Cain on Games - Tim Cain's new YouTube channel

[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.

 

[Roguey]

First mention of Avellone: Tim says he was responsible for creating Tyranny's setting. That's funny, considering how Avellone later distanced himself from the project (By choice? Not by choice? Either way it led to trouble when he told mindx2 Tyranny wasn't his project which made Paradox irate because they had agreed to pay Feargus extra to have Avellone as a lead and Feargus never bothered to tell Chris this).

 

[Infinitron]

I talk about how we created procedural dialog in Arcanum, to add variety and extra reactivity to conversations.

 

[Roguey]

That procedural dialogue didn't always work out for the best.

http://www.ataniel.org/arcreview.htm

Arcanum is also heavily, heavily geared towards men. Female players should brace themselves for the tired old gaming experience of watching women in this game give you the same flirtatious lines they give the male characters and accidentally call you "him" periodically; the only time the game seems to remember female PC's might exist is in bars and whorehouses, where you sometimes get groped or propositioned by ugly gnomes. You definitely get the feeling that no one at Troika bothered to playtest this thing with a female PC, much less a female player.

Much like Vavra, Cain's on the AI-train for a more robust-version of this.

 

[Hagashager]

"Ugly Gnomes"

Well we certainly know where that author's prejudices lie. Which real-world analogue are Gnomes coded by modern critics? Jews? I think it's Jews.

That author is anti-semitic.

 

[Goral]

Really interesting talk about game engines:

I talk about game engines, including the pros and cons of making your own versus using third party ones.

 

[PapaPetro]

The more these come out, the more Tim looks like a neurotic pain in the ass to work with.

Seems like a cool guy to spitball ideas around at a high concept level.
But yeah I wouldn't want to get dicked down at work by him over some petty nuanced design decision/flex (I bet he has a very effective passive-aggressive way of making you feel dumb if he wants).
Though, I get the stresses of trying to jigsaw something like a game ex nihilo and make sure all the pieces fit/make sense.

Really interesting talk about game engines:

Every video he's cranked out has been

I'd like to see more of these industry figures start doing casual wisdom dumps on the reg rather than wait for their irregular TED talks at GDC once a decade or so.
Like MCA's got the time and fuck-you-money now from the settlement to do vlogs like Timmy here. I'd like to hear his takes.
Plus let's be honest, this is free marketing influence for himself or others who want to cash out their venerable past for a second future in this industry (NG+ with the Zoomers)

"Retirement" my shiny black ass

 

[KeighnMcDeath]

Shiny? That’s sone skin treatment.

 

[Bad Sector]

Really interesting talk about game engines:

Having worked on a bunch of games, including a few AAA games, as an engine and tools programmer i personally by far prefer custom engines even if i wasn't the one making them (actually in all the AAA cases i wasn't :-P). No real technical reason aside from the control he mentioned (which is a *HUGE* *GARGANTUAN* *GINORMOUS* pro), i just personally like seeing how different programmers handle similar issues in real games - one engine using a pure OOP approach for entities, another using components, another using a hierarchy of nodes, another using all of them because the codebase is old and they wanted to modernize it but there is still code from the 90s :-P, one using macros for its RTTI, another using custom registration code, another using an external parser and code generator, another being "what is RTTI?", one using a scripting language for gameplay customization, another using visual scripting in the world editor, another using a node-based system, etc.

I've also used Unreal and the flip side of "knowing the engine" is that feeling that "i have already addressed that exact issue in this engine in my last company" so now you have to redo all that exact same work which is kinda mind-numbingly dull. Unreal's State UI being at best half-baked and a toy when compared to most existing GUI toolkits (including wxWidgets that UE3 used) and lacking (or lacked when i used it) features you'd find even in Windows 3.1 doesn't help (e.g. you can't have a scrollbox that can scroll both vertically and horizontally at the same time, you need to put one scrollbox inside another and connect the scrollbar of the inner one to a scrollbar you made yourself and have placed next to the outer one... it is a hacky mess).

TBH at this point in my life if i am to join a studio i'd rather join a studio with a custom engine (and preferably a smaller studio as with a bigger studio you're just getting lost in the human sea) rather than a studio with an off-the-shelf engine even if theoretically i'd be able to use my off-the-shelf engine knowledge (and TBH i don't think that is that much of a benefit as even the first time i used Unreal i already had a decent idea of where things would be because of my experience with custom engines - even if the details are different, at a high level most engines are somewhat similar). It is just more interesting to me that way.

Of course ideally i'd rather be making my living from my own games made using my own engine :-P

 

[PapaPetro]

Shiny? That’s sone skin treatment.

Polished from past kisses

 

[Roguey]

That's So Random


The masses yearn for karmic dice and shuffled permutations.

 

[scytheavatar]

Really interesting talk about game engines:

I talk about game engines, including the pros and cons of making your own versus using third party ones.

He does bring up a surprising disadvantage in using Unreal/Unity: you are encouraging your competitors to poach your talent and make it easy for them to steal your tech and ideas. While by using your own engine you make it hard for your employees to leave you cause the experience they gain from making your game is harder to be transferred to other studios.

 

[pickmeister]

He does bring up a surprising disadvantage in using Unreal/Unity: you are encouraging your competitors to poach your talent and make it easy for them to steal your tech and ideas. While by using your own engine you make it hard for your employees to leave you cause the experience they gain from making your game is harder to be transferred to other studios.

That or health insurance. God bless America.

EDIT: Harthwain, I'd really like to know why you retardoed my post. Are you unaware of the corporate practice of keeping employees in the company by leveraging the obscenely high cost of American healthcare system and offering them a better health insurance they're unlikely to get somewhere else?

 

[Bad Sector]

you are encouraging your competitors to poach your talent and make it easy for them to steal your tech and ideas.

The last time that had been a concern was when Atari in the late 70s tried to hide who made the games for their console so that they wont be poached by other companies, which led to the creation of Activision that credited the developers.

The games industry doesn't really work like that, proof is all the conferences like GDC and SIGGRAPH where developers go to share their tech and ideas before even the games they work on are out.

While by using your own engine you make it hard for your employees to leave you cause the experience they gain from making your game is harder to be transferred to other studios.

This isn't really that much of a problem, most people get up to speed in a week or two.

Also these arguments can work both ways: by using Unity/Unreal you can easily poach talents from your competitors whereas by using your own custom engine you make it hard to gain experienced employees. However in practice none of these are a concern as people's valuable experience isn't on how to make an engine move some avatar or how to set up properties in the world editor, these are things one can learn very fast (especially when they have coworkers to help them - and often with a custom engine not only you have coworkers to help you but also the programmer who made those features in the first place), the valuable experience is on things that transfer between engines like gameplay systems (not their implementation but the ideas), level/quest/encounter/etc design, story/dialogs/writing, etc.

 

[Goral]

lol, six demos when nowadays almost no games have demos.

I talk about the six different demos we made for Fallout, starting almost two years before the game shipped.To fully understand the context of this video, I recommend you watch these three videos before watching it, since I reference concepts in them:GNW & TIG: • GNW & TIG, My OS Abstraction Libraries Implementing Randomness: • Implementing Randomness Crunch: • Crunch

 

[Infinitron]

That's not really true, plenty of games have demos these days because of Steam's game festivals. Also Early Access is a form of demo.

But you don't need to have "six demos" nowadays anyway. You just release a continuously updated demo build on Steam.