Cain on Games - Tim Cain's new YouTube channel

[Nano]

Very difficult to get narrative designers to stop thinking linearly. Most of them are used to writing stories in linear format like books/TVs/movies.

Has Cain talked about how this didn't use to be a problem because most CRPG designers were tabletop players?

 

[__scribbles__]

I talk about the best way to receive criticism about your work, or your opinions, or even the things you post online.

 

[StrongBelwas]

At some point you run out of time(money), and as a matter of prioritization the game is going to ship with stuff you don't like still in it. Repeats his statement about his games being so large he'd never see everything (Played Outer Worlds 16 times.) If you can't see something, you can't change it.
Never made a game where he had 100% final approval on everything in it. Didn't want E-Registration in Fallout, or the Temple of Trials in 2. If you get into game development, you're going to eventually ship a game with stuff you didn't like that wasn't your call and people will criticize it.
Read all the reviews, read the comments on Steam.
A lot of the criticism will be low quality or just completely wrong , but if you see a lot of criticism of particular features, there is probably something wrong there even if their suggestions on how to fix it aren't great.
Has seen some developers say game development is hard, as if something that was hard is a shield against criticism. Sees other developers make the mistake of seeing a negative review and saying the reviewer should try making a game. Was once pulled aside at work and told not to critique a feature because someone had worked really hard on it. That was for a game he supposedly had the final word on. Cain pointed out that effort does not mean greatness and that they had to fix it.
No matter how you phrase it, some people will take it badly.
Sees some very bizarre comments on his channel, and finds it amusing when other people critique those comments.
TL;DR: Just listen to the feedback, aggregate it, there's going to be some really out of left field statements, you're going to want to act on anything you see a lot of

 

[Roguey]

Tim giving some timely advice to the Avowed dev team I see.

E-Registration in Fallout

Huh? What does this refer to?

 

[Infinitron]

E-Registration in Fallout

Huh? What does this refer to?

I don't remember if Fallout had this, but you may recall that in the early years of the Internet some games had registration form apps that would launch after installation finished. Digital version of the once-ubiquitous mail-in registration card.

 

[Russia is over. The end.]

Huh? What does this refer to?

And when you click "Later", it gives you another one

 

[Alienman]

Did anyone here ever register? Did you get anything? I remember clicking past 100s of these.

 

[Infinitron]

Did anyone here ever register? Did you get anything? I remember clicking past 100s of these.

I did. I never got anything, but that may have been due to them not doing long-distance mail to Israel.

 

[user]

Did anyone here ever register? Did you get anything? I remember clicking past 100s of these.

If I had internet at the time I might have

 

[__scribbles__]

I talk about emergent gameplay, defining what it is and also explaining how to have it in your game.

 

[NecroLord]

"Heya! It's me, TImoen!"

 

[NecroLord]

Tim shows he was a real scholar and gentleman by allowing players to blow open doors with explosives in Fallout (dynamite, satchel charges, rockets, later fireballs and disintegrate in Arcanum).

 

[Alienman]

What game is he talking about, the scroll thingy?

 

[StrongBelwas]

Cain defines emergent gameplay as things player can do that come from the game mechanics but were not necessarily planned by the designers or were part of those mechanics.
He liked it, but that is not a viewpoint shared by everyone on those teams. Emergent gameplay causes a lot of unpredictability for designers, both narrative and systems. Letting the player mix up mechanics makes their jobs more difficult, but Cain considers it a good kind of difficult.
Will only talk about RPG's emergent gameplay because that's the genre he worked on.
On Fallout, they expected some emergent gameplay. and didn't expect others. Once they implemented explosives that could damage anything in a radius that had health, they started giving doors/locks on doors hit points because now they knew people could try blowing them open. The nice thing about this is once they implemented the system, they didn't have to special case it. If there was a door, you could use explosives on it. What they did not expect was the emergent gameplay around pickpocketing. Cain had to get it done quickly and had just finished up the bartering system, so he just used the same UI and put a flag in saying don't check the player's barter skill. That's all they thought would happen. What someone in QA discovered that since it was bartering, you could put stuff into the NPC's inventory. Putting explosives onto the NPC and watching them blow up quickly followed. They decided to keep it in and use it as a means for some quests.
Would notice more emergent gameplay from players after release, didn't realize Fallout didn't track whether or not you got the water chip until he watched speedrunners go straight for the mutant army.
Watched emergent gameplay happen in tabletop games, players doing things you didn't expect, trying to talk to the bad guys and managing to make it work. When they talked about making Fallout and and discussed this in detail for Arcanum, they knew they had to provide a rich set of low level mechanics and if they had enough of those interacting with each other.
To make this work, you make the code very general. If you have a lock, you can say it's part of the object, and mark it's Key ID and how hard it is to pick. You can put the Key ID wherever you want, such as a guard to be pickpocketed. If you code the the object to unlock once it's HP hits 0, you now have given the player a method to beat and blow open locks.
The flipside of that would be a particular lock that was scripted to open if a nearby screwdriver was applied to it. The lock and the screwdriver only work at that one point. Cain hates this because it teaches the player something that cannot be applied to the rest of the game. If they start finding locks, they'll go look for particular items nearby to open them up. Cain wants players to go through their general toolset and figure out what can get them through the door.
Also hates it when the game doesn't follow through on their rules. Won't name the game*, but it was a very popular 1990s RPG where he was told to find an NPC, when you find them they were dead. The intention was you bring the body back, but Cain was playing a cleric and had a raise dead scroll. Knowing the person had only recently died, Cain tried to use it. The scroll was wasted and it said 'invalid target'. Cain wondered why they gave him the scroll and framed the quest like that if they wouldn't follow the rules. Good example of where emergent gameplay could have happened and they flubbed it. A generic response could have been implemented and worked. If you are asked to bring someone back and bring them back to the quest giver., have them just say they have no idea how you did it and thank it. The point is not knowing the player could do it, but preparing in advance for the player figuring out some way to do it. They did this several time in Arcanum.
If your ruleset is fancy enough you are never going to be able to predict every player idea.
TL;DR Try try to do as much code low level and generic as you can, react to everything you can. Do some specific reactions, and than include some generic reactions for the situations you didn't see happening. Just relax and let players be smart. It's fun to read about how they met the challenge in your game.

*I want to say Baldur's Gate (1 main character you consider the player, D&D ruleset, very popular) from how he phrased it but can't recall the exact quest

 

[NecroLord]

*I want to say Baldur's Gate from how he phrased it but can't recall the exact quest

I don't remember there being Raise Dead scrolls or spells in Baldur's Gate.
You can only resurrect dead companions at a temple, assuming they were not burned to death or gibbed, their portraits being gone for good.

 

[Cologno]

Tim shows he was a real scholar and gentleman by allowing players to blow open doors with explosives in Fallout (dynamite, satchel charges, rockets, later fireballs and disintegrate in Arcanum).

Listening to this guy for a few seconds, it was all I could stand, but seems Tim perfected the backdoor breech'n'screech.

 

[whydoibother]

Funny from a Bloodlines 2 thread on the chins

 

[__scribbles__]

I talk about methods to make sure that the player sees some story events before others, and why you should rarely do this.

 

[StrongBelwas]

Story gating happens at design stage.
At the beginning of game/story development, try and make sure your game narrative has as few ordered steps as possible. If player has to do A B C, let them do it in any order. Basically how Fallout does it, they didn't realize you could skip the water chip, but even then you could do A and then B/C as you wish.
If there has to be an ordering, like they did in Arcanum and Outer Worlds, it usually has to be the villain encounter. You probably want it to be impossible to encounter the villain without doing at least a few steps. Maybe you do this with a code or an access key, or combine some items together to face the villain.
In Arcanum, you need to get to the Void to beat the game, which entails completing a device that requires discovering and meeting multiple NPCs.
Even in a nonlinear story at certain stages, you need to block access NPCs/items/areas.
Some games are filled with essential NPCs, Cain understands the practicality of that, but personally he hates them. Essential NPCs smack the player in the face on player agency. Immortal NPCs that pop right back up after being killed are fine with Cain provided the lore makes sense but like amnesia, he's rather you only do it once.
If you end up in a situation where you really must make an NPC essential, Cain suggests making them only essential up to the point they are no longer needed (Such as the Overseer in F1, but Cain remembers midway you could fight but not kill him before the ending.) Cain also suggests holograms or magic messages depending on how your setting. You can't kill them, but they are talking to you. Another way is just make them non essential but there is always a backup way to get the information. Cain admits that even though his games do that a lot, something like a pass phrase you would normally have to do a lot of quests for being found in the journal of the NPC after being killed can feel like a shortcut. Maybe the journal just provides a note on where the NPC found the passphrase, and now the player has to go on an adventure to that location.
Please only do the gating if you have to, and you should always look hard at your story and ask if you have to. You may think the story unfolds better in a certain way, but the story is driven by the player, and they decide how it unfolds. If your RPG narrative really needs a lot of forced gated sequences, maybe you should try writing a book or movie. Sure, there are linear games out there, but Cain doesn't make them and he doesn't play a lot of them, so you are asking the wrong guy. Repeats his 3 acts vs. 27 acts discussion regarding Arcanum/Fallout and finding the perfect balance.
Ideally, the only gated sequence in a nonlinear game is perhaps the villain confrontation and all the sequences the player participated in beforehand adjust their reaction to the player.

 

[StrongBelwas]

 

[NecroLord]

Story gating happens at design stage.
At the beginning of game/story development, try and make sure your game narrative has as few ordered steps as possible. If player has to do A B C, let them do it in any order. Basically how Fallout does it, they didn't realize you could skip the water chip, but even then you could do A and then B/C as you wish.
If there has to be an ordering, like they did in Arcanum and Outer Worlds, it usually has to be the villain encounter. You probably want it to be impossible to encounter the villain without doing at least a few steps. Maybe you do this with a code or an access key, or combine some items together to face the villain.
In Arcanum, you need to get to the Void to beat the game, which entails completing a device that requires discovering and meeting multiple NPCs.
Even in a nonlinear story at certain stages, you need to block access NPCs/items/areas.
Some games are filled with essential NPCs, Cain understands the practicality of that, but personally he hates them. Essential NPCs smack the player in the face on player agency. Immortal NPCs that pop right back up after being killed are fine with Cain provided the lore makes sense but like amnesia, he's rather you only do it once.
If you end up in a situation where you really must make an NPC essential, Cain suggests making them only essential up to the point they are no longer needed (Such as the Overseer in F1, but Cain remembers midway you could fight but not kill him before the ending.) Cain also suggests holograms or magic messages depending on how your setting. You can't kill them, but they are talking to you. Another way is just make them non essential but there is always a backup way to get the information. Cain admits that even though his games do that a lot, something like a pass phrase you would normally have to do a lot of quests for being found in the journal of the NPC after being killed can feel like a shortcut. Maybe the journal just provides a note on where the NPC found the passphrase, and now the player has to go on an adventure to that location.
Please only do the gating if you have to, and you should always look hard at your story and ask if you have to. You may think the story unfolds better in a certain way, but the story is driven by the player, and they decide how it unfolds. If your RPG narrative really needs a lot of forced gated sequences, maybe you should try writing a book or movie. Sure, there are linear games out there, but Cain doesn't make them and he doesn't play a lot of them, so you are asking the wrong guy. Repeats his 3 acts vs. 27 acts discussion regarding Arcanum/Fallout and finding the perfect balance.
Ideally, the only gated sequence in a nonlinear game is perhaps the villain confrontation and all the sequences the player participated in beforehand adjust their reaction to the player.

 

[NecroLord]

Happy Black History Month, Tim!

 

[Gandalf]

Man, Tim looks so old in this video. It's the oldest I've seen him.

 

[Modron]

Man, Tim looks so old in this video. It's the oldest I've seen him.

Time, how does it work?

 

[NecroLord]

Time, Time never changes.