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Cain on Games - Tim Cain's new YouTube channel
- Thread starter Goral
- Start date
- Joined
- May 29, 2010
- Messages
- 36,651
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.
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.
- Joined
- Aug 1, 2015
- Messages
- 516
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.
- Joined
- Aug 1, 2015
- Messages
- 516
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.
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If I wanted to do everything myself I'd be living off the grid, not making RPG's
Modern compiler didn't like the code and threw over a hundred of warnings and errors so he had to fix them.
Tim is fixing Arcanum bugs... what does he think of the UAP?
edit: doing a balancing pass on spells, thinks Harm damage shouldn't scale as much or have a cooldown (!!!) - why not just make it cost more fatigue? It's just too easy to spam.
edit: doing a balancing pass on spells, thinks Harm damage shouldn't scale as much or have a cooldown (!!!) - why not just make it cost more fatigue? It's just too easy to spam.
- Joined
- May 29, 2010
- Messages
- 36,651
Not really much of a deterrent as long as you fill your inventory with mana potions.
a mana cost of 20 would mean you can cast it ~twice on a medium level (twice and then passing out on lower levels). I don't think the mana potion route would be sustainable in that case. Even a cost of 15 might suffice and would definitely be warranted considering the spell's power.
EDIT: straight from the horse's mouth:
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Great video and nice to see him just doing some work on the actual Arcanum source code. 
And as stated, he does not currently own the IP and cannot release this work as a patch or whatever, but the current (as of 2023) is M$. Entirely possible (some day) they would be ok with this update of the work he has done.
He mentioned he might take a look at Vampire. Really looking forward to that one too.
And as stated, he does not currently own the IP and cannot release this work as a patch or whatever, but the current (as of 2023) is M$. Entirely possible (some day) they would be ok with this update of the work he has done.
He mentioned he might take a look at Vampire. Really looking forward to that one too.
I don't buy it. He can make mods like any other people. The only difference is that he'd be doing it using the source code that he owns. He's not bound contractually to any special treatment, he'd be just like any other modder. As a modder, he can release the diff patch for the current .exe.
He's just being a drama queen. He also clearly wants Microsoft to pay him for essentially a mod. Good luck with that. I'd throw a few dollars his way if he simply opened a Patreon and started modding. But he wants to be the drama queen.
Yes, but I'm even more looking forward to him taking a "look" at TOEE... like, a really hard look. Something that makes it playable. I'd rather watch a Cain video of an improved TOEE than play it in its current state.
Did Bethesda authorize an Obsidian staff member to make his own mod for New Vegas? Or he did it anyways, even without being given the green light?
I'm pretty sure there was an "official" mod for Fallout: New Vegas, but I never gave it a go, so I'm not gonna recall all details about it.
I'm pretty sure there was an "official" mod for Fallout: New Vegas, but I never gave it a go, so I'm not gonna recall all details about it.
Most mods are not strictly legal even if game companies generally don't do anything to stop them. A patch also isn't automatically free of copyright - and a patch upgrading an executable to one compiled with a much newer compiler will likely contain almost the whole new executable. I'm all for ignoring copyright where you can get away with it but I can also understand how someone who is himself still in the industry (even if semi-retired) would want to keep things 100% kosher. Also, whatever agreement allowed him to keep the source code could have additional teeth.
Now of course should the source code or a patched executable just appear somewhere on the net then who could say that Tim had anything to do with it...
What, remasters never happen? Or do you think the developers making them work for free?
But yeah, he could just ask Microsoft for permission to release an unofficial patched .exe. What incentive do they have to say no?
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- May 29, 2010
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- 36,651
Sawyer made the mod purely for himself and then released it due to public demand. It's not official, he merely worked on it.
Back in the early 00s, Gaider released a mod for Throne of Bhaal (changing the ending and restoring the other bosses to their pre-playtester-feedback unnerfed states).
Yeah, not exactly official, which is why I used "official".
But did he contact Bethesda, prior to releasing the mod publicly?
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Such things are unnecessary. If Bethesda didn't want people making and putting mods out there, they wouldn't have gone through the great effort of making and releasing user friendly mod tools.Yeah, not exactly official, which is why I used "official".
But did he contact Bethesda, prior to releasing the mod publicly?
The idea that Microsoft/Activison would sue him or deliver a C&D for improving one of their products for free is ludicrous. As far as I know, no one has ever been in trouble legally for releasing a mod or an unofficial patch to a game.
NecroLord
Dumbfuck!
- Joined
- Sep 6, 2022
- Messages
- 14,579
Co8 and Temple+ mods have got you covered!
Install those and you should be good to go.
I know right?Such things are unnecessary. If Bethesda didn't want people making and putting mods out there, they wouldn't have gone through the great effort of making and releasing user friendly mod tools.Yeah, not exactly official, which is why I used "official".
But did he contact Bethesda, prior to releasing the mod publicly?
Tim just has no guts, apparently. Just upload this bloody patch / mod, Timmy!
He is a coward.
It's called an anal-something personality, not anal-retentive, but something else? In infants, it manifests as them refusing to poo, retaining the poo within, until begged or until sufficient attention to the matter is given.
There's a famous phrase for it in Russian, popularized by a russian psychologist vlogger, called "programmist analnik". She says it often affects programmers.
Yes, would be unlikely for Microsoft. But still possible and even without legal action there might be consequences for someone that still wants to keep open the possibility of working with them in the future.
https://www.techspot.com/news/83353-take-two-sues-modder-over-red-dead-redemption.html
https://www.gamedeveloper.com/busin...hind-i-gta-i-reverse-engineering-project-re3-
Even with a settlement in the end that can be more trouble than helping other people out without payment is worth.
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