Cain on Games - Tim Cain's new YouTube channel

[Infinitron]

I talk about what board games I like playing, what features I like to see in my board games, and my list of Top 5 board games.

 

[Infinitron]

I talk about Arcanum's press event "Editors Day", held in April 2000 in Los Angeles.

 

[Roguey]

Tim has a mysterious Arcanum disc but he has no idea what's on it because he doesn't own an optical media drive anymore.

 

[0sacred]

I talk about what board games I like playing, what features I like to see in my board games, and my list of Top 5 board games.

Tim off-handedly burying our hopes for not-Arcanum not-2 ever deeper, saying he doesn't have the patience to create a game anymore

 

[NecroLord]

I talk about what board games I like playing, what features I like to see in my board games, and my list of Top 5 board games.

Tim off-handedly burying our hopes for not-Arcanum not-2 ever deeper, saying he doesn't have the patience to create a game anymore

Arcanum: World War 1 edition...

Imagine that:
Arcanum was Victorian Era Industrial Revolution.
Arcanum 2: World War with Technology and Magick going crazy, Caladonian mage getting cut down by Tarantian Machine gunner.
Eh, just some ideas...

 

[mindx2]

Tim has a mysterious Arcanum disc but he has no idea what's on it because he doesn't own an optical media drive anymore.

He can always send it to me (along with any other Arcanum goodies) and I'll let him know...

 

[Infinitron]

I talk about the experiences I had with tabletop RPGs that showed up later in my own computer RPGs, specifically in Fallout, Arcanum, and The Temple Of Elemental Evil.

 

[NecroLord]

Party Alignment in TOEE makes a lot of sense.
Having a LG goody two shoes Paladin and a CE murderhobo in the same party just doesn't make sense unless you try to RP the hell out of it.

 

[The Wall]

You see, people who like to call you bad names like to play Evil characters but wanna feel good and be called good. Good thing that Tim isn't at all infested with this brain virus. You can see it from his perfectly normal smile. 100% normal

He literally could sit down, in his spare time, write story and Engine for Not-Arcanum 2. In 1997 it took him year+. With modern tools, shouldn't take much longer. But he's oh so old, oh so tired and WOKE worm inside his brain demands regular propaganda feeding. No time for c0d1ng. He's being c0ded

 

[Sigourn]

this year was the first time i have ever been paid a performance bonus. it wasn't very big

Last year was the first time I had ever been paid a performance bonus. It was bigger than my salary. A surprise, to be sure, but a welcome one.

 

[Roguey]

Another video on making videos



"If I fired you myself, you deserved it"

 

[Infinitron]

I read through my lecture notes from a class I taught on game development at the University of California Irvine in 1999.

 

[NecroLord]

I read through my lecture notes from a class I taught on game development at the University of California Irvine in 1999.

That thumbnail...

 

[Roguey]

Tim says that back in the 90s the expected development time for a game was 18 months which I'm sure was true for many genres but not all. Fallout, Baldur's Gate, and Deus Ex all took around three years.

 

[Butter]

Tim says that back in the 90s the expected development time for a game was 18 months which I'm sure was true for many genres but not all. Fallout, Baldur's Gate, and Deus Ex all took around three years.

Which is still extremely fast by modern standards, and those games had smaller teams, and they were better games.

 

[NecroLord]

and they were better games.

Not just better games, but works of creativity made by devoted nerds.

 

[Bad Sector]

Fallout, Baldur's Gate, and Deus Ex all took around three years.

I'm pretty sure those were outliers (though by the time Deus Ex came out game development time was already increasing). Daggerfall and Diablo seem to have taken around two years and these were kinda hard hitters, System Shock seems to have taken somewhere between a year and 18 months and i'd expect smaller games to take less time (like Bethesda's own Battlespire which took 1 year). And another thing to keep in mind is that back in the 90s developers sometimes worked in multiple projects at the same time which slowed the progress of each individual title (e.g. Battlespire was made at the same time as Redguard and System Shock at the same time as Terra Nova).

I think up to mid-90s a year was about the maximum you'd expect for most games, which is why games that took longer kinda stood out (and not always in the best way, see Stonekeep which apparently started development in the late 80s).

 

[luj1]

I talk about what board games I like playing, what features I like to see in my board games, and my list of Top 5 board games.

No Talisman 2ED really? Instead lists plebeian trash like Catan lmao

 

[luj1]

You see, people who like to call you bad names like to play Evil characters but wanna feel good and be called good. Good thing that Tim isn't at all infested with this brain virus. You can see it from his perfectly normal smile. 100% normal

He literally could sit down, in his spare time, write story and Engine for Not-Arcanum 2. In 1997 it took him year+. With modern tools, shouldn't take much longer. But he's oh so old, oh so tired and WOKE worm inside his brain demands regular propaganda feeding. No time for c0d1ng. He's being c0ded

Slam dunk post

 

[0sacred]

I played the German version of Fallout on release, never even noticed you couldn't kill the children because I think the game gave you 0 incentive to kill them. What's wrong with people?

 

[Roguey]

Daggerfall and Diablo seem to have taken around two years and these were kinda hard hitters, System Shock seems to have taken somewhere between a year and 18 months and i'd expect smaller games to take less time

System Shock is a shooter. Daggerfall took nearly three years. Diablo took two years, but it's also far simpler than Daggerfall/Fallout/BG/Deus Ex and they had to go through a brutal 9 month crunch to ship it. Blizzard actually expected them to make it in a year and that proved impossible.

 

[Bad Sector]

System Shock is a shooter. Daggerfall took nearly three years. Diablo took two years, but it's also far simpler than Daggerfall/Fallout/BG/Deus Ex and they had to go through a brutal 9 month crunch to ship it. Blizzard actually expected them to make it in a year and that proved impossible.

System Shock has shooting mechanics but there is a lot more going on than a Doom clone. Daggerfall started after Arena's development which was in March 1994 and it was released in September 1996, this adds at most an extra 5 months but they initially started with the raycasting engine which they dropped later and restarted with XnGine, so i'd say it is closer to two years than three.

But regardless, i think you're trying too much to draw correlation between development time and mechanical complexity which is certainly not the case - otherwise not only Stonekeep would be way more complex than it turned out to be but also modern games with their multiyear development times would dwarf pretty much all of 90s games in terms of mechanical complexity. But that doesn't really happen, there is barely a connection between the two.

And the end of the day, the 90s wasn't only Daggerfall, Diablo, Fallout and Baldur's Gate, i don't think it makes sense to use a handful of games to judge the development times of the games from an entire decade.

 

[Roguey]

System Shock has shooting mechanics but there is a lot more going on than a Doom clone. Daggerfall started after Arena's development which was in March 1994 and it was released in September 1996, this adds at most an extra 5 months but they initially started with the raycasting engine which they dropped later and restarted with XnGine, so i'd say it is closer to two years than three.

But regardless, i think you're trying too much to draw correlation between development time and mechanical complexity which is certainly not the case - otherwise not only Stonekeep would be way more complex than it turned out to be but also modern games with their multiyear development times would dwarf pretty much all of 90s games in terms of mechanical complexity. But that doesn't really happen, there is barely a connection between the two.

And the end of the day, the 90s wasn't only Daggerfall, Diablo, Fallout and Baldur's Gate, i don't think it makes sense to use a handful of games to judge the development times of the games from an entire decade.

18 month RPGs certainly wasn't the norm for at least half the 90s which was my point. Even before then, Darklands took three years, Betrayal at Krondor took two. You could get a slam dunk done within 18 months, sure, Interplay banged out Fallout 2 in a year, but not from scratch.

 

[Bad Sector]

18 month RPGs certainly wasn't the norm for at least half the 90s which was my point. Even before then, Darklands took three years, Betrayal at Krondor took two. You could get a slam dunk done within 18 months, sure, Interplay banged out Fallout 2 in a year, but not from scratch.

Ultima Underworld 2 was released ~10 months after the first game, New World Computing pretty much spat out a new Might and Magic every year from M&M3 to M&M5 and from M&M6 to M&M8 while making a bunch of other games in-between. You can also find several RPGs that weren't as big names that were made in less time, like Escape from Hell (made in a year), Xenomorph (also a year), Ishar series (each one was released a year after the previous entry), Vengeance of Excalibur (released a year after its prequel) and FFS, apparently Mobygames introduced some sort of limit for guest visitors, but you get the idea. Bonus games that took ~1 year to be made and are more known are basically most of SSI's games like Curse of the Azure Bonds, Champions of Krynn, Death Knights of Krynn, etc. Eye of the Beholder 2 also seemed to be made less than a year too.

Again, i think you are focusing on a few highly known titles but those are not the only RPGs released in the 90s. Whatever you may think about their quality or complexity, the fact is all of the above are commercial RPGs that were made in around a year or so in the 90s (mainly early 90s because Mobygames blocked me from looking through its list) which i believe fits with what Tim Cain mentioned. And TBH considering he worked at a somewhat prolific publisher i'd expect him to have an idea how long most games took back then.

 

[Roguey]

Ultima Underworld 2 was released ~10 months after the first game, New World Computing pretty much spat out a new Might and Magic every year from M&M3 to M&M5 and from M&M6 to M&M8 while making a bunch of other games in-between. You can also find several RPGs that weren't as big names that were made in less time, like Escape from Hell (made in a year), Xenomorph (also a year), Ishar series (each one was released a year after the previous entry), Vengeance of Excalibur (released a year after its prequel) and FFS, apparently Mobygames introduced some sort of limit for guest visitors, but you get the idea. Bonus games that took ~1 year to be made and are more known are basically most of SSI's games like Curse of the Azure Bonds, Champions of Krynn, Death Knights of Krynn, etc. Eye of the Beholder 2 also seemed to be made less than a year too.

Man,

You could get a slam dunk done within 18 months, sure, Interplay banged out Fallout 2 in a year, but not from scratch.

You listed a bunch of games that could be cobbled together quickly because they already had a lot of code and art ready to go. It took Troika three years to make Arcanum. It only took 19 months for Temple of Elemental Evil because they already had a good amount of code for it thanks to the development of Arcanum, but the constraints that schedule put on them certainly showed.