Cain on Games - Tim Cain's new YouTube channel

[Infinitron]

I talk about how to write detailed design specifications for artists and programmers.

 

[Russia is over. The end.]

StrongBelwas hello?

 

[blessedCoffee]

Cain thinks now that the rat cave was the wrong way to go about it. Would have opened with a cinematic of the player going outside into a very bright desert and then moving into the isometric view where the player can see nearby that rats are chewing on a body and that there some equipment nearby the body.

I don't see what would be the benefit of showing the in-game perspective in the cinematic, which Tim incorrectly referred as 'isometric'. If you re-watch the Fallout cinematic, with the overseer sending you out of the vault, there's already a part showing a preview of what the player can expect gameplay to be like. You don't need to stress that you're not gonna have 1st person exploration, in multiple cinematics – even if you're taking into account impatient players who will spam 'enter' or 'esc' to skip cinematics and begin the game, what kind of loony would buy a game without checking the basic stuff?

You know, the key features of a game (described on the back of the game box, or in the game's page, if you're buying in the internet), screenshots showing UI/perspective/etc, system requirements?

And you'll be rewarded with experience points if you deal with the hostile creatures in the starting area, this is the player's reward: xp. Why should you add equipment on top of that, it's not like you can get something of value which is being 'watched' by one or multiple creatures / take something of value out of their inventories when they perish, during the entirety of the game. I think the pocket lint is a Fallout 2 addition, I must say I like that the developers included useless items in this RPG. Sometimes the player will regret pickpocketing a NPC, and that's how it should be, if you ask me.

 

[deuxhero]

Any updates on Arcanum source code now that MS owns Sierra/Activison?

 

[StrongBelwas]

Thought experiment on a TTRPG that you make that you only want to use two six sided dice. Want something special to happen on 1s and 6s, but also want to avoid rolling double bad or double good, and also don't want the 1s and 6s to be too rare. Can make new rules, that requires more rolling, or in a computer equivalent, needs the rules explained to the player so they understand why their double 1/6 became something else.
Proposes using special die where either the 1 or the 6 is replaced with another 1/6. Those dice would ensure you never roll two 6s or 1s. No extra rules required. Likes the player needing to roll and nothing else.
References the Reboot Conference 2017 of geometric shapes infamy.
Wanted to make a game that had something like SPECIAL like Fallout but without extra rules, would drop Luck and replace it with an upgradable perk thus giving you equal 3-3 physical mental stats.
Thinks the geometric shapes would have given the player way to manipulate their physical/mental attributes separately without requiring the player to learn a lot of new rules (i.e don't need to tell the player you can't have two really bad attributes, don't need to tell the player if you rolled two sub-5 attributes you have to reroll like in D&D.)
Could have picked one primary shape and a secondary shape, i.e make Physical your primary and every point of the triangle gets a little bonus.
Dice rule and point buy systems with a lot of rules are often nonsensical to Cain. Believes they require unwritten knowledge. Restrictions by the developer to prevent nonviable characters being created feel like the developer overtly overreaching, the geometric shape option lets you spin it around to create a character without the developer having to impose.
Players can see geometry, Cain doesn't believe it was dumbing down, just presenting it in a better manner without requiring the player to understand some rules.
They got it functioning in Outer Worlds, but people got confused or believed they couldn't make certain characters.
Still thinks it's a good idea, hopes someone smarter than him will figure out how to get it in a game in a way that satisfies the player.

 

[Infinitron]

Ah, the fate of the geometric shapes! IHaveHugeNick

 

[IHaveHugeNick]

So basically, he thinks the classic way of presenting the attributes can be confusing for players (which is a fair point), but when they tried geometric shapes, it ended up being even more confusing.




I liked TOw's Flaws though, so there's that.

 

[Butter]

"What if you want to dump all mental attributes to pump all your physical attributes? Your triangle system doesn't support that."

"Shut the fuck up."

 

[0sacred]

"Ideas are cheap. Make a prototype to prove your point" - Tim Cain

 

[StrongBelwas]

Packets are sent to a game server to be analyzed.
Started using telemetry at Wildstar.
Hard to get a proper telemetry team.
Telemetry server is a computer at the office/data center.
Game connects to server at start of game, confirms it can connect, then begins sending the information.
Twain Martin was a database master at both Obsidian and Carbine, very good at SQL.
Packet is a timestamped location marked chunk of data.
Mostly discrete in game events, player takes damage, uses ability. Player takes this much damage from this much trap at this point in the map.
Some events are nondiscrete, such as player movement. Player is always moving, you don't really want packets of every instance of the player stopping and starting.
Some events are discrete but not technically considered game events, like the player saving or loading, or changing game options.
The data can be analyzed in lots of different ways. Look at what individual players did, but generally you conglomerate them.
Tim Cain tried to get the heat maps color coded in a way he can see with his colorblindness. Most important parts of heat maps where were do they spend the most time, and where are they going to you didn't plan for them to get to.
Can also use heat maps for places with frequent deaths, or where people save the game, or where they quit (maybe ragequit) the game.
Cain heard an anecdotal story from one of the Tomb Raider games where they noticed a lot of player death and ragequits at a sequence where there was supposed to be an easy jump. A curve in the level area would cause players to jump too soon instead of advancing further to see the safe point to jump.
Take note if players of a certain class are dying more often to some bosses than other classes. Can also go through the whole game and see if certain classes had higher death rates( Or in, skill-based games, do certain archetypes die more often than other builds.)
Basically telemetry lets you see if players are playing the game like you expected. You have to decide what your expectations were, which changes how you respond to the data.
Telemetry is particularly important for big games because even as the game director Cain doesn't really know all the content in the game.
Used Telemetry in Pillars to track which skills were being used, and noticed some of them were overly used and others were frontloaded at the start and then fell out of favor.
Wishes he had telemetry in Fallout 1 so he could have noticed Energy Weapons were underused in the early sections.

 

[NecroLord]

Wishes he had telemetry in Fallout 1 so he could have noticed Energy Weapons were underused in the early sections.

Same situation in Fallout 2.
You only get your hands on a Plasma Rifle later in the game (if you manage to gain access to the Sierra Army Depot), from a Super Mutant in the Military Base (one of the more difficult areas in the game, really tough battles await here), or from Navarro, which is an Enclave base (need I say more?).
The godly Pulse Rifle is in the BOS bunker in San Francisco, but you don't get access to it until you steal the Vertibird plans from Navarro for Matt, the BOS member guarding the bunker.

 

[Alienman]

Telemetry seems to be a tool for devs who are alien to the concept of actually playing games. At least that's the impression I'm getting.

 

[Viata]

Telemetry is gay. I always turn internet off when I'm playing games.

 

[StrongBelwas]

Telemetry seems to be a tool for devs who are alien to the concept of actually playing games. At least that's the impression I'm getting.

I think Cain's example of Energy Weapons is rather silly because anyone can notice that in one playthrough, but there probably is only so much useful information you can get from the same handful/dozens/hundreds of team members who have known the game for years and don't even know what they know.

 

[Roguey]

Wishes he had telemetry in Fallout 1 so he could have noticed Energy Weapons were underused in the early sections.

Josh Sawyer beaming with smug pride.

Those as I recall, Jesse Heinig was a proponent of energy weapons as a late-game skill so there was disagreement within the team itself.

 

[Zeriel]

Really likes the Lynch Dune movie, knows he is in the minority.

how prestigious of Tim. I agree.

Lynch's movie was much more stylish, and they did a much better job with casting than nu Dune

Tim is really a weird combination of the most shit opinions possible with some prestigious and respectable ones mixed in. ...Which, come to think of it, is just a human being thing I guess?

It's strange the things he's monocled on with regards to game design (like extended unskippable tutorial/intro sequences being cancer) and then the ones where he just spouts the most decline possible. I am assuming he got peer-pressured into a lot of his new fangled game design views. A lot of devs seem to be like this. "Oh everyone around me is telling me pure retardation is actually good design? Well the kids are all doing it, so it must be hip to be square."

It's corporatism in general. I see the same approach in my industry. I am assuming it occurs in every industry. Most companies (and middle managers) just copy whatever everyone else is doing and assume it is the perfect way to do things... because everyone else is doing it! Nevermind that that's not how any highly profitable company got highly profitable in the first place.

 

[Roguey]

I am assuming he got peer-pressured into a lot of his new fangled game design views. A lot of devs seem to be like this. "Oh everyone around me is telling me pure retardation is actually good design? Well the kids are all doing it, so it must be hip to be square."

Very Intelligent Designers have always been this way.

We listened to our super hardcore friends who told us, here's how I would fix Deus Ex. I mean we listened - we had some friends, some good friends, who told us that Deus Ex was giant disaster - and here's what they would change, and I love those guys, and we really felt sensitive about that. We really felt like, "God, we've - we've uh, we're not meeting the demands, or we're not meeting the standards of our very intelligent designer friends, so ashamed. Let's fix all that in the sequel, and we weren't listening to the players of the original game, who liked what we had done.

 

[Jedi Master Radek]

It amazes me how shapes proponents seem to think an average person is some kind of total troglodyte, who can't comprehend the abstract meaning of numbers. In reality most people tend to put numeric ratings on everything, they rate everything as x out of 10, they overuse numeric ratings. Constraining character building options just to appeal to people who hate character building or are more excited by the fact that something moves on the screen rather than what it represent is why we got the decline period past 2005.

 

[Jedi Master Radek]

It's corporatism in general. I see the same approach in my industry. I am assuming it occurs in every industry. Most companies (and middle managers) just copy whatever everyone else is doing and assume it is the perfect way to do things... because everyone else is doing it! Nevermind that that's not how any highly profitable company got highly profitable in the first place.

Don't demand too much from the monkey brain.

 

[ds]

Telemetry with explicit opt in is creepy as fuck. Imagine buying a toaster and suddenly there is someone standing in your kitchen clicking a counter every time you use it and notes what kind of toppings you eat your toast with. At least laws are finally (slowly) catching up to shit like this that the tech industry likes to do.

And its not like telemetry actually leads to better software. All it gives you are statistics and those can be used to justify about any change, like removing the restore function from backup software because its rarely used.

 

[ds]

Wishes he had telemetry in Fallout 1 so he could have noticed Energy Weapons were underused in the early sections.

Same situation in Fallout 2.
You only get your hands on a Plasma Rifle later in the game (if you manage to gain access to the Sierra Army Depot), from a Super Mutant in the Military Base (one of the more difficult areas in the game, really tough battles await here), or from Navarro, which is an Enclave base (need I say more?).
The godly Pulse Rifle is in the BOS bunker in San Francisco, but you don't get access to it until you steal the Vertibird plans from Navarro for Matt, the BOS member guarding the bunker.

And that makes them feel special rather than just being another weapon type. Feels good when you finally get to vaporize suckers after having tagged the skill at the start of the game and put some points into it in anticipation of finding one.

 

[NecroLord]

Wishes he had telemetry in Fallout 1 so he could have noticed Energy Weapons were underused in the early sections.

Same situation in Fallout 2.
You only get your hands on a Plasma Rifle later in the game (if you manage to gain access to the Sierra Army Depot), from a Super Mutant in the Military Base (one of the more difficult areas in the game, really tough battles await here), or from Navarro, which is an Enclave base (need I say more?).
The godly Pulse Rifle is in the BOS bunker in San Francisco, but you don't get access to it until you steal the Vertibird plans from Navarro for Matt, the BOS member guarding the bunker.

And that makes them feel special rather than just being another weapon type. Feels good when you finally get to vaporize suckers after having tagged the skill at the start of the game and put some points into it in anticipation of finding one.

Absolutely.
Until that point, I suppose the Laser Pistols you get in New Reno will do. You can upgrade them into the Magneto Laser Pistols, who have the "Weapon Penetrate" perk.
Oh, there's also a Plasma Pistol in the Toxic Caves, but the real star there is the BOZAR!

 

[Glop_dweller]

Wishes he had telemetry in Fallout 1 so he could have noticed Energy Weapons were underused in the early sections.

Underused? Do you mean underused like the Traps skill?

Well here is the thing... How many people booby-trap their house, or lay mines in their back yard? There is one or two(?) traps in the film Book of Eli; no energy weapons at all.
How many people in here (right now) can hunt with a boomerang? If you have that skill and find a simple (or tricked out) boomarang—you are one of the very few, and it's a guarantee that in a post apoc setting (especially outside of Australia),
that you will not be looting boomerangs from every other violent encounter with the locals. It would be absurd to find a trap in every house, every apartment building, even just once every town. And it is the same for high-tech energy weapons———especially in a setting that (mostly) eschews aught but vacuum tube tech. Having an energy weapon skill is like having a Katana skill (or the Traps skill). It comes at significant cost, but enables your PC to be an expert where most everyone else is not.

*Also though... the early game was set in destitute/primitive environs; low level characters too. I'd only expect energy weapons near the military base, the Glow, or —maybe— with one of the caravans.

 

[NecroLord]

Having an energy weapon skill is like having a Katana skill

Katanas are underpowered.

 

[Glop_dweller]

Katanas are underpowered.

So are fencing foils... but not in the hands of an expert...