Cain on Games - Tim Cain's new YouTube channel

[Goral]

I talk about fun memories of Troika, so that viewers don't get the impression from my other Troika videos that we were constantly stressed there.

Edit:

• He has shown his Troika boxer shorts.
• Initially they worked from their homes.
• Sierra gave them 90 days to deliver a demo.
• They had showers in Troika office so the others had to watch out to not drop the soap when Tim was around.
• Tim Cain was bringing a dog to the office. Disgusting.
• Some of the Arcanum portraits were inspired by a 1910 yearbook.
• Everyday at 4 PM they were watching Chinese soap opera, 2 of the staff members spoke Chince but Mandarin not Cantonese so no one knew what they were saying.
• They were playing Counter-Strike drunk.

Edit 2:

The office had a men's restroom, a women's restroom, a private single restroom, and a private single restroom with a shower. The two private restrooms were lockable.For people who biked to work or who wanted to go out in the evening straight from the office or who had worked over night, that shower was awesome.

 

[Wirdschowerdn]

Those were some real dog days.

 

[FreshCorpse]

Instead of talking into a camera he should write blog posts. Only aspie NEETs have the time/inclination to watch 10-20 minutes of vlog a day.

 

[StrongBelwas]

 

[Roguey]

"I'd rather make a bad game than make a bland game."

And yet The Outer Worlds.

"I don't hear anybody wanting to get into the game industry because they want to do gaas, because they want to do microtransactions. That's a way of making money off your game but it's certainly not a reason to make games."

I dunno, here are some really ancient screencaps of devs talking about how much they love dlc on account of the greater job security it provides.

Instead of talking into a camera he should write blog posts. Only aspie NEETs have the time/inclination to watch 10-20 minutes of vlog a day.

Not happening because he's been told he comes across as mean in text.

 

[Jedi Master Radek]

Tim seems to have failed to understand that nowadays "passion" often is a buzzword corporations use to exploit the workers. "You don't want to work 12 hours a day for pennies? You don't have a passion". It's especially funny to demand passion when AAA game design is handled down from business and marketing departments and is focused on making the blandest product possible to appeal to the biggest number of people.

 

[ciox]

Does DLC even sell that well? It seems mostly a cope unless you've built a massive paypig operation around a big franchise that can support it, but I'll let you correct me.

 

[Butter]

Modern game devs crow about "work/life balance" because they're not passionate because they feel no sense of ownership over the product. If it's a corporate product that hundreds of people are working on, nobody is going to voluntarily work overtime to make it as good as possible.

 

[IHaveHugeNick]

Meanwhile, Sawyer sneaking back into the office in middle of the night to drool over font ligatures in Penistent.

 

[Warhawk47]

I'm glad he finally addressed what I've been repeating like a broken record, namely art vs. product. Unfortunately he missed the memo on the current environment compared to what he knew. The "starving artist" motif is more literal than ever, and with how unbalanced a lot of people are, plus the ease of working from home, do you really want that proximity and to be that personally invested in... well... insanity? People are complaining about work/life balance because the work/reward ratio is insufficient to sustain life, and communard-style arrangements with daycares and other on-site facilities are not only impractical while remote but undesirable while working with random jerks just as poor, depressed and stressed out as you are. "The company store" is bad enough when you're working for a coal mine and your children are doomed to follow your footsteps underground. To pretend that you're working on something creative when it's neither allowed to be nor is it even really yours, while "the company store" got shut down due to budget cuts... Tim went through his share of hell, but was there ever a point at which the economy totally collapsed around him, his wages frozen and then inflated away, he was laid off, his student debt crushed him, his health collapsed? No. He managed to reach the executive level, which is akin to crawling back onto dry land. The vast majority of developers will never get there as things are now. The ones who want to unionize at massive corporations probably have the only real shot, as well as the occasional savant or struck-gold indy.

 

[Roguey]

Does DLC even sell that well? It seems mostly a cope unless you've built a massive paypig operation around a big franchise that can support it, but I'll let you correct me.

DLC budgets are typically low enough that it's easy money. One would have to screw up big time to make a DLC that isn't profitable.

 

[Butter]

Cain answers the most important question: What is an RPG?

 

[Infinitron]

The decade when Tim Cain made Fallout, Arcanum and TToEE was a "lost decade" for him. The price of your hobby, Codex!

I talk about my lost decade, from 1993 to 2003, where I worked so much that I barely was home and knew almost nothing going on outside of work. Consider this a cautionary tale of work-life imbalance.

 

[Harthwain]

The price of your hobby, Codex!

That's a sacrifice we are willing to make.

 

[Roguey]

That doesn't seem so bad.

"I know also," said Candide, "that we must cultivate our garden."

"You are right," said Pangloss, "for when man was first placed in the Garden of Eden, he was put there ut operaretur eum, that he might cultivate it; which shows that man was not born to be idle."

"Let us work," said Martin, "without disputing; it is the only way to render life tolerable."

The whole little society entered into this laudable design, according to their different abilities. Their little plot of land produced plentiful crops. Cunegonde was, indeed, very ugly, but she became an excellent pastry cook; Paquette worked at embroidery; the old woman looked after the linen. They were all, not excepting Friar Giroflée, of some service or other; for he made a good joiner, and became a very honest man.

Pangloss sometimes said to Candide:

"There is a concatenation of events in this best of all possible worlds: for if you had not been kicked out of a magnificent castle for love of Miss Cunegonde: if you had not been put into the Inquisition: if you had not walked over America: if you had not stabbed the Baron: if you had not lost all your sheep from the fine country of El Dorado: you would not be here eating preserved citrons and pistachio-nuts."

"All that is very well," answered Candide, "but let us cultivate our garden."

And it could have been worse https://web.archive.org/web/2015032...com/click_nothing/2015/03/ten-years-down.html

I went to GDC in March of 2005, while the game was in the distribution process, and I gave a talk about the narrative structure of the game. Of course, I also got to hang out with Dave under far less stressful circumstances. Over dinner one night, we got to talking about the time he'd last been in Montreal. During that discussion, I kept correcting him about what we'd done the last time he was in Montreal, but we kept disagreeing about the details and the timing. Over the course of the meal, we realized that I actually had no memory of his trip to Montreal six months previously, and that I was recalling a previous visit he'd made about a year or so before that. Dave had spent a week living in my house. I had curtailed my work week down from 70-80 hours to a normal 40 in order to spend time with him. We had eaten great meals, gone to great bars, seen movies, played games, and talked about our careers and the industry and our pasts and our futures, and all of it was simply fucking gone. I could not remember any of it.

To be clear - I do not mean I didn't remember what we did or what we talked about. I mean that I literally had no memory of the events. To me it was like it never happened. It was like he never visited. There was just an empty space in my brain that had been overwritten by the stress and anxiety of Splinter Cell. Splinter Cell: Chaos Theory gave me brain damage.

Once we realized that the incongruities in our conversation were the result of a legitimate failing of my memory, Dave helped me trying to find a handle. We talked about it over dinner, and then on and off over time. I spoke with my wife about it (she, of course, had full recollection), and eventually, I was able to pin a few minor pieces of my memories to the cork board of my brain and piece together a kind of past.

Over time, I was able to slowly reconstruct some significant part of that lost week. I remember a few meals and a few conversations in a few bars. I remember my friend being in my house. I remember us drinking coffee together and smoking cigarettes.

Writing it all down, now, I have to confess I have mixed feelings about it. I am really, truly proud of what we accomplished with Splinter Cell: Chaos Theory. It stands the test of time as one of the best games ever made. At the same time, the personal cost for making it was real and serious. It's not about forgotten beers in some bar on St Laurent. It's about brain damage and the loss of life. To this day, I am still not sure what the right equation is there. I'm still not sure if it was worth it. I'm still not sure if I would do it again if I had the chance.

 

[ciox]

I mean, he DID miss all of Britney Spears' music videos as they were coming out.

 

[mindx2]

I mean, he DID miss all of Britney Spears' music videos as they were coming out.

I would count that as a blessing...

 

[KeighnMcDeath]

So, is his channel any good? The faggot video made me ignore the channel completely.

 

[Roguey]

So, is his channel any good? The faggot video made me ignore the channel completely.

The latest video has more fag talk.

 

[KeighnMcDeath]

Yeah…… fuck that channel then. I don’t care to hear about that shit.

 

[BlackheartXIII]

Big dollars? No. I made less during that decade than in the two decades afterward. I had bought a house because I got a raise and used all of that money (since I never did anything but go to work) to buy a home during a slump in the market, and I had to refinance my house in the middle of that Lost Decade because I couldn't even afford that mortgage. The two other Troika owners and I made far less than our employees for the first two years, and the same amount after that. I remember a young man at PAX in the early 2010's who asked me about Fallout and "all the royalties I made from it". He assumed I was set for life, and when I told him it was work-for-hire like most games in the business, he was shocked. I think he said "why bother?".
Why bother, indeed.

 

[ciox]

StarcraftBro bringing the hard hitting questions.

 

[Zeriel]

Modern game devs crow about "work/life balance" because they're not passionate because they feel no sense of ownership over the product. If it's a corporate product that hundreds of people are working on, nobody is going to voluntarily work overtime to make it as good as possible.

It's also not the job of consumers to care. I mean, sure, it's nice if they do, but I'm not going to ask customers to buy more products where I work because I/my union failed to negotiate a good wage, or because I have no job security. That's up to the individual to figure out. Not to mention a lot of the time the "hard work" these people do is laughable. Sit in a chair all day, make anywhere from above-retail-wagie grade up to professional tier money, then bitch about how it's never good enough. I'd love to see these fags work manual labor 10 hours a day for 20 days straight and then say how miserable their "crunch" is.

 

[Roguey]

Humor in games:


Tim finally ran out of new shirts to wear. I counted about 90 (!).

Tim's responsible for the wereshark throwing fish at you and the sheriff-bat throwing people at you at the end of Bloodlines.

Mentioning things he's talked about before, like how he prefers referential humor that works even if you don't get the reference.

"Humor makes the dark parts even darker" - Leonard Boyarsky. Didn't work for The Outer Worlds though, just turned the setting into one big obnoxious joke.

Tim believes there's more humor in Fallout than Wasteland, though I'd say that Wasteland was far goofier with its situations and character designs (which carried into its two sequels).

"I don't think you should build an entire game around dumb dialogue and I've never built an entire game just around humor" - once again those who have played The Outer Worlds would disagree.

 

[KeighnMcDeath]

I wonder how much comedy was in Wizard’s Crown. I don’t need “yuckity yuck chuckle fuckity yucks” in my games to enjoy them. It is not a requirement.


Edit…. I forgot the hilarious white rabbits.

Spoiler

….. until the massacre your party.