Cain on Games - Tim Cain's new YouTube channel

[StrongBelwas]

Thinking about writing a book on game development, without the memoir stuff that would aggravate people (Don't hold him to this.)
Starting at Cybron. Wishes they had a logo, he has a Pegasus shirt but they changed their name right after. Shows a few high school pictures.
Moving onto Interplay, a 1994 picture of everyone who worked there, and then another picture of just the programmers. Then a 1997 picture of the Fallout team, a picture of a super mutant head and another head he thought was Morpheus but apparently wasn't sure. Shows a picture of Nicholas Kesting showing up to Cain's office to get some bread Cain liked to bake and bring into the office . The picture used to explode his head in the credits was one taken of him talking to T.Ray Isaac. Final picture is actually not during Interplay, but a 2017 reunion of Leonard, Jason, and Cain for Fallout's anniversary.
A picture of Cain at his desk at Troika, Cain liked to carry a picture of Batboy around and say it was his second grade picture. Another picture of Cain with a bag head with Tiffany Chu, QA at Troika and now a producer. The first day Cain brought his dog to work on September 11th 2000, they were considering throwing a one year anniversary for the dog in 2001 but that did not happen for obvious reasons. A picture of some of them at an Arcanum press event in the Magic Castle in LA. A picture of probably the entire Temple of Elemental Evil team. Some pictures of him at his desk and the Wednesday D&D games, Cain tried to teach them 3.0/3.5.
Cain used to find almost dead crawfish, would try to keep them alive in a tank, one called Pinchy managed to get out and nobody could find them, Daniel Albert made a milk carton to shame Cain. They'd eventually find Pinchy dried up and dead.
At Carbine, a picture of his desk, he had a lot of decorations by this time, including a very large Arcanum cover poster. Went to Halloween as Charlie Brown, next year went as a pimp. Picture of being interviewed at his desk by G4, he's pretty sure this is what made it into the Fallout 3 making of DVD.
For his 2010 birthday they covered his desk in candy, and glued candy to the walls and the ceiling. Carbine was a fun time and had it's moment.
Obsidian Entertainment, B&W picture of him at his desk again, then a picture at his desk of Dan Spitzley and Robby Adatero labelled 'programmer meeting' of them playing with puppets. Reproduction of the wig photo at a 2018 Academy Awards party, same wig and statue, a bit older Cain. The Tim Cain thumbs up picture, which got turned into a meme at 'various places'. A plushie of a Cystpig Cain made for the first Outer Worlds game pitch, they had to go to New York in the winter of 2017 and he took it with him, didn't have room for it on his carry on, their art director had to bring it with his carry on and explain it to people. The Cysts are removeable, he ended up giving it to a Take Two producer. When Take Two had their ship party, they had kept it around and displayed it there. When they got the Moonman helmet, Cain snuck it home and took a few pictures in the day of Moonman's day to day life. Brought it back monday with no one the wiser.
Picture of almost everyone on the Outer Worlds team, he is not the fellow on the right.
A big chunk of the team came to the Game Awards when Outer Worlds was nominated.
Some pictures of the conferences he started doing, GDC 2012, Reboot in 2017 (T-Ray Isaac happened to also be doing a talk there.) They did a round table, but he can't remember what it was besides they laughed about it. Some pictures from his Australian conferences, including a round table with David Gaider. Went around to all the chocolate shops.
Final picture is Seattle when he was setting up Zoom/Teams for his contract work with Obsidian, his dog would come into the room and photobomb him.

 

[user]

Scenes from the life of a game developer, but for real:

 

[NecroLord]

Scenes from the life of a game developer, but for real:

Soon to be Avellone?
Nah, I think Chris is pretty loaded.
And Tim doesn't seem to do so bad for himself.

 

[ds]

Scenes from the life of a game developer, but for real:

If only - then they would actually be motivated to make something their audience likes.

 

[Alienman]

"Will code for frappuccino"

 

[StrongBelwas]

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.
First red flag is when he is in a meeting with narrative designers and they say "The player goes here and the player does X." Cain questions them what happen if the player does something else there, or goes somewhere else entirely. Cain has had narrative designers respond to that with 'We will force the player to go there, and then we will lock them in that space. They cannot leave until we do the thing we want." Cain doesn't think that sounds fun to him, or most RPG players.
Cain tells them not to base the story on player actions, instead base it on player goals, and you don't care how the player does it. i.e, don't say 'The player goes to this goblin cave and gets this item', tell the player "I want this item." If it's not a unique item and the player can buy or craft it, all the better. If a merchant has been kidnapped, that's an even better hook. You can try and find out who kidnapped the merchant (i.e there were goblins arguing in his shop), when you figure out goblins did it, you can handle the cave in any number of ways, but what matters for the narrative is you come back to the quest giver with the merchant. Let the story unfold based on the goal, not the action of the player.
Cain hates the phrase Story Driven Game, which is why he kept calling Outer Worlds a Player Driven Story. Stories do not act, players act.
You have to have fallbacks if you go through with this. If you tell the player to get an item and it gets sold or lost, what do you do? Has to be considered from the moment you first start making the quest. Now, you can just implement mechanics to handle that. Quest important items can't be destroyed, but what happens if you apply that to the merchant quest? You get Essential NPCs, which Cain doesn't like, and he knows lots of the audience doesn't like. So, try and come up with an alternate way to the quest, with ending slides at the end maybe, if the merchant dies. Perhaps he was the only merchant who sold a certain item, or now the plot can't progress in a certain way. Players love this kind of impact and reaction to what happens, not a set thing that happens to every single player.
Don't tell the player what to do or where to go. Just tell them what the goal is and let them figure out what to do.
This can get very out of control very quickly though. Try and make it systemic wherever possible, not something you have to hand script. In the example of being asked to deliver an item, if it's something is craftable, you already have a system for getting it. If it can't be crafted, but you can put it as a loot drop, also a good and easy solution. If you really need a unique particular item you'll have to put it in the inventory of a guaranteed to spawn creature.
The thing that can be tricky is introducing a solution to the goblins and the merchants where the goblins ask you to do something or they are bribable. Now you have to write a dialogue, the one solution that requires hand scripting. Your time will be filled with making and debugging scripted solutions to your quests. Systemic ones can be tweaked and fixed easily. With hand scripted ones, each one is a unique situation, you fix one, you still have all the others to fix. Also, since dialogue gets localized early on (And thus locked in), you often can't change those if there is an issue. If you have unique scripted solutions that involve dialogue, you need to catch those bugs early, another reason to try and keep it systemic.
Stories that try too hard to force the player to do one thing or go one thing or solve it in a particular way make players feel railroaded. And at least in theory RPGs promise the player lots of options. If you force them to play a certain way, particularly a main quest, it's going to feel really bad. If that merchant rescue was a main quest and the only way through was to kill all of the goblins, that is not going to be good for a pacifist playthrough.
Setup situations with multiple ways through them, tell the player a goal, and then let events unfold. That alone can be good but enough, but keep a record of what the player does, and then have NPCs refer to those actions later on, and you have something very special.

 

[NecroLord]

Fallout reflects his mindset perfectly, I think.
Just got out of the Vault and you got 150 days left to find a Water Chip and save your Vault?
Nah, bro, you can go the fucking Glow if that's what you want.
Or do whatever else.
Also no "Essential NPC" either.
Arcanum followed some of the design principles of Fallout and had no Essential NPCs. You could exterminate entire cities just fine, though obviously there will be consequences.

 

[Quillon]

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.
First red flag is when he is in a meeting with narrative designers and they say "The player goes here and the player does X." Cain questions them what happen if the player does something else there, or goes somewhere else entirely. Cain has had narrative designers respond to that with 'We will force the player to go there, and then we will lock them in that space. They cannot leave until we do the thing we want." Cain doesn't think that sounds fun to him, or most RPG players.
Cain tells them not to base the story on player actions, instead base it on player goals, and you don't care how the player does it. i.e, don't say 'The player goes to this goblin cave and gets this item', tell the player "I want this item." If it's not a unique item and the player can buy or craft it, all the better. If a merchant has been kidnapped, that's an even better hook. You can try and find out who kidnapped the merchant (i.e there were goblins arguing in his shop), when you figure out goblins did it, you can handle the cave in any number of ways, but what matters for the narrative is you come back to the quest giver with the merchant. Let the story unfold based on the goal, not the action of the player.
Cain hates the phrase Story Driven Game, which is why he kept calling Outer Worlds a Player Driven Story. Stories do not act, players act.
You have to have fallbacks if you go through with this. If you tell the player to get an item and it gets sold or lost, what do you do? Has to be considered from the moment you first start making the quest. Now, you can just implement mechanics to handle that. Quest important items can't be destroyed, but what happens if you apply that to the merchant quest? You get Essential NPCs, which Cain doesn't like, and he knows lots of the audience doesn't like. So, try and come up with an alternate way to the quest, with ending slides at the end maybe, if the merchant dies. Perhaps he was the only merchant who sold a certain item, or now the plot can't progress in a certain way. Players love this kind of impact and reaction to what happens, not a set thing that happens to every single player.
Don't tell the player what to do or where to go. Just tell them what the goal is and let them figure out what to do.
This can get very out of control very quickly though. Try and make it systemic wherever possible, not something you have to hand script. In the example of being asked to deliver an item, if it's something is craftable, you already have a system for getting it. If it can't be crafted, but you can put it as a loot drop, also a good and easy solution. If you really need a unique particular item you'll have to put it in the inventory of a guaranteed to spawn creature.
The thing that can be tricky is introducing a solution to the goblins and the merchants where the goblins ask you to do something or they are bribable. Now you have to write a dialogue, the one solution that requires hand scripting. Your time will be filled with making and debugging scripted solutions to your quests. Systemic ones can be tweaked and fixed easily. With hand scripted ones, each one is a unique situation, you fix one, you still have all the others to fix. Also, since dialogue gets localized early on (And thus locked in), you often can't change those if there is an issue. If you have unique scripted solutions that involve dialogue, you need to catch those bugs early, another reason to try and keep it systemic.
Stories that try too hard to force the player to do one thing or go one thing or solve it in a particular way make players feel railroaded. And at least in theory RPGs promise the player lots of options. If you force them to play a certain way, particularly a main quest, it's going to feel really bad. If that merchant rescue was a main quest and the only way through was to kill all of the goblins, that is not going to be good for a pacifist playthrough.
Setup situations with multiple ways through them, tell the player a goal, and then let events unfold. That alone can be good but enough, but keep a record of what the player does, and then have NPCs refer to those actions later on, and you have something very special.

how unlike TOW is to the examples he is giving...

it's sometimes difficult to take him seriously given how fucking crap TOW is

 

[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