly when the contract was signed, that is all above his paygrade. Next note he has is June 13th, 1994. Tom Decker, Chris Taylor, and Cain respond to John M Ford's design for a non linear time travelling GURPS roleplaying game. Doesn't have notes for that, but it was apparently quite whacky. Forgets why they didn't go for it, but it was a little early, they hadn't figured out their genre yet.
In August 24th, 1994, made the first wishlist for the project. Wanted Chris Taylor and Scott Campbell as designers, wanted Jason Taylor to do scripts and design implementation, Jesse Reynolds as an extra programmer, and for lead artist he wrote Spencer Kipe. Hadn't worked with him, but he was on their GURPS session, he played the overweight magic user that fled fights and let the fire elemental fight. Doesn't know what happened to that, because he didn't have a team yet.
September 9th, 1994, the art list is all generic fantasy. No setting picked yet, his list has stuff like crossbows, medieval armor, generic forest and desert environments.
Fall of 1994, wanted to open the game development, but wasn't allowed to, so that is when he invited people to an empty conference room to have pizza. Surprised at how few people came by, but in hindsight he got highly motivated people because they were willing to come on their own time.
At the second meeting, they elaborated on the crazy time travel setting with dinosaurs and wizards and aliens. Some people liked it, but it was really complicated, so they cut it back to an alien invasion plot where future humans were hiding in shelters. At this point talked to Scott Campbell because Cain had a dream about vaults in an apocalyptic world. Really liked the apocalypse idea, not so much the aliens, so they ditched the alien invasion plot and turned it into pure post apocalypse. Vaults were useful because the player's knowledge of the situation would be the same as the characters.
December 8th 1994 was the first mention of Junktown. Jason Taylor and Jason Anderson were officially assigned to the team. Tom Decker was removed as he had so many projects that Allan Pavish (Executive Producer) declared he simply didn't have time for it. Cain Estimates Tom had about 22-24 different product SKUs he was working on. Cain was a producer now, extra responsibilities, no extra pay. Between Cain and the two Jasons they put together some prototype levels. Combat, taking items from containers. One of those prototypes is on Fallout's CD ROM, video from someone else's channel at 6:55. Prototype, but you can see the sprite engine.
January 2nd, 1995, Cain comes up with the original idea for the Fallout story. On May 22nd 1995, the VP of Development Alan Pavish said he wanted voice actors in the game and wanted a feasibility analysis from Cain.
June 12th 95, the project was now official and had assigned team members, Fargo told Cain he had to regularly come to the offsite producer meetings and produce a vision statement. Cain made several, all of which Fargo hated, culminating in Chris Taylor writing one in January of 1996.
June 21st 1995, confirmed the game would have voice actors.
8:04, picture of everyone assigned to the project at mid 1995. Brian Freyermuth, Leonard Boyarsky, Jesse Reynolds, Tim Cain, Jason Taylor, Scott Campbell, Jason Anderson, Micheal Dean, and Fred Hatch.
August 2nd, decision was made by people above Cain that the game would be for Windows 95. Has a little note saying Steve Jackson Games was not happy about that. Cain pointed out that because he writing it all for GNW, could keep the DOS one as an extra SKU and it wouldn't be too much work (It was a bit more work.)
August 16th, Jesse Reynolds and Cain were switched to Stonekeep to help it ship, lost some time but that was when Scott Rodenheizer joined the team to do the clay heads.
August 30th, Chris Jones begins the Windows 95 port of GNW, did it in about 3 weeks. Enabled a playable version of the game in Windows 95 instantly and a finished one within six months.
September 6th, Scott Campbell gives his two weeks notice. Starts negotiating to get Chris Taylor as soon as Stonekeep ships.
September 3rd, moves from Fitch building to a temporary place at Alton, and then a final place at Von Carmen. The team was Leonard Boyarsky, Micheal Dean, Jason Anderson, Tim Cain, Fred Hatch, Jason Taylor, Jesse Reynolds, Chris Jones, Brian Freyermuth, and Arlene Summers, a 2d artist, did a lot of button sprites.
October 11th, 1995, Helena Wickberg joins the team to make it 11. Marc O'Green was listed as Cain's supervisor, not Feargus. Feargus was still a producer at that point. GURPS was not part of of his D&D division, so Cain was supervised separately.
November 13th 1995, made a Fallout demo just for internal play. Not the demo they released in April 1997. Alan Pavish thought it ran too slow, Fargo loved it. Was particularly fond of the death animations. Set proposed ship date to be November 1996, obviously did not make that.
January 1996, Cain bought a pet emperor scorpion he named Spud and gifted to the team as a mascot. Lived in Fred Hatch's office and dined on crickets caught around Cain's house or the yard. May have been the inspiration for the Radscorpions.
January 29th, Scott Everts and Nicholas Kesting join the team.
February 1996, Cain gave the talk on how to manage a team effectively at an offsite producer meeting.
January 13th 1996, they slip the ship date to February 13th 1997 (They wouldn't make that one earlier.) They had to redo all the estimates to do 3D artwork, they underestimated the effort, Leonard tried to make up for it by working weekends but it wasn't enough. Also started the GURPS-Mac Fallout, there weren't any current plans but Bill Dugan wanted to hire a programmer for it. Cain told him as long as someone was hired before April 1996 it should be doable.
March 26, Mark Morgan is hired for ambient music. Excellent hire.
May 10th 1996, sometime between this and October 1995 Marc O'Green was removed as director and Feargus was the new director. Mac version approved, but still no programmer. Chris DeSalvo, on his own time over the weekend made a mac version of GNW so they at least had a version that worked.
Made an interactive E3 demo that could also be self played. Two maps. showed off most of the features. mini adventure where the player was asked to kill some radscoprions for items in a cave.
July 25th 1996, they made an intro movie. Modeled and rendering began, tried to get rights to I Don't Want to Set the World on Fire, didn't get them. Fred Hatch looked into the legal rights. Planned to begin recording in a few weeks, brought in Mark O'Green to rewrite the spoken dialogue. Written dialogue could be cool but sound weird spoken, he rewrote it to sound a lot better when read out. Cain wrote to himself that the design and implementation of maps is going slower than anticipated.
Built a demo for ECTS, a conference at the time. Prepared for editor's day, had many delays for that. Cain wrote to marketing that he understood the need for them, but they had to be scheduled from the start, they could not keep throwing requests for demos at him (They kept throwing requests for demos at him.)
Cain wrote that not only are the tasks for the game becoming more complicated with more team communication needed, but that his own coding time was dropping to about 60% of the time during the week. Was trying to make up for it by going in at the weekend but it kept dropping.
Team photo at 14:30, Around August 1996.
August 1st 1996, Fred was still working on getting the rights for I Don't Want to Set the World on Fire, but it didn't seem possible without extensive legal wrangling and royalty payments. Search for other songs began, they really liked Maybe. Believes Gary Platner found that one.
August 11th, Fred and Cain met with Jaime Thomason to do voice directing. He could access incredible voice talent, Cain wrote down being impressed at how professional he was and the top name people he could bring in. Cain submitted a budget, it was approved.
Made a non-interactive movie demo for CGW's anniversary CDROM, it holds GURPS Fallout up as a spiritual successor to Wasteland. Full credit to Fred Hatch for putting that together fast, did it all by himself with the rough editing software of the time.
September 11th, 1996, voice recording began. Chris Taylor and Fred Hatch handled most of that, attended every session, but Cain went up one time to watch David Warner. In that same week, got a lot of interface into Starfleet Academy's sound code, which was a trade with John Price for getting GNW to run Starfleet with. Now Fallout had sound. Finally got a programmer for the Mac version of Fallout, Tim Hume, Cain went to graduate school with him, now works at Obsidian. Cleaning up the Mac GNW code, was going to share that code with Starfleet Academy so they could also have a Mac version.
November 11th, 1996, got a lot of feedback from QA on the pre-alpha. Changed some stuff around, like getting rid of the auto resolve for combat they had. Would run through the combat without graphics and showed you what happened.
Novebmer 25th, 1996, prepared an alpha that would be ready on December 16th. Had the opening movie, could made a character, several towns were in, travel the world map, one of the digitized heads was moving.
Early 1997, sent the opening cinematic to Steve Jackson games. Almost identical to the one that shipped. They did not like it, they had real trouble with some elements. Did not like the guy getting shot in the head, and hated Vault Boy with no uncertainty , demanded changes. Caused a lot of turmoil. They are well past the first ship date, and committed to another ship date already in the Fall.
February 17th, 1997. Steve Jackson shows up in person at Interplay. He is in the front lobby. Brian Fargo and Feargus both decline to meet with him. Cain talks to him, they talked for six hours, will not get into detail except that they did not reach any resolution. There were changes he really wanted that Cain was not empowered to agree with. The people who could make those calls would not speak to Steve Jackson, which was understandably frustrating for him. It is what it was. After he left, Interplay had a lot of meetings, asked Cain how hard it would be to remove GURPs. It was all modular, removed it.
Next note is March 3rd, 1997, it says that the game is entirely non GURPS now, full conversion to SPECIAL has been done for at least a week. Thanks to Chris Taylor for a fast design and all modular code. Photo of the team in early 1997 at 19:10.
March 17th, Cain wrote that the interactive demo has been in QA for a bit, discovered many bugs and got a lot of feedback and suggestions for new features.
April 19th, ran into electronic registration issues, was supposed to be drop in, it was not a drop in. Dan Spitzley saved the day and got E-Reg working.
April 28th, the interactive windows 95 demo is put up on Interplay's website, response was amazing, overwhelmingly positive. That same week, they got the license for Maybe, and would put it in the game.
April 12th (sic?), the demo continues to do well, they stop trying to estimate downloads. Did not have an actual download ticker. Many sites picked up the demo, they knew at least 100,000 copies were being played. One thing that concerned Cain was the UK branch of Interplay sent him suggestions for changes in content, like the level of violence and presence of children. Cain responded that it was 8 weeks from being finished, this was not the time to question basic design choices, they had two years to complain. Doesn't remember what they did with kids in the UK version.
May 27th, good news and bad news. Good news is that Mark Harrison has managed to compress the game to fit onto one CD. Cain was quite grateful he did not have to ask upper management for another expensive CD. Bad news is, constant issues with scripts. Not loading correctly, corrupting memory, it was a mess.
June 24th, is sending 3 new Fallout revisions to QA a week instead of one a week. Wanted faster turnaround on bugs. Sent a revision for each of the three major platforms, Win 95, Mac, and DOS. This was when QA began showing up on the weekends even though some of them were not being paid extra, they just wanted to play more. Very nice group.
Windows 95, very stable. Mac, stable, but has memory fragmentation, can be barely play to endgame but reported memory issues. DOS was very unstable, lots of crashing, traced to an error in sound code. One QA staffer realized extra crashing in the DOS stopped once you turned off the sound.
When did they ship? Interesting question. September 30th, 1997, a build was sent to the duplicator but QA found a bug that same day.
October 1st, final build is tested and sent to duplicator.
October 7th, 1997, reports from people on the Internet say they've seen the game for sale in US stores. Not until October 9th that they went to stores themselves.
Early October 9th, team members confirm finding game for sale.
October 10th, official release date of Fallout.
They did patches, work on Fallout 2 started, but that is the timeline of Fallout 1 development.

 

[Jigby]

That was needed, for posterity's sake. Epic Games still has the old release date of September 30th

 

[Roguey]

What's new to me (maybe I saw it before and forgot it) was that Fallout actually had a combat auto-resolve toggle at one point that got cut. That would have helped with all the slow combat animations.

Also funny how Interplay UK had issues with the content after they had already told Jackson to pound sand and Tim yelled at them for not bringing it up much earlier. Kids in the Euro versions were in fact removed, ended up causing a bit of a pain in Fallout 2 because the kids were still there, just invisible, and they'd still steal your stuff in the den when you'd enter a building.

 

[NecroLord]

That would have helped with all the slow combat animations.

You know you can just increase the game speed from the Options menu, right?

 

[Roguey]

That would have helped with all the slow combat animations.

You know you can just increase the game speed from the Options menu, right?

I set it to max, it's still incredibly slow epsecially in big fights with loads of characters (e.g. the big fight in the Boneyard, though at least you can opt out of this fight and they resolve it without you). Need SFall to make things truly speedy.

 

[Butter]

The tanker fight is crazy slow regardless of settings. I think the game just needed simultaneous turns for NPCs (or enemies at least).

 

[NecroLord]

The tanker fight is crazy slow regardless of settings. I think the game just needed simultaneous turns for NPCs (or enemies at least).

The fight with the small army of aliens, floaters and centaurs?
Yeah, I agree.
But that's why you bring the heavy weapons with you (Gauss Rifle, Pulse Rifle, Bozar, etc.).

 

[agris]

The tanker fight is crazy slow regardless of settings. I think the game just needed simultaneous turns for NPCs (or enemies at least).

The fight with the small army of aliens, floaters and centaurs?
Yeah, I agree.
But that's why you bring the heavy weapons with you (Gauss Rifle, Pulse Rifle, Bozar, etc.).

Really fun encounter if you specialize big guns and use explosives plus grenades

Tim finally made a new video worthwhile. It’s interesting that neither Fargo or Urquhart would talk to Steve Jackson. My 2024 mindset says that’s incredibly rude and juvenile, not how you handle a disagreement at all.

Tell him to pound sand to his face if that’s your decision, don’t have your admin feeding him tepid coffee all day long

 

[adegron]

Put together from about five years of notes.
1991, started making computer tools for GURPS, did them for fun. Send the Star System Generator to Steve Jackson Games and they let him use the license to release, can maybe still find it somewhere if you look.
Middle of 1993, Rags to Riches just shipped, after it shipped Cain was assigned to different things here and there, worked on some installers, worked on Stonekeep and a few other games, but was also working on engines. Voxel engine, 3d engine, and an isometric 2d sprite engine.
Early 94, Interplay announced at a company meeting they were looking for a tabletop RPG to license, an excited Cain suggests GURPS, believes the weekly sessions he was having helped push the idea, the only other suggestion he heard was licensing Earthdawn.
Already had a way of getting hold of Steve Jackson games, so he mailed them.
Early March of 1994, Steve Jackson visited the studio in person and was shown an early version of the game, basically the isometric 2D engine and GURPs character creator. Went to lunch at Club 33 (Would later take the fallout team there when they shipped) and sat down and played Illuminati, the card game. Was interesting because at one point Steve Jackson and Floyd Grub (An Interplay employee) got into a rules argument and Floyd was right.
March 28th, 1994, Cain sent Steve all of the recent Interplay titles. Not sure exactly when the contract was signed, that is all above his paygrade. Next note he has is June 13th, 1994. Tom Decker, Chris Taylor, and Cain respond to John M Ford's design for a non linear time travelling GURPS roleplaying game. Doesn't have notes for that, but it was apparently quite whacky. Forgets why they didn't go for it, but it was a little early, they hadn't figured out their genre yet.
In August 24th, 1994, made the first wishlist for the project. Wanted Chris Taylor and Scott Campbell as designers, wanted Jason Taylor to do scripts and design implementation, Jesse Reynolds as an extra programmer, and for lead artist he wrote Spencer Kipe. Hadn't worked with him, but he was on their GURPS session, he played the overweight magic user that fled fights and let the fire elemental fight. Doesn't know what happened to that, because he didn't have a team yet.
September 9th, 1994, the art list is all generic fantasy. No setting picked yet, his list has stuff like crossbows, medieval armor, generic forest and desert environments.
Fall of 1994, wanted to open the game development, but wasn't allowed to, so that is when he invited people to an empty conference room to have pizza. Surprised at how few people came by, but in hindsight he got highly motivated people because they were willing to come on their own time.
At the second meeting, they elaborated on the crazy time travel setting with dinosaurs and wizards and aliens. Some people liked it, but it was really complicated, so they cut it back to an alien invasion plot where future humans were hiding in shelters. At this point talked to Scott Campbell because Cain had a dream about vaults in an apocalyptic world. Really liked the apocalypse idea, not so much the aliens, so they ditched the alien invasion plot and turned it into pure post apocalypse. Vaults were useful because the player's knowledge of the situation would be the same as the characters.
December 8th 1994 was the first mention of Junktown. Jason Taylor and Jason Anderson were officially assigned to the team. Tom Decker was removed as he had so many projects that Allan Pavish (Executive Producer) declared he simply didn't have time for it. Cain Estimates Tom had about 22-24 different product SKUs he was working on. Cain was a producer now, extra responsibilities, no extra pay. Between Cain and the two Jasons they put together some prototype levels. Combat, taking items from containers. One of those prototypes is on Fallout's CD ROM, video from someone else's channel at 6:55. Prototype, but you can see the sprite engine.
January 2nd, 1995, Cain comes up with the original idea for the Fallout story. On May 22nd 1995, the VP of Development Alan Pavish said he wanted voice actors in the game and wanted a feasibility analysis from Cain.
June 12th 95, the project was now official and had assigned team members, Fargo told Cain he had to regularly come to the offsite producer meetings and produce a vision statement. Cain made several, all of which Fargo hated, culminating in Chris Taylor writing one in January of 1996.
June 21st 1995, confirmed the game would have voice actors.
8:04, picture of everyone assigned to the project at mid 1995. Brian Freyermuth, Leonard Boyarsky, Jesse Reynolds, Tim Cain, Jason Taylor, Scott Campbell, Jason Anderson, Micheal Dean, and Fred Hatch.
August 2nd, decision was made by people above Cain that the game would be for Windows 95. Has a little note saying Steve Jackson Games was not happy about that. Cain pointed out that because he writing it all for GNW, could keep the DOS one as an extra SKU and it wouldn't be too much work (It was a bit more work.)
August 16th, Jesse Reynolds and Cain were switched to Stonekeep to help it ship, lost some time but that was when Scott Rodenheizer joined the team to do the clay heads.
August 30th, Chris Jones begins the Windows 95 port of GNW, did it in about 3 weeks. Enabled a playable version of the game in Windows 95 instantly and a finished one within six months.
September 6th, Scott Campbell gives his two weeks notice. Starts negotiating to get Chris Taylor as soon as Stonekeep ships.
September 3rd, moves from Fitch building to a temporary place at Alton, and then a final place at Von Carmen. The team was Leonard Boyarsky, Micheal Dean, Jason Anderson, Tim Cain, Fred Hatch, Jason Taylor, Jesse Reynolds, Chris Jones, Brian Freyermuth, and Arlene Summers, a 2d artist, did a lot of button sprites.
October 11th, 1995, Helena Wickberg joins the team to make it 11. Marc O'Green was listed as Cain's supervisor, not Feargus. Feargus was still a producer at that point. GURPS was not part of of his D&D division, so Cain was supervised separately.
November 13th 1995, made a Fallout demo just for internal play. Not the demo they released in April 1997. Alan Pavish thought it ran too slow, Fargo loved it. Was particularly fond of the death animations. Set proposed ship date to be November 1996, obviously did not make that.
January 1996, Cain bought a pet emperor scorpion he named Spud and gifted to the team as a mascot. Lived in Fred Hatch's office and dined on crickets caught around Cain's house or the yard. May have been the inspiration for the Radscorpions.
January 29th, Scott Everts and Nicholas Kesting join the team.
February 1996, Cain gave the talk on how to manage a team effectively at an offsite producer meeting.
January 13th 1996, they slip the ship date to February 13th 1997 (They wouldn't make that one earlier.) They had to redo all the estimates to do 3D artwork, they underestimated the effort, Leonard tried to make up for it by working weekends but it wasn't enough. Also started the GURPS-Mac Fallout, there weren't any current plans but Bill Dugan wanted to hire a programmer for it. Cain told him as long as someone was hired before April 1996 it should be doable.
March 26, Mark Morgan is hired for ambient music. Excellent hire.
May 10th 1996, sometime between this and October 1995 Marc O'Green was removed as director and Feargus was the new director. Mac version approved, but still no programmer. Chris DeSalvo, on his own time over the weekend made a mac version of GNW so they at least had a version that worked.
Made an interactive E3 demo that could also be self played. Two maps. showed off most of the features. mini adventure where the player was asked to kill some radscoprions for items in a cave.
July 25th 1996, they made an intro movie. Modeled and rendering began, tried to get rights to I Don't Want to Set the World on Fire, didn't get them. Fred Hatch looked into the legal rights. Planned to begin recording in a few weeks, brought in Mark O'Green to rewrite the spoken dialogue. Written dialogue could be cool but sound weird spoken, he rewrote it to sound a lot better when read out. Cain wrote to himself that the design and implementation of maps is going slower than anticipated.
Built a demo for ECTS, a conference at the time. Prepared for editor's day, had many delays for that. Cain wrote to marketing that he understood the need for them, but they had to be scheduled from the start, they could not keep throwing requests for demos at him (They kept throwing requests for demos at him.)
Cain wrote that not only are the tasks for the game becoming more complicated with more team communication needed, but that his own coding time was dropping to about 60% of the time during the week. Was trying to make up for it by going in at the weekend but it kept dropping.
Team photo at 14:30, Around August 1996.
August 1st 1996, Fred was still working on getting the rights for I Don't Want to Set the World on Fire, but it didn't seem possible without extensive legal wrangling and royalty payments. Search for other songs began, they really liked Maybe. Believes Gary Platner found that one.
August 11th, Fred and Cain met with Jaime Thomason to do voice directing. He could access incredible voice talent, Cain wrote down being impressed at how professional he was and the top name people he could bring in. Cain submitted a budget, it was approved.
Made a non-interactive movie demo for CGW's anniversary CDROM, it holds GURPS Fallout up as a spiritual successor to Wasteland. Full credit to Fred Hatch for putting that together fast, did it all by himself with the rough editing software of the time.
September 11th, 1996, voice recording began. Chris Taylor and Fred Hatch handled most of that, attended every session, but Cain went up one time to watch David Warner. In that same week, got a lot of interface into Starfleet Academy's sound code, which was a trade with John Price for getting GNW to run Starfleet with. Now Fallout had sound. Finally got a programmer for the Mac version of Fallout, Tim Hume, Cain went to graduate school with him, now works at Obsidian. Cleaning up the Mac GNW code, was going to share that code with Starfleet Academy so they could also have a Mac version.
November 11th, 1996, got a lot of feedback from QA on the pre-alpha. Changed some stuff around, like getting rid of the auto resolve for combat they had. Would run through the combat without graphics and showed you what happened.
Novebmer 25th, 1996, prepared an alpha that would be ready on December 16th. Had the opening movie, could made a character, several towns were in, travel the world map, one of the digitized heads was moving.
Early 1997, sent the opening cinematic to Steve Jackson games. Almost identical to the one that shipped. They did not like it, they had real trouble with some elements. Did not like the guy getting shot in the head, and hated Vault Boy with no uncertainty , demanded changes. Caused a lot of turmoil. They are well past the first ship date, and committed to another ship date already in the Fall.
February 17th, 1997. Steve Jackson shows up in person at Interplay. He is in the front lobby. Brian Fargo and Feargus both decline to meet with him. Cain talks to him, they talked for six hours, will not get into detail except that they did not reach any resolution. There were changes he really wanted that Cain was not empowered to agree with. The people who could make those calls would not speak to Steve Jackson, which was understandably frustrating for him. It is what it was. After he left, Interplay had a lot of meetings, asked Cain how hard it would be to remove GURPs. It was all modular, removed it.
Next note is March 3rd, 1997, it says that the game is entirely non GURPS now, full conversion to SPECIAL has been done for at least a week. Thanks to Chris Taylor for a fast design and all modular code. Photo of the team in early 1997 at 19:10.
March 17th, Cain wrote that the interactive demo has been in QA for a bit, discovered many bugs and got a lot of feedback and suggestions for new features.
April 19th, ran into electronic registration issues, was supposed to be drop in, it was not a drop in. Dan Spitzley saved the day and got E-Reg working.
April 28th, the interactive windows 95 demo is put up on Interplay's website, response was amazing, overwhelmingly positive. That same week, they got the license for Maybe, and would put it in the game.
April 12th (sic?), the demo continues to do well, they stop trying to estimate downloads. Did not have an actual download ticker. Many sites picked up the demo, they knew at least 100,000 copies were being played. One thing that concerned Cain was the UK branch of Interplay sent him suggestions for changes in content, like the level of violence and presence of children. Cain responded that it was 8 weeks from being finished, this was not the time to question basic design choices, they had two years to complain. Doesn't remember what they did with kids in the UK version.
May 27th, good news and bad news. Good news is that Mark Harrison has managed to compress the game to fit onto one CD. Cain was quite grateful he did not have to ask upper management for another expensive CD. Bad news is, constant issues with scripts. Not loading correctly, corrupting memory, it was a mess.
June 24th, is sending 3 new Fallout revisions to QA a week instead of one a week. Wanted faster turnaround on bugs. Sent a revision for each of the three major platforms, Win 95, Mac, and DOS. This was when QA began showing up on the weekends even though some of them were not being paid extra, they just wanted to play more. Very nice group.
Windows 95, very stable. Mac, stable, but has memory fragmentation, can be barely play to endgame but reported memory issues. DOS was very unstable, lots of crashing, traced to an error in sound code. One QA staffer realized extra crashing in the DOS stopped once you turned off the sound.
When did they ship? Interesting question. September 30th, 1997, a build was sent to the duplicator but QA found a bug that same day.
October 1st, final build is tested and sent to duplicator.
October 7th, 1997, reports from people on the Internet say they've seen the game for sale in US stores. Not until October 9th that they went to stores themselves.
Early October 9th, team members confirm finding game for sale.
October 10th, official release date of Fallout.
They did patches, work on Fallout 2 started, but that is the timeline of Fallout 1 development.

Very interesting video, this one was particularly insightful about the inner workings of a videogame within an organization.

 

[__scribbles__]

I have been playing Diablo again and I wanted to talk about my experience.

 

[StrongBelwas]

Replaying first Diablo, will explain why at the end. Thinks it won't make sense otherwise.
Game holds up very well for coming from 1996. Very good looking, great music. VO albeit on a limited cast. Very minimal HUD. You can bring up stuff for your character, but most of the time it is a little bar at the bottom and a big screen.
The dungeons in the original Diablo are procedurally generated. Each dungeon has 16 levels, each dungeon is themed. Named monsters are generated randomly, keeps seeing the Butcher at level 3 at though, wonders if it is guaranteed (Not guaranteed.) Most named monsters are randomized, but the rooms they appear in are fixed.
Same room, but embedded in a random level. You won't know the boss is coming up until you reach a certain sized room decorated in a certain way. Interesting way to connect procedural and handmade, 20 years old. Cain cheesed the Butcher after dying a bunch, he realized he can shoot through some of the walls, opened the door, shot him with an arrow, ran through the door, slammed it shot, and then just kept shooting him through it while the Butcher paced back and forth.
Really cool thing about their procedural dungeons but it makes the game very replayable. Can't remember how many times he replayed Diablo 1 when it first came out, but in 2024 his knowledge isn't overly helpful because every dungeon level is randomized and he doesn't always get the same quests.
Procedural Generation causes some issues, the stairs from level 7 to level 8 were right next to the stairs next to level 8 to level 9 in one instance for Cain. Could have gone straight down it if weren't for the harder fights. Sometimes you get empty rooms, empty chests.
Quests are randomized, only the last two in the game aren't randomized. You get a unique item for doing them, they can have 6 bonuses vs. the standard 2, a good reason to do quests.
Some things feel dated, not gonna talk about graphics because they feel beautiful. No real dialogue, no dialogue trees, if someone needs to talk with you when you just want healing or their store, they just start talking. No choice in accepting quests. Weapon Durability is in the game, along with other money sinks, but you still get way too much money. The gold has a stack limit, creates a new stack every 5000. Once you get too much gold, you literally can't get more items. Cain's workaround this is just dumping piles of gold in town (Nobody ever steals them of course.) Also, no guarantee you can use the magic items you get from your randomized quests. Every class can use every item if they have the right stats, but the classes come with different stat bonuses and stat maximums, so sometimes you can get the stat high enough, sometimes you can't. Cain did the anvil recovery quest for Griswold, his archer character was rewarded with a nice sword. With no use for it, he had to sell it, but it sold for enough he just got stuck with more stacks of gold to dump into the town.
Magic Items are colored coded, there was no colorblindness accessibility option, and probably no accessibility options period as far as Cain remembers. Cain could at least tell they were different because they appeared white grey and tan instead of white blue and gold. Used to at least see a bit of the blue and gold when he was younger.
Now, why is he talking about a 28 year old game? First, if you only play recent game, you are massively restricting yourself. Not just in fun, but in learning the craft of video games. Cain did a video about procedural content, here is a 28 year old game doing it well, learn it well and maybe apply it to your own games. If you only play recent games you will learn a lot about fads, fads come and go, fads are impossible to predict. No way to know what features will suddenly get super popular. But if you play older games, you learn about trends. Fads leave eventually, trends come and stay stuck. Play older games, you notice the things that stick around instead of fading away.
Diablo teaches that you don't need every feature in every game. It had minimal dialogue and a few NPCs. When Diablo came out in 1996, and Fallout was a year away from shipping, Cain had to defend Fallout from marketing when they demanded real time combat and multiplayer. Cain defended Fallout by pointing out all the things it had Diablo lacked. Marketing didn't want to hear it, so Cain decided to create a new schedule and budget based on those requests and submitted to them for approval. That was the last time he ever heard about real time combat and multiplayer in Fallout.
Play older games, you'll find out things you didn't know and have fun.

 

[Gandalf]

I like the idea of him playing older games. Diablo is not bad, it's as good as it was back in the day. I doubt it will make him develop better titles, because he's a part of the machine.

 

[NecroLord]

Tim Cain playing BG3.

 

[__scribbles__]

I talk about perseverance and all the times I thought about leaving the games industry.

 

[StrongBelwas]

Talking about the speed bumps and times he thought about leaving and where he thinks others might have left, will try to keep it positive as he did stay in it. Talked to someone who had been in the industry as long as Cain has and they were both amazed that there were always times where it looked like it would be the end of their career and then it didn't.
First job was at Pegasus Software which changed it's name to Cybron for Grand Slam Bridge. Started in high school, they had him going back and forth during the summers of College. Shipped in 1986, following summer, Cain didn't have a job. Had lined up the previously mentioned compiler job that fell through, took the summer off. During grad school, got his masters but walked away from the PhD. Suspects some people wouldn't have tried to get back in the industry at this point.
Went to Interplay, several things made him wonder if this was for him, and suspects some people would have left hte business at this point. After some time, he got more responsibilities and more roles in addition to being a programmer put on him without a corresponding raises (He got some cost of living adjustment raises.) No raise for having to be a producer as his own producer had too many SKUs to handle. Not even a mention that they may consider it a few months down the road. When he asked, he was told that is just how it works there. The other employee told him to imagine Interplay is like a pool, they throw more stuff at you and see how much you can take before you sink. When Cain responded "And then you throw in a life preserver right" the other guy just laughed.
Cain goes back to the story of almost walking away from Fallout when he needed a raise to afford a house he wanted. Had been saving up for a down payment by cutting back on a lot of things, people at a similar income at Interplay asked how he did it and when he told him they dismissed it as not worth it. Cain considered going somewhere else when the bank told him he simply wasn't making enough to get the loan.
Also considered leaving after Homophobia, sees his previously discussed video. People complained after 1 video out of 300+ he made about being gay. Had a credible death thread that Facebook took seriously and made him shut off social media. Thinks a number of gay game developers would have left after just how homophobic 'the entire industry' was. Even when people weren't homophobic, there were no real allies. You didn't feel attacked, but you didn't feel supported.
Speaking of crunch, no real crunch at Cybron, Interplay was crunch central. Crunch in all games before Fallout, Cain perpetuated it in Fallout because everyone who worked on it really wanted to make a good game they were coming in on weekends. Happened at Troika because they literally could not afford more people, they had to squeeze the ones they had. Carbine also had crunch, less than Interplay or Troika, but still there. Obsidian, least amount of crunch he ever did since Cybron. What crunch there was was managed at the stage of fixing or removing things at the last minute and they were fed the whole time, non salaried made overtime. Positive that given the current anti-crunch mentality many developers would have bounced, but not sure where you would have gone in the 90s/early 2000s that wouldn't have had crunch. Maybe indie, but all of the indies Cain knows has another job to support themselves so effectively all of their indie development is unpaid overtime.
Several times Cain took paygrade and title reductions, The shift from Carbine to Obisidan cut Cain's salary by about 35%-40% as he went from a lead to a senior. A lot of people in that position would have just left the industry and gotten a programming job outside it for more pay with less stress. Wanted to keep making games, just with less stress. Stress in every role, but the stress of a lead is taking responsibility for every decision even the ones you were told to do.
Another thing that most viewers won't be effected by yet but Cain had to deal with was Ageism after he left Carbine and went to jobs. There would be comments, sometimes jokingly. People would mention he was old enough to be their dad or they were the same age he was when he made Fallout. Thinks some people would have just stepped down at that point, game development is a young person's game, especially if you stay with developing and don't move into management. You'll look around and not really see anyone with grey hair.
Recommends new devs to stick with it, look at all the opportunities he got because he stuck around. If he quit around the time of the mortgage, there would be no Fallout, no Troika, he would probably be working at some web company tweaking an app.
Even with all of the recent layoffs, there are more game job opportunities around then there were for Cain back then.

 

[mindx2]

I talk about perseverance and all the times I thought about leaving the games industry.

The more he talks about these type of things I respect him even more. His outlook on work, responsibility and owning your actions are usually spot on. Especially when comparing his outlook to today's generation...

 

[NecroLord]

I talk about perseverance and all the times I thought about leaving the games industry.

The more he talks about these type of things I respect him even more. His outlook on work, responsibility and owning your actions are usually spot on. Especially when comparing his outlook to today's generation...

Indeed.
Tim is from the old guard of game devs and programmers, when you actually had to put in some work and show some skill.

 

[__scribbles__]

I talk about skill-based XP progression, where games give their players XP based on their use of skills. I discuss the problems this method can cause that you will need to either fix or dismiss as a non-issue for your game. This progression can also apply to perks, traits, backgrounds, or anything about the player build that affects the game.

 

[NecroLord]

A shame the Traps skill in Fallout is near useless...
Tim likes to award XP mainly from completing quests, like a true gentleman.
Anyway, I like to gain XP from completing quests (with certain bonuses if they are completed in clever or inventive ways) and from killing stuff.
This is the way.

 

[Roguey]

TES and Colony Ship get told.

Tim likes to award XP mainly from completing quests, like a true gentleman.

A lot of people got very angry about this in the Pillars games though.

 

[StrongBelwas]

Cain's previous video on XP generated a lot of discussion. Made him decide to do a video just on Skill XP progression.
What Cain talks about applies to any kind of progression, could be background based, perk based, skill based, etc. Anything that the character selects that is later on used to determine an outcome. That outcome can be used to reward XP to the factors that went into determining about it.
Skills generally have a direct application to something you are currently doing, you are disarming with your trap skill, you are hitting things with your sword skills. Attributes can be a bit vaguer. You're using strength to hit something with a sword, how much XP goes to Strength and how much goes to Sword? Also, can you raise attributes to begin with?
Skills have an interesting aspect in that they can fail, unlike perks or backgrounds.
Cain isn't saying not to do Skill based XP, he's just listing the problems he thinks you'll run into and how to work with them
Cain defines skill based XP as using a skill, gains a little bit of XP for it, every skill has a bar, once the bar goes up, skill goes up, you go to the next rank (Be that a level or a name title like Expert or Beginner.)
Perhaps you don't think the things Cain considers problems are problems, but he's going to walk through them for your consideration, even if that consideration is "I don't care."
What does it mean to use a skill? Taking a combat skill, does it go up any time you swing a sword? What if you just smash a bunch of barrels, does it go up? Maybe you mean it only works against hostile creatures. If the creature not being hostile means you don't get skill points, do stealth attacks not give XP on the attack portion?
How does Stealth get raised? Do you get points for attacking in stealth, or just for sneaking around? Do pacifist stealth characters not get XP? If you get Stealth XP just for sneaking around, what stops you from just waiting in a bush near a low perception guard and watching stealth get raised? Does everyone in the world have a little bit of stealth XP they can give someone who sneaks past them? You just added a lot of work to your programmers and Cain hopes you explained to the player when you've already gotten all the Stealth XP you can out of a dude.
Constraints on how often skills can be used. Combat is generally frequent, you could spend all day fighting. Are you encouraging people to do that? If you have a summon scroll, can you just summon monsters and grind up XP killing them? If you can't how do you determine the difference, and how do you define that rule to the player? What about skills that used against placed things, like dialogue skills or lockpicking? Probably a limited number of things placed in the world. Only so many locks to pick and NPCs to persuade. Is it going to be fun to find all of these things? Procedural generation might help her. Once you clear out an area, maybe new NPCs to be persuaded spawn in, or bandits with locked chests to pick. Very easy to procedurally generate random encounters, so combat skills dominate.
If some skills are used differently, maybe some skills fill differently. Perhaps with there being more combat, the combat bar's take longer to fill out. Will be tricky and time consuming to balance it out.
Is your Skill based XP system going to encourage players to play the game you want them to play? Are your players just picking fights with rats in the starting area or spamming basic spells? Maybe they find a particular NPC whose Persuasion bar is easy to reset so they can grind up Persuade on them. Is this how you want players to act, and do you want the play guides that will come out recommending people do that? XP is the designer telling the player what they want done.
Does the player need a level in a skill based system? lot of TTRPG systems without levels, GURPs didn't have levels. If you don't have levels, how will your encounter designer determine challenges for levelless player? Do they look at the character's skills and give them approximate encounters, if a character has scattered and low combat skills maybe they just never encounter a high level monster. Maybe it becomes increasingly hard to develop an encounter the player will struggle to Persuade as they invest in their skills. How does the player get hit points if there are no levels, do you not gain hit points?
Let's say you solve all of those problems, Cain throws one more problem. How about if Skills increase when you use them, even if that skill use fails? Maybe you get more XP from failure and less/none from success. People learn from their failures, may feel more natural. If when you fail, you gain XP, generalists suddenly become more common and possible builds. If you are doing different things and failings, your skills will go up. Specialization would take time and focus. You want to get good at locks, find a lot of locks and fail at a lot of them. Once you fail at a lock enough and it gives up XP, maybe you don't get any more points, or you only get more points after the success. Maybe you don't like this because if you learn from failure you won't need to raise your skill, but Cain asks why you need a higher skill if you are succeeding. If you are not succeeding, you are failing and getting XP.
Cain is not saying don't use skill based XP, just consider the ways you are encouraging the player to behave and the problems you are introducing.


(Sorry for being pretty late to anyone who uses these, and will be away when Cain releases his video tomorrow.)

 

[Nano]

(Sorry for being pretty late to anyone who uses these, and will be away wh

You're writing out all these recap essays and you're apologizing to us? Is this your job or something?