Cain on Games - Tim Cain's new YouTube channel

[__scribbles__]

I talk about the pros and cons of taking games too seriously.

 

[NecroLord]

I talk about the pros and cons of taking games too seriously.

Wait, that dude Raycevick asked Tim this question?
Dude only reviews goyslop, not actually good games...
Also got it in his head that he's some kind of big brain reviewer.

 

[StrongBelwas]

Anything can be taken too seriously
Loves when people deep dive into the lore/setting/mechanics of the game. Often something they think about when making the game.
Was talking to Leonard on a game (either Fallout or Arcanum) and wondered if people would get something subtle deep in the game and Leonard said the right people would get it.
Prefers to put lore dumps into books or computer terminals where people have to dig for them.
Plenty of games Cain doesn't take too seriously and doesn't get really into the lore, often IP's he's familiar with or games that just have mechanics he likes.
Indebted to people who make wikis on games that connect everything together, they will often be more detailed than anything they created in house within a few months.
Has a problem with taking games too seriously when people get nasty about it. Doesn't like people putting down others who don't know the lore and exclude them.
Enjoy things that you enjoy and enjoy them the way you want to.
Would rather people move on than making hate videos, says vote with your money.
Says arguments against vote with your money assume people are dumb and have no self control.
The opposite, not taking them seriously is also bad. Many people thought Cain was making a mistake when he went into game development, including his professor who would later ask him to teach a class.
Asked why he isn't doing something more 'valuable' (Including the comments on this channel apparently), his skillset isn't in medicine or agriculture , it's in programming and storytelling.
Read a book called How to Be Perfect by Micheal Schur (Cain is very fond of the Good Place) that he thinks points out the flaws in Greater Good above all kind of mindset.
Had a bunch of games in him he wanted to make, and now he has gotten them out.
Don't take it too seriously, but don't write it off as a frivolously activity.
Always happy when a game namedrops Fallout as one of it's references.

 

[NecroLord]

Loves when people deep dive into the lore/setting/mechanics of the game. Often something they think about when making the game.
Was talking to Leonard on a game (either Fallout or Arcanum) and wondered if people would get something subtle deep in the game and Leonard said the right people would get it.

Yes.
Tim was Based when he made the Half-Ogre Island quest.
He tried to warn us about Jewish Subversion.
How the Tarantian Monarchy conveniently got replaced by the Gnomish Merchants League with the "Tarantian Council".
Yeeeah...

 

[Ryzer]

Loves when people deep dive into the lore/setting/mechanics of the game. Often something they think about when making the game.
Was talking to Leonard on a game (either Fallout or Arcanum) and wondered if people would get something subtle deep in the game and Leonard said the right people would get it.

Yes.
Tim was Based when he made the Half-Ogre Island quest.
He tried to warn us about Jewish Subversion.
How the Tarantian Monarchy conveniently got replaced by the Gnomish Merchants League with the "Tarantian Council".
Yeeeah...

The gnomish quest was written by Leonard Boyarsky who is Jewish himself and not by Tim.

 

[scytheavatar]

I talk about how we made endgame slides in many of my games.

Real talk, endgame slides are yesterday's news. Endgame epilogue like in Baldur's Gate 3 is the new standard that all RPGs should be aiming for.

 

[Alienman]

Ending songs is the real™ new thing, like in Wasteland 3.

 

[KeighnMcDeath]

Every game at the end should have a codexian vote patch & comment that gets emailed to devs and sellers.

 

[Tyranicon]

Endgame slides should compliment you as a person and give you a BJ.

 

[NecroLord]

Endgame slides should compliment you as a person and give you a BJ.

That one of your endgames in your RPG?

 

[Infinitron]

I talk about all of the sections and subsections that you would expect to see in a complete game design specification document.

 

[Roguey]

Disagree with Cain's take that a game should have a number of acts in-between Fallout's three and Arcanum's 27. Fallout having only three critical goals was great. I like having an RPG where 90% of the content is optional but it's a good idea to do enough of it so you have the equipment and experience to handle what you're required to do.

 

[StrongBelwas]

Cain is using a fantasy RPG as an example
Setting and then story and system mechanics. The setting should describe the world the game is set in, and what the major areas are. History of the whole world, particularly where you have the game in.
The story is the main acts you are going to go through, Fallout has three acts (Find Water Chip, Stop Mutants, Stop Master), Arcanum has 27 acts. Cain feels the best number is somewhere in between.
Should also detail key characters that move story along, provide most of the main story quests. You may consider some Essential and make them unkillable, in Cain's games he prefers to just consider Essential to mean you have to prepare a plan B if the player kills them (Side NPC steps up, you find their journal, etc.)
Then you go to the system mechanics, which will need many sections and subsections.
Character System Mechanic like attributes skills spells feats backgrounds races flaws, etc. You probably won't have all of those, but you'll have a bunch of them, and you'll need to describe what they are how they're obtained, how they can be raised during the game, expected range, and whether you can respec.
Than you give a mechanical idea of what character construction is, what the player is given to select, do they have points to spend or do they roll, then you consider the exact mechanics of what happens when the player levels up.
Consider all the status effects, some of them could come from perks or hazards in the game. Could easily be 4/5 dozen of them, Cain has had games with over a hundred status effects. Must be exact when describing these and how they interact with other status effects.
Then comes inventory, encumbrance, different equipment slots on the player and NPCs.
That leads into combat, which is going to be a lot. Is it real time, turn based, what is the combat like on a high level, what form does it take (turn based, real time), the rules for hitting, missing, critical hitting. Melee vs. ranged, are the range weapons projectile or hitscan. Have to go into excruciating description. What kind of armor is there, how many armor slots are there.
What creatures are in the game, what kind of abilities do they have, what attacks and status effects could they use.
Then another big section is dialogue, have to explain exactly how it works, how you want it to branch, what restrictions there. Cain personally restricts it to no more than 5 nodes displayed at any one time. How do skills work in dialogue, how NPC reaction affects dialogues.
Now in stealth section, how hiding works, does it work with lighting and/or cover, how NPCs detect you, how does picking locks work, what does a stealth path for a quest look like.
If you have companions, you're going to need a whole section for that, how players get them, how to keep the companions when they leave, how many there are, how many can you have on the same time (Does it depend on skills/abilities/perks?) Do some companions have restrictions, how do they interact with the main quest and what are their personal quests if any.
Economy gets it's own section. Loot, loot tables, vendors, probably want to throw in a crafting section with everything that entails.
Going back to areas in the game, now you consider how big they are, what towns are there, what dungeons do they have. What encounters are guaranteed, what kind of random encounters could you find.
User Experience section can be broken up into three parts. Pre-Game, Out of Game, and In Game.
Pre Game would be anything the player sees before actually playing. Main menu, how that is designed. Consider options such as visuals/audios/accessibility. Some of these you're going to want set before game, others are set during the game (Cain calls this out of game, such as game saving.) Have to be careful because some options apply to every game, others apply the options just to the game currently running.
Than you have to consider all the in game UI. Level up screens, journal screens, inventory screen, all the works. You'll need looting, bartering, local maps, world maps, the notifications the player gets when they are set on fire or damaged.
A few considerations, some of these may need their own sections, maybe you could attach them to the other sections.
PC Vs. NPC. Some attributes may work the same, others work differently. Can NPCs knock out players like players can knock out NPCs? You may not want the player to fly, but maybe you have dragons or other flying enemies and you can control where they can fly. Don't have to worry about a dragon flying into a house, but if you let the player fly that's the first thing you need to consider.
Considerations for mutliplayer. If you have multiplayer, some game features may go, maybe you don't want the turn based option in multiplayer. Maybe in multiplayer people don't make custom characters like they do in single player.
More recently, Cain has begun implementing Design Fallbacks. These are more simplistic designs that can be used instead of your main plan if it turns you lack the time/resources to implement it. They used this several times in Outer Worlds. One of them was grenades, Cain wanted throwing grenades, but they could never get the arcs working right so they went with the Grenade Launcher you see in the game. That caused a throwing skill in the Melee section to be removed.
Fallbacks are important because you can rarely sacrifice something without consequences, i.e they lost grenades, now the throwing skill has to go.
Cain shows the Arcanum design specifications printed out, a meaty 148 pages. There is a digital version, but Cain believes it is still covered under NDA and won't upload it.
Codename for Arcanum was Epic, also what they called the post apoc demo.
A surprising amount of the design specifications actually are the same as the shipped game, there's a map of the game shown at 17:15 and it's pretty close to the final version. Designs are incomplete, lots of interface stuff at the end left unfinished. Was used to get the contract with Sierra, where they were told they had 90 days to make a prototype if they wanted to keep the contract, they used a small subset of that design specification to create the prototype.

 

[The Wall]

The gnomish quest was written by Leonard Boyarsky who is Jewish himself and not by Tim.

Gnomes Jews love to flex

 

[__scribbles__]

I talk about how to fix design problems, using an example of such a problem that shipped in Fallout.

 

[StrongBelwas]

Cain considers the problem of being able to tag Energy Weapons at the start of Fallout without getting energy weapons for a long stretch of the game.
First you have to notice the problem, they didn't notice the problem.
Vast amount of player builds you may play without noticing the problem. QA may not report it as a problem because they think energy weapons not dropping is working as intended. This is why Cain likes Telemetry, so he could see where energy weapons are placed.
Second step is confirming the problem is a problem. Think you've noticed a problem, but maybe it is working as intended. In the case of energy weapons, check if the energy weapons are actually not possible to get early or if it's just bad luck at the loot tables or vendor randomization. Repeats his wish for telemetry in Fallout 1, even with all of their QA fallout was a 40 hour game and QA could often only play the game once per build.
Now you go look at the design docs and consider if the lack of energy weapons is expected, and if it is a design goal that you can get all skills before they are useful. There were no goals in the Fallout design doc, Cain considers that a mistake.
Cain compares the lack of energy weapons to putting lockpicking in a game and not placing any locks into the game until the final level.
Now you reach the question of where to place the energy weapon. Still quite possible for energy weapons to not appear for most people if you place them somewhere hard to get like a drop from an NPC most people won't kill, or a rare chance to appear from a vendor. If you introduce a lot of energy weapons early on, you'll have to make them weak, which may also make some people question tagging Energy Weapons.
Another solution is to change your system design, such as locking the energy weapon skill until a certain level/stage, or energy weapon is a specialization of the general weapon skill you can put points into after getting a certain amount of points in the general skill, which is what they did in Outer Worlds. Wouldn't require changing loot tables or reitemizing the world
Fourth step which people sometimes forget is test the solution. Give QA instructions to make a note of when they find energy weapons and if the energy weapon skill is useful. Now look at all of the other skills and see if they have similar issues, are there enough traps, are Doctor and First Aid both useful, etc.
You can have a perfect design document implemented just the way you hoped for and still see the final execution and find it lacking.

 

[NecroLord]

Cain considers the problem of being able to tag Energy Weapons at the start of Fallout without getting energy weapons for a long stretch of the game.
First you have to notice the problem, they didn't notice the problem.

Good thing the Fixt mod, in a display of common sense and gentlemanly behavior, gives you a Laser Pistol if you have tagged the Energy Weapons skill.

 

[Alienman]

How is it even possible to miss that issue, and why would telemetry be needed for that? Let's add a very specific weapon unique to the setting, but somehow totally forget about the addition.

 

[NecroLord]

How is it even possible to miss that issue, and why would telemetry be needed for that? Let's add a very specific weapon unique to the setting, but somehow totally forget about the addition.

'Muh Balance, right?
LIke I said, good thing the Fixt mod, even with some of its faults, gives you a Laser Pistol. It's not too bad, but also not great, just the right starting weapon for an Energy Weapons focusing character.

 

[Alienman]

A simple solution would have the overseer ask you for what you want before leaving. Surprised that it was never brought up apparently.

 

[NecroLord]

A simple solution would have the overseer ask you for what you want before leaving. Surprised that it was never brought up apparently.

 

[Roguey]

More from Tim. I don't see the problem in having a delayed gratification skill you can tag at the beginning that will pay off much later (and it certainly does pay off).

The only change I would make would be to change the description to note that energy weapons are incredibly rare.

 

[NecroLord]

 

[Alienman]

Talk about circumventing both the weapon and ammo issue.

 

[NecroLord]

Tim should've also addressed the issue of Laser weaponry being nearly useless against anything better than leather armor.
Really, you have to rely on critical hits in order to do noticeable damage against armored enemies (Metal Armor, Combat Armor, Power Armor, Super Mutants).
Compare with Plasma which remains consistently strong against pretty much eveything the game throws at you.
And those Plasma death animations...
Just awesome (and gruesome).