Cain on Games - Tim Cain's new YouTube channel

[Wesp5]

Glad to see Tim is not into random loot...

Sadly, he didn't seem to have brought that into The Outer Worlds, because illegal items like the hacking and lockpicking devices could be found all over the place and in much too high quantities too!

 

[Quillon]

Glad to see Tim is not into random loot...

Sadly, he didn't seem to have brought that into The Outer Worlds, because illegal items like the hacking and lockpicking devices could be found all over the place and in much too high quantities too!

TOW's loot table excel sheet has only one line: "fuck ton of crap everywhere"

 

[Roguey]

Tim's disappointed by the blurriness of low resolution games on high resolution monitors. You can alleviate this somewhat with integer scaling, though this obviously means you won't be utilizing your monitor's entire height. And yeah you can use high resolution mods to set it to the monitor's resolution, but that changes the way it looks and his lament is that you can't get Fallout/Arcanum/ToEE looking exactly the way they did on a CRT.

Tim's design philosophy has matured and he cringes at some of his old design decisions.

He's disappointed by the UIs in the pseudo-iso games of course.

He experienced a lot of content he's either never seen before or completely forgotten about and had a good time laughing at it.

"Still fun and hold up, but just a little clunky."

 

[0sacred]

Tim's design philosophy has manured and he cringes at some of his old design decisions.

ftfy

party alignment was like the one good improvement on D&D in TOEE

 

[Infinitron]

 

[NecroLord]

Should've named his dog Dogmeat.

 

[agris]

I played my first four RPGs (Fallout, Arcanum, The Temple of Elemental Evil, and Vampire: Bloodlines) and give my thoughts about experiencing them now, decades later.

Tim-

Fallout 1 can look really crisp on your modern 1920x1080 screen, without looking tiny or ridiculous. Check this out:

1. Install Fallout 1
2. Install the high resolution pach
3. Install Sfall for Fallout 1 (engine function extender .dll mod)
4. Navigate to the F1 installation directory, open f1_res.ini and set GRAPHICS_MODE to 2, SCALE_2X to 0, SCR_WIDTH to 960, SCR_HEIGHT to 540, and COLOUR_BITS to 32
5. Same dir, open ddraw.ini (sfall's configuration ini), under [Graphics] set Mode & GraphicsWidth/Height to 0

Now you will play the game in native widescreen (!!!) 960x540, perfectly scaled to your 1920x1080 screen. There's a lot more fun stuff in those files if you want to customize the game. The Fallout 1 community has really treated your baby well.

 

[Infinitron]

I talk about my experience with working on games with shorter development times and smaller budgets than usual.

 

[Roguey]

Tim approves of narrative RPGs (if you don't have the budget to include a combat system).

 

[Pyrite Pachyderm]

I talk about my experience with working on games with shorter development times and smaller budgets than usual.

Work harder on your double peace sign ahegao, Tim.

 

[NecroLord]

I talk about my experience with working on games with shorter development times and smaller budgets than usual.

Work harder on your double peace sign ahegao, Tim.

 

[StrongBelwas]

Cain loves mods, won't review them. Has been using mods since Quake, and most recently used them playing Fallout 4.
Encourages making mods as a way to get into the industry.
Hired someone on Outer Worlds based on a mod they made for Skyrim
Some houserules when he played AD&D
Used the 4d6 generation method
Removed restriction on female character strength
If you got more than 1 sub 6 attribute, you can reroll the whole character.
Threw out grappling rules, too complicated.
Ignored weapons vs base armor type to hit chance modification chart. Too difficult to determine base armor type of non humanoid enemies.
Some of Cain's house rules may be based on stuff from Dragon magazine he read and can't remember the source from.
Cain added a character generation rule where you rolled percentile dice (Chart at 5:40.) Get under 95, nothing. 96-99, rolled once on a special chart that gave disadvantages or advantages . Roll 00, double twice. Roll under 40, get something bad, roll over 75, get a benefit. This was all before he saw GURP's advantage/disadvantage system. People did not care much for rolling disadvantages, a friend of Cain managed to get hit with blindness and hemophilia on the same character. He wanted to reroll, Cain refused, the friend got the character killed off in the first fight.
Another modification was during character generation, you had to pick a god. For Clerics, every deity granted an ability/restriction to their clerics (This was far before Cain ever saw D&D 3e's domains.) For Astorte, you got one undetectable lie and one phantasmal force each day, but you had a chance of becoming a pathological liar every level up. He has most of the list on the screen at 10:10 so I won't elaborate further.
Cain experimented with economy measures (Chart at 11:10), might have gotten it from a magazine. Required players to pay taxs and duties for items brought into the cities, non citizens of each country had to pay more. Levies on anything you sold, head tax on anyone who entered the town, religious tithes and requirements to attend church. Gem and Jewels had a very high sales tax, guilds also had membership fees. Eventually dropped because it was simply too much busywork to bother with doing by hand.
Last big change was falling damage (Chart at 13:20), thought the standard rules were too generic, decided to have them roll a percentile dice on each fall, might take more damage, might take less damage, could get broken bones or sprains. Also eventually dropped for being an unfun form of realism.

 

[0sacred]

Cain experimented with economy measures, might have gotten it from a magazine. Required players to pay taxs and duties for items brought into the cities, non citizens of each country had to pay more. Levies on anything you sold, head tax on anyone who entered the town, religious tithes and requirements to attend church. Gem and Jewels had a very high sales tax, guilds also had membership fees.

 

[Alienman]

Removed restriction on women strength

 

[NecroLord]

Removed restriction on women strength

-4 Str, right?
Arcanum has -1 Strength, but +1 Endurance for women, I think...

 

[Roguey]

We got rid of the weird restriction that women couldn't have higher than an 18/50. That was explained to me by my graduate student group that it was a dumb rule and we got rid of it.

If the rule gets in the way of your ideal power fantasy then ignore it, but the strength differences between women and men are real.

 

[StrongBelwas]

Focusing on the last 15 months of Troika, end of 2003 to start of 2005.
After Arcanum shipped, split into Bloodlines and ToEE teams as is known. Temple was a small group of Arcanum people, most Arcanum people moved to Bloodlines. Steve Morray (Programmer), Mike McCarthy (Artist on Arcanum lead artist on ToEE) are two people who stuck with ToEE. ToEE was otherwise mostly new hires.
Tim Cain spent half his day doing HR stuff after ToEE shipped and he moved onto Bloodlines, minimal design or interaction with publisher, didn't want to get involved in arguments. Tried to coordinate programming team and programmed AI for some boss fights.
Self-Confidence feeling very low, kept thinking back to Fallout, wondering why it went so much more smoothly than how Troika worked out.
Fallout was made in the context of a bigger company, so when they needed help at the end they had more sources to call upon.
Was the final say on Fallout, but having a higher entity in the company who could step in and demand something be done because too much money or time had been spent already could help a lot. No such thing with Troika.
"Sometimes Democracy doesn't lead to the best decisions."
Tim Cain was the first to suggest shutting down when they struggled to get a new contract, Cain isn't sure Anderson and Leonard agreed with it so much as they were simply tired along with Cain and everyone else.
Troika was an experiment in many things, most of those failed.
Discussed with Leonard many years later on what he felt went wrong, Leonard felt Cain got too passionate about things, useful when dealing with publishers or journos, not so helpful when he squashes other team member's ideas and it was hard for other people to get their ideas in.
Particularly true for Arcanum apparently because of it's flat hierarchy, had a lot of new hires that felt like they had ownership of Arcanum. This wasn't the case for Fallout because by the time the group expanded there had already been a small core group who established things.
Talked with a programmer from Carbine who had been there longer than him (And was partially responsible for him being hired as their boss, Cain asked why they weren't in charge, the programmer apparently explained but Cain does not elaborate.) The programmer said even though he approved hiring Cain, he felt threatened by him. Well known in the industry, made Fallout (Apparently this programmer was involved with World of Warcraft though), made his own engines. Felt like a small part of a big game, Cain felt like a big part of a big game. Programmer said Cain made a lot of people at Carbine feel defensive, like they had to prove themselves against him. There was worry that Cain would get all the glory for the game despite Cain's efforts to distribute credit.
Cain really liked working with people much smarter than him at Troika. A sense of relief when you can turn something over to someone else knowing it would be handled very well.
Felt like Fallout benefited from having one arbiter who decided what went in and what didn't.
Troika taught Cain he was a poor businessman, told Feargus multiple times at Obsidian he was a much better businessman than Cain. Observed how Obsidian worked and saw many things Feargus did better than him.
Glad he tried the Troika experiments, even if many of them didn't work, so he wouldn't be wondering now how they could worked have out.
Feels weird when he gets feedback from people who never ran their own company on what he should have done at Troika, knows Feargus probably gets the same issue.
When you do something poorly, or ok but not well, don't discount it when people try to tell you.

 

[0sacred]

"Sometimes Democracy doesn't lead to the best decisions."

 

[Roguey]

The pitfall of being a Celebrity Game Developer is that the non-celebs will be intimidated by you and/or deeply resent you. Chris Avellone certainly gets his share of this as well.

And speaking of Chris, I'm sure he'd heavily dispute the thought that Feargus is a good businessman.

"I'll see you tomorrow." You mean Monday.

 

[StrongBelwas]

Development method called 'fast fail', used to do it 30 years ago before he even knew the term, and it currently doing it with his little games made for fun.
He called it rapid prototyping back then. Quickly putting together a level just to see if a mechanic works or if the level size works, done before final art.
Have to view failure as a good thing, discovering something you were planning won't work in the minimum time and effort required. Have to be willing to throw away stuff.
Some people don't have the right mindset for it, he at first thought it was an ego thing but it is more like they don't get the journey vs the destination.
Rapid prototyping was used for Fallout, three engines made, voxel 3d and isometric, voxel and 3d were too slow and 3d required very low polygon count to get a decent framerate.
Some art assets in Fallout from before they decided to shift to the 1950s art style were kept if they weren't too jarring. Some assets such as some walls were discarded.
Changing from GURPs required fast changes.
Problem with fast fail is that you can be left with a lot of unfinished material in the game, i.e many systems in Arcanum that were basically in their alpha version due to constant prototyping .
A lot of bosses/publishers can't see the ideas of a prototype because they can't see beyond the basic greybox assets. One would just look at the greybox area and say it was stupid. All their feedback will come back negative, you simply can't show these people prototypes.
Some people can't bear to part with their work, will want to leave to another project after their work is discarded.
Fast fail can get expensive when the team gets larger (on Fallout it was fine because most of it was just him and when the team grew they already had a clear idea), it can mean paying a lot of people to do things that will be removed, Cain believes there isn't much R&D expense in the gaming industry, mainly just left to the large companies like Blizzard and Valve. They can work on the game until it is finished, most companies work on the game until the budget runs out. Very hard to predict how long a R&D phase can last.
Fast Fail can become a mess if the vision isn't clear, Cain thinks too many people had too much say in things in Carbine and it resulted in a lot of ideas being generated without them going anywhere and converging into one central idea. Just wandering through random ideas.
Believes that fast fail fading out of practice in most companies has resulted in a lot of stable games that are mediocre, or games that improve after several patches.
Fast fail can lead to unstable games but he believes it is the path to a truly great game, companies have to decide if they want stable goodness or unstable greatness.
Recommends it for anyone who is trying to prototype.

 

[StrongBelwas]

Stop shitposting on Codex, start making your game.
People say they don't have time to make a game, if you have time to watch his videos, you have time to make a game. Most common excuse in his comments. 15 minutes a day working on something will get you results.
People say they don't have money. Might have been fair 40 years ago, but now you have access to free engines and assets and probably have a device that can run them.
People say that they can't do it all, now plenty of sites to download assets, especially if you aren't going for a commercial assets.
At the very least, you'll get a better response on job interviews, Cain has been impressed by people he has interviewed that can quickly grasp something on their own.
Cain is probably not as well off as you think he is, compare yourself to Cain when he started and not as he is now.
Cain took a bit of a gamble going into game development with how much student debt he had.
Cain enjoyed his role on Nuka Break and didn't think he shouldn't do it just because the other actors were better.
Cain shows off his little space combat game (made in Unity) starting at 6:35. Got a free starship model, got some free skyboxes. Just retaught himself how to do player movement in Unity. Deciding how movement works and how to code it is already a good chunk of game development figured out.
Added stars when his free skybox couldn't really demonstrate where the player is moving. Deciding how to handle the stars is another aspect.
Cain can't find it, but when he was teaching himself C# he made a simple image filter program. Taught him how to do things in C# (Working with file system, loading and saving files and handling their formats.)
C# is fast to develop with, but the resulting program was very slow. Wrote a similar program in C (Took him weeks instead of days), but the C program did in seconds what the C# would take half a minute or more to do. Limits to optimization in C# because of what they hide from you.

 

[NecroLord]

Learn 2 code.

 

[0sacred]

If I wanted to do everything myself I'd be living off the grid, not making RPG's

 

[Roguey]

Guy with a very strong work ethic seems utterly puzzled that there are so many people with a very weak work ethic.

 

[Cohesion]

I talk about my work on making Arcanum a native Windows 10 executable...and why I cannot release it.

KING

Modern compiler didn't like the code and threw over a hundred of warnings and errors so he had to fix them.