Cain on Games - Tim Cain's new YouTube channel

[HeatEXTEND]

Reviews can be useful but IMO nowadays by far most useful are Let's Play videos where the player keeps his mouth shut. These will give easily 10x more information than any review.

fypnp

 

[Alter Sack]

Why does he wear so many popsicle shirts?

Who knows?

Spoiler

 

[None]

Why does he wear so many popsicle shirts?

He has a video where he explains the reason:

 

[Roguey]

If Meb were still around she'd be disappointed that Tim-m-o stopped playing them before Final Fantasy XIV fixed itself.

 

[Infinitron]

I talk about crunch: what is it, what causes it, and how can we minimize it?

 

[Roguey]

Tim blaming overscoping on publishers, which is fair, but they're all dumb. Obsidian and inXile's overscoping problems on their crowdfunded projects are entirely on their own leadership.

 

[abija]

Everything he listed is a management issue. Denial was strong in this video.

 

[Butter]

What's the last AA/AAA game you heard of that didn't have overscoping/crunch? There are probably a few examples, but it's apparently a really widespread problem. It makes me think it's just incompetent developers. No matter how little you put on their plate, they're going to complain that it's too much.

 

[None]

What's the last AA/AAA game you heard of that didn't have overscoping/crunch? There are probably a few examples, but it's apparently a really widespread problem. It makes me think it's just incompetent developers. No matter how little you put on their plate, they're going to complain that it's too much.

I think most of it is just normal project flow and any extraordinary issues stem from poor handling on the individual and managerial level. Almost every project, technical or not, that I've worked on or been witness to has always had some sort of crunch unless it was a very routine project where there are very few unknowns. All this crunch talk really just feels like the games industry catching up with the rest of the world now that games are becoming less of a guaranteed return on investment. Carie Patel's talk at GDC was particularly alarming to me as she was talking about some fairly standard and common sense practices in order to curb crunch, but that might just be an Obsidian thing.

 

[pickmeister]

Haven't worked on a video game but was unlucky enough to work through many small crunches in other industries and it's always a combination of lazy people and mismanagement.

Some examples:
1) I have a task A. For the task A, I need info/mock-up/foundation from person Z. Person Z claims to be busy with other tasks or waits for someone else. I think person Z is a lazy fucking idiot who's only good at making excuses but project team doesn't object so what can I do. Therefore I proceed with other tasks to enjoy crunch before deadline.
2) Here are tasks B, C, D, and E. B is an important foundation many other tasks are built on and was quickly hacked together at the start to have a minimal viable product to work with. Task C, D, and E are partially (or even fully) reliant on task B. Project team focuses on tasks C, D, and E.
"Hey, project team, shouldn't we focus on task B for a short while, to clean it up and flesh out other functions we need, so we have a smoother process with the other tasks and avoid waiting for dependencies?"
"Are you crazy? Those are important extremely high visibility tasks that need to be shown to the CEO/board/director/customer/whoever. Otherwise, there would be nothing to present!".
Aight ya fuck but don't say I didn't warn you.
3) Here we have 20 small tasks that would take 2 - 3 days to complete and more small tasks keep piling up and are going to be a huge annoyance once deadline comes. Some require collaboration and decision. Perhaps we should do them now when we have a bit of a breathing room?
"We can't afford dedicating our resources to these small tasks when we have the big ones here.".
4) "Hey, how is it going with that big task you're working on for half a year now?"
"Yeah, they changed their vision of the final product, which means we're starting again. For the third time now."
5) "What are you working on? Shouldn't you be fixing the bugs we got from quality?"
"Yeah, but the boss just stopped by with a new feature that needs to be ready for the presentation next week. He said it's for the big guy and extremely important. You know how it is."
"Yeah..."

And tons of others I could come up with. It always comes down to working with idiots.
The moment deadlines comes, suddenly, everybody is extremely efficient, no one is coming with useless reworks or adding useless features to please higher-ups and small decisions are made by individuals as they can't afford to wait for approval with every bullshit.
I'm sure it's absolutely the same in vidya industry.

 

[Nano]

Opinion: crunch is *necessary* for developing complex games in a reasonable amount of time. Go back and read about the development of a lot of Codex classics. Some of the Thief 2 developers were living in the Looking Glass offices unbathed.

 

[Hagashager]

Crunch is an inevitable fact of life- not just in a Capitalistic sense, but in general.

You can jolly well bet there was an awful lot of life threatening crunch during Stalin's Five Year Plan.

That doesn't change the fact that crunch, as experienced in Tech, appears to be unreasonably protracted. I work in manufacturing, we have deadlines, crazy ones too, including same-day orders. At the worst of our days no one's pulling all-nighters, napping next to the machinery or skipping breakfast.

From what I gather Tech is a unique blend of profound incompetence by management and profound incompetence by the developers.

 

[pickmeister]

From what I gather Tech is a unique blend of profound incompetence by management and profound incompetence by the developers.

Yeah. That's because they can "afford" it. When a manufacturing worker is tired and sticks his hand in a running lathe, you have fucking problem. There's no equivalent for that in tech. When a dev team goes full retard in a code, most won't notice. When customers start complaining, it's already too late and the management is already on to something else. Or excuse it by whatever. It's harder to make excuses for a worker that has some new stamps on his spine and skull because he fainted into a powerhammer.

 

[Hagashager]

Valid point. A large chunk of our rigorous curation of schedules and times comes from the fact that the alternative is someone loses a limb at the plasma cutter or shear-saw.

 

[Bad Sector]

Everything he listed is a management issue. Denial was strong in this video.

It is a management issue in that everything (including tasks to do, hires, projects, etc) boils down to some manager's decision, but that also makes the argument kinda worthless.

Go back and read about the development of a lot of Codex classics.

Or, more related, watch Tim's "lost decade" video.

 

[toucanplay]

That doesn't change the fact that crunch, as experienced in Tech, appears to be unreasonably protracted. I work in manufacturing, we have deadlines, crazy ones too, including same-day orders. At the worst of our days no one's pulling all-nighters, napping next to the machinery or skipping breakfast.

From what I gather Tech is a unique blend of profound incompetence by management and profound incompetence by the developers.

I've worked in (non-game) tech for about ten years now, and I'm married to someone who's worked in (game and non-game) tech. We've run into the latter here and there (and we're both very critical towards incompetent people), but astonishingly bad managers/leadership are everywhere.

A lot of the problems in tech are the same as everywhere else: managers that come from "outside" and don't know how things work, or that are only interested in their own careers instead of things functioning smoothly, or narcissism (talking over you, interrupting you, fobbing you off, stealing your ideas), or just being a cunt in general.

With tech, you have the additional problem of people treating it like it's voodoo magic, and not knowing just how much they're speaking out of ignorance. Some small change may sound simple, but depending the code/data/physical tech, that simple thing could be days of work, and sometimes even the experts won't know until they've worked on it a little. Turnover is very high in tech as well, and a lot of stuff is very badly documented and code is often written in a rush (often for management-driven reasons) so it's easy to lose key people who know what's going on.

Game tech has the additional problem of not nearly paying as well as elsewhere, so turnover is even higher than usual, and big dev companies can get away with it because a lot of people think making games is "fun" and "cool". There's also a lot of middleware involved to cover for skill gaps, and if game middleware is anything like the "middleware" I've used elsewhere, it'll be only slightly better documented, and full of kludge because that'll have been made by some other tech team working under the same sorts of pressures.

 

[HumanTotemPole]

Not long started watching. Illuminating how enthusiastic Cain remains when talking about the classics. Boyarsky too in an indirect sort of way. Everybody really gave a shit when they made those games and it shows.

 

[Infinitron]

I talk about how we stored object prototypes and created building structures in Arcanum. This is a follow-up to the video on Arcanum's procedural generation, found here:

 

[La vie sexuelle]

I talk about how we stored object prototypes and created building structures in Arcanum. This is a follow-up to the video on Arcanum's procedural generation, found here:

Why he is burining all his legacy with this chanel?

 

[Alienman]

It makes me appreciate modern games more, so the whole thing has been a good thing for me overall. I was too stuck in that the olden days were better - we are never getting these kinds of devs again, etc etc. And sure, many older games are great, but as mentioned before in this thread, they were just happy accidents. This combined how the "comeback" (failure) went with the Kickstarter craze... well, happy accidents can and will happen again, like for example with Jagged Alliance 3 and Aliens Dark Decent. So I don't stress about it as much anymore, and I thank Tim Cain for that realization.

 

[abija]

Btw you can even see in one of Tim's videos (with Scott Cambell) how nonchalant they talk about people joining as QA or interns and eventually being promoted into management because they made themselves useful. Doesn't even register to them that's a horrible practice.

Good thing he gets triggered by "every crunch is management problem" statement.

 

[Butter]

Btw you can even see in one of Tim's videos (with Scott Cambell) how nonchalant they talk about people joining as QA or interns and eventually being promoted into management because they made themselves useful. Doesn't even register to them that's a horrible practice.

Sounds preferable to the Obsidian situation where they have a bunch of entrenched leads and nobody gets promoted.

 

[Roguey]

Btw you can even see in one of Tim's videos (with Scott Cambell) how nonchalant they talk about people joining as QA or interns and eventually being promoted into management because they made themselves useful. Doesn't even register to them that's a horrible practice.

Sounds preferable to the Obsidian situation where they have a bunch of entrenched leads and nobody gets promoted.

Feargus made the leap from QA to division director to CEO. It could always be worse, but it wasn't exactly great.

 

[Roguey]

Game directing part two


Tim's long experience has made him become hyper-critical of other games.

He doesn't care too much about balance as long as it's fun, but doesn't want to veer off too much into imbalance.

He was glad Leonard handled all the art directing in TOW, all complaints go to him.

QA testers are more about replaying the same sections over and over again, a game director goes through the whole thing multiple times.

Tim regrets not being more balanced-focused early in his career, Fallout and Arcanum could use more

 

[StrongBelwas]

Cain preferences to make:
* Nonlinear story with choices and consequences
* Player generated protagonist with setup that allows for the main character to be basically anybody, like with Fallout's voting system to send someone out of the vault or a random colonist being picked in a rush at the start of Outer Worlds.
* New gameplay systems not seen in past games (Perks & Dumb Dialogue in Fallout/Fate points in Arcanum/ Party Alignment in Temple of Elemental Evil/ Path System in Wildstar/Flaws created by player actions in Outer Worlds)
*Likes to add humor
* Original setting/IP
**Additionally, a setting different from previous settings he worked on.