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Cain on Games - Tim Cain's new YouTube channel

Butter

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This video is Reddit-tier cringe. Tim doesn't think it's okay to express a negative opinion unless you explicitly preface it with "I think..." or "In my opinion...". Failure to do so constitutes a character flaw. Naturally, positive opinions are not held to this standard.
 

Roguey

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This video is Reddit-tier cringe. Tim doesn't think it's okay to express a negative opinion unless you explicitly preface it with "I think..." or "In my opinion...". Failure to do so constitutes a character flaw. Naturally, positive opinions are not held to this standard.
Back in the early 00s it was Codex consensus that phrases like "in my opinion" were totally redundant and unnecessary because of course the thing you're saying is your opinion. Tim has forgotten this.
 

normie

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This video is Reddit-tier cringe. Tim doesn't think it's okay to express a negative opinion unless you explicitly preface it with "I think..." or "In my opinion...". Failure to do so constitutes a character flaw. Naturally, positive opinions are not held to this standard.
the man got buck broken by Patel
they kept him in isolation and deprived him of gay sex while reciting "No Mavericks, No Martyrs" to him, clockwork orange style
 

rojay

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This video is Reddit-tier cringe. Tim doesn't think it's okay to express a negative opinion unless you explicitly preface it with "I think..." or "In my opinion...". Failure to do so constitutes a character flaw. Naturally, positive opinions are not held to this standard.
Back in the early 00s it was Codex consensus that phrases like "in my opinion" were totally redundant and unnecessary because of course the thing you're saying is your opinion. Tim has forgotten this.
That was pretty much the consensus of most English departments in the 80s, too. I suspect it's older than that, but I lack context.

Tim needs to cut the frequency of his posting. I mean, I know *I* want to hear his opinion on laundry detergent, but I'm a superfan.
 

StrongBelwas

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In general, doesn't like making sequels, at least not nearly as much as making original IPs. Would choose something new over making a sequel. If he's made a game for that world, he's already explored pretty much what he wanted to explore. His games are large and have multiple ways of playing them, which means he's already explored all of the ways one could play in that IP. Making sequels feels superfluous, nothing more to say or it would just be dragging thinks out.
Part of the reason he didn't want to work on Fallout 2. When Fallout 1 was finished, didn't think he was going to work on Fallout 2. Was told he'd be put on a D&D game after Fallout 1 because that would make money. Three and a half years making one game, that is a long time, and you get tired of it.

Of course, Cain has made games in other people's IPs. Wasn't expecting to ever do a South Park game, but got himself immersed in the IP, watching episodes and discussing what the team wanted to do. But these were always his first time in those IPs as video games. Explored all he wanted to explore in those worlds in the form of a videogame. Have to be very respectful IP, that was why he was happy he got to talk to Gygax. Even with it being his lowest scoring game happy how it kept the memory of Temple. Repeats his ideas for editing some stuff in a Temple remake. Has made some IPs that were fully intended to have sequels made for them. First one was Arcanum. When you start it, you are coming to a new continent to look for work, don't know anything, perfect way for player character and play to share knowing nothing, like coming out of the freeze in Outer Worlds. Bunch of stories they still wanted to tell, knows people want the gnome story continued, want to know what was happening to other dwarf clans or elf groups, how the industrial revolution continued. When he picked up the D&D license, and they told he could make any module, picked ToEE fully planning to to implement the rest of the GDQ series (Against the Giants, Queen of the Demonweb Pits.) Would have pushed for those if ToEE was a success. Outer Worlds was designed from scratch for sequels to be not only possible but desirable if it did well. Added descriptions (sometimes one line, sometimes paragraphs) of other colonies, who founded them, what the planet was like, important to be distinct from Halcyon. Earth could be a thing all of itself to explore.
Sequels are never off the table, just not his first choice, especially right after the first game. If he'd just done a game, would want to shift gears and do a different kind of game. Part of why making Arcanum 2 first person was planned. Was Excited for Bloodlines because it was his first time working with C++, first time working in World of Darkness, and first time working on a first person game.

South Park/Bloodlines/ToEE made Cain understand the difficulty of someone else's IP, have to be very respectful. Wanted to be respectful to South Park's humor, ToEE's mechanics and settings, and Bloodlines' Masquerade and modern day story. Lots to take in, Cain hopes when people making sequels they are also trying to do the same thing.
Cain dislikes hardly sequels and remakes that throw too much out, will not name certain very recent TV shows that did that and make him worry for future TV shows. Thinks they were disrespectful to the source material, they either threw too much out, or they were so desperate to add their own things to the IP that they jammed it in there, and added a very modern sensibility to something older to try and make it fit even if it didn't belong. Doesn't think you can't modernize it, but you have to be very respectful to source material. Modernize should be showing it in a better light (i.e for a game better visuals, better UI.)
People who do not respectfully making a sequel will probably end up making very bad sequels and not understand why people don't like it (The people who complain about it may not even realize why exactly they don't like it), tend to end up talking past each other.
Danger of making sequel is people have a preestablished notion, advantage of original IP is there is no pre established notion of what Cain is offering you.
Main reason he likes making original IP is that it is challenging, fun, and lets him explore things he couldn't do in previous games.
TL;DR Would make sequels, wouldn't be his first choice.
 
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NecroLord

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What a legend of a game Toee could have been...
Still really good (and with the patches like Temple+ even better), but it could've used some more polish. Maybe some voice acting and interactions between companions, even though you make your own party, so you use your imagination to write their backgrounds and so on...
Game is also not that long and really could have benefited from having some more content and quests.
Other than that, it's a wonderfully tactical cRPG.
 

Roguey

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Sounds like Tim was not a fan of the latest season of True Detective. :) That last bit can also apply to Bloodlines 2 and its very pessimistic reception.
 

StrongBelwas

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Had a bit of a discussion with Leonard and a few designers at Obsidian about this.
Would Troika have tried to use Kickstarter/crowdfunding if it existed at the time and what for? Yes, and Arcanum 2.
Troika was a small company, made Arcanum with 14 people Very efficient, wore lots of different hats. Programmers who were designing, designing who were doing arts, artists who were scripting.
It was perfect for the efficiency that you need for a Kickstarter budget. You can raise millions of dollars, but it costs millions of dollars. Have to get it right first, can't go back to the well after drawing from it like you can with a publisher.
Troika was small enough that if they had gotten that budget and developed for that budget they could probably have kept to that budget. Not that true with Bloodlines, but stayed within the budget for Temple but gave more than what was asked for and probably more than they should have done.
If they had done this, wouldn't have done Bloodlines or ToEE, would have made Arcanum 2. References the video where he discusses plans for that. Journey to the Center of Arcanum, maybe they would have done that, maybe because it's a Kickstarter game they wouldn't have. Would have asked what people wanted. Would you want a same engine game, would you want a first person game, would you want a Source engine game (The person who had signed them to Sierra worked at valve, so still an option.)
They had way more stories to tell in Arcanum, had barely scratched the surface of a fantasy world going industrial revolution. You can add a lot of side quests to a game, but at some point you have to focus on telling the story you want to tell (Who is the gnome in the crash, and who is this dangerous villain returning.)
Wanted to dive more into elves, dwarves, much more into orcs. What about orcs in the wilderness, what about ogres, what about the entire half ogre storyline?
If they had gone kickstarter, an advantage would be that it was hard enough to tell their stories back than without being censored. Anything even vaguely homosexual was censored. Nowadays, Cain doubts you would be able to tell many of Arcanum's stories in a game today.
A big chunk of Arcanum was real, actual races that were genetically different humanoids. There was racist stuff going on, Arcanum addresses it. People don't want that now, people want you to pretend that nothing is bad or going on. Act like there isn't a problem and it will go away if you ignore it.
So many different stories in Arcanum that if you weren't interested in one you could not follow it. Didn't have to follow the gnome and ogre plot. Didn't have to go too deep into dark elves or dwarf clans. Would have loved to tell those stories in a Kickstarter.
Kickstarter provided a better communication method to the fans. Could do an early beta and get feedback on it with less trouble. You can get feedback from people you know paid. Takes a lot of time to get feedback from the comments in his videos, has a month full of videos to go through. Youtube has suggested he setup memberships that would highlight comments from paying members. Kickstarter would allow him to setup forms that only people that gave money (Or even money above a certain amount) can respond to.
One more reason, very personal to do Arcanum, if they kickstarted. Really liked working on Arcanum, particularly coming from Fallout where there was a lot of pressures on Fallout he had to deal with that other team members didn't have to. Talked to Leonard about this, for Leonard it was the other way around. Fallout was more fun to work on than Arcanum because there was less pressure, and when Leonard worked on Arcanum there was suddenly a bunch of other stuff to deal with. Cain felt like more of his ideas were going into Arcanum with less discussion with higher ups. Really liked that, would have love to do it again.
Maybe it would have been Journey to the Center of Arcanum, maybe it would have been an isometric game set on another continent, maybe another game in the same continent given they already made a bunch of cool locations.
Kickstarter came 10 years too late for Troika.
 

NecroLord

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Ah, Arcanum...
A shame that Arcanum 2 never was, but maybe it is better this way.
I do wonder what direction they would've taken with the game and its timeline. A World War 1 period in Arcanum, complete with machine guns, hellish trenches and cannon fire? Magick was already established to be in decline in Arcanum, only fully mastered by a few select individuals with very strong wills and minds, but people are turning towards Technology due to its applicability in the real world.
The racist stuff was also great. No dumb utopia where every damn elf, man and orc get together and sing IMAGINE, but one where race and relative racial homogeneity are very important. Elves and Dwarves wisely keep to themselves and are insular, while humans are the dominant culture of Arcanum. Fucking Gnomes are up to their historical tricks, as usual...

"Tarant needs MILLIONS of orcs if it is to survive!" - Anonymous Gnomish Professor at the Tarant University
 

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he should do it or shut up, is he pitching or is he just torturing fans by fueling their daydreams?
at this point he's getting off on teasing Arcanum 2 and cooming to the attention and people's pleas
 

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Interesting that he would have swung for the fences rather than go for the safer GDQ adaptation, but that's very Cain. Not a Project Eternity guy (despite being a part of the actual Project Eternity :P).

It was hard enough telling some of our stories back then without being censored. In fact, about that time, putting in anything that was even vaguely homosexual was censored.
A better era as far as I'm concerned. :cool:
But these days I doubt if we'd be able to tell many of the stories from Arcanum in a game because people would be like "No no, you don't want to talk about that."
Tim's not a fan of the new political correctness where depiction = endorsement.

he should do it or shut up, is he pitching or is he just torturing fans by fueling their daydreams?
at this point he's getting off on teasing Arcanum 2 and cooming to the attention and people's pleas
He's stated repeatedly that he's retiring. He's just answering questions.
 

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This video is Reddit-tier cringe. Tim doesn't think it's okay to express a negative opinion unless you explicitly preface it with "I think..." or "In my opinion...". Failure to do so constitutes a character flaw. Naturally, positive opinions are not held to this standard.
Back in the early 00s it was Codex consensus that phrases like "in my opinion" were totally redundant and unnecessary because of course the thing you're saying is your opinion. Tim has forgotten this.
Tim specifically mentions this in the video. He states that obviously most of the time it is just people's opinions.

But he also says that this video is about people who think that their opinion about a game being bad is the absolute truth. So no, Tim hasn't forgotten this. But of course people on the Codex are up in arms about the video because they recognise themselves in it. And yes, these people are idiots.
 

StrongBelwas

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Thought he talked about this before, but apparently not (On this channel.) Will explain why they used it, and dispel a common explanation he hears that is completely wrong.
Troika is a Russian word for a carriage drawn by three horses who are all abreast, none of them are the lead horse.
Shows a box of Russian chocolates with two Troikas on the box art on them and links his chocolate blog. Also once had a chocolate bar named Troika that was one of the worst bars he ever ate
Troika being Russian had nothing to do with why they picked it, thinks Leonard might have russian/polish heritage, but when they were working on Fallout Leonard/Cain/Jason all worked very close together. Leonard came up with a lot of the look of the game (Would have been called Art Director today), Jason was very good at the technical aspects, figuring out how to make the art work in the engine. Frustrating to do the art for the game, lot of 3d art looked shiny and plastic, hard to do dirt/dust/rust. Cain's engine required things to be done in a certain way isometrically and Jason figured out a good way to get that out of the art packages.
Cain would bring both of them along when he had to do anything as a producer involving art, i.e approving the box cover or signing off on ads. Brought them for the manual layout, it was full of art and Cain wanted to make sure it was laid out correctly and at the right aspect ratio. Literally needed another set of eyes for the box art and ads because he was colorblind.
At some point, someone at Interplay referred to the three of them as 'The Troika'. First time Cain ever heard that word. Thought he heard Perestroika, asked about it and was corrected it was Troika, because 'you three are always together'. Didn't quite understand what was going on there, but later realized there weren't really many tight professional groups at Interplay. There were friend groups, but Cain can't recall another tight professional group like the three of them. They all complimented each other, all represented program/art/design.
They thought it was funny and remembered it. Later, after Cain quit and Leonard/Jason quit, they were just gonna look for jobs. Then they thought about making their own game and to make Arcanum, decided to make a company. Figured on making a small company LLC.
Cain's notes appear to break down here, despite knowing they had a lot of discussion about different names, he cannot find a single note on it. Once they settled on a name, there were ideas for logos, he can't find any of those.
Remembers someone joked about just calling themselves Troika, referring to the time they were called that at Interplay. They realized that was a great way to promoting their concept that they wouldn't push one discipline over the other. Not story forward or art forward or code forward, everything had to be synchronized.
Three horses abreast with none at the lead would have been great description of them, they went with that.
They got pushback, someone asked them if they were a bunch of communists when they heard about the equal payment and royalties, the connection didn't even occur to them, they just wanted to be fair on how they treated people and how they did design.

TL;DR: Funny nickname that represented not ever promoting code or art over each other, has nothing to do with Russia or Communism.
 
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BlackheartXIII

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Pure hideousness​

Posted on March 8, 2012
I started a new company in 1998 named Troika Games. Gary, a friend of mine and ex-coworker from a previous company, found this appropriately-named Norwegian candy bar the following year and gave it to me for my birthday.

I thought this would be a wonderful addition to my label collection, a candy bar with the same name as my new company. I opened the wrapper and bit into the bar…to taste one of the most hideous candy bars I had ever experienced! This bar is made from marzipan layered with fruit jelly and coated in milk chocolate. It was nasty! And the worst part is that the flavor stayed in my mouth for a long time, even after several glasses of water, until I finally ate some Altoids to get rid of it. Blech!
But I love the wrapper!
 

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I talk about the five traits that I found in every good producer I worked with, namely:
1. good communication skills
2. being organized
3. knowledgeable about game development
4. being proactive
5. good at handling deadlines
 

StrongBelwas

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May think Cain wants a producer that does what he says, but producers need to be a little tough, they work with all kinds of people. Often have to be the one who puts their foot down and say something has to be done or something won't be going into the game. The game director does this a lot, but the producer will often be the one telling them they are out of time/money or someone they want isn't available anymore.
First key trait may seem obvious but it's good communication. Need to have good communication skills even with people who do not have good communication skills. Many introverted people in game development, and you will have to handle all the different flavors of introversion. You will have people who never want you to come in and talk to them, email them. They'll want you to Slack them instead, or Slack them to get a time to come and talk to them. They may only want you to talk to them during certain hours of the day, or if they don't have a little thing hanging on their monitor (Don't talk to them if they have the thing on, even if they have forgotten to take the thing off, so you don't talk to them all day.) You just have to figure out how to work with them. Cain doesn't think this is entirely people getting full of themselves, he himself has issues with his mental structure of a program falling apart when he gets interrupted during coding. You can generally interrupt Cain whenever he is designing, would rather not when he is programming. But you have to work out a system, you can't just tell the producer never talk to me. Won't just be communicating with developers, but with publishers, press, and management in the company.
Second one is being organized, more than anyone else on the team, you have to be very organized. Game development has many moving parts, lots of half finished things being put in the game. Stuff that isn't completed in the game gets put in because it's what they have, or because they want to test it. Have to keep track of all that. Have to track all of the partially completed assets that are in pipelines. Now that almost everything is worked on by multiple people, you have to keep track of the self-set deadlines to ensure each component is sent off to the next person in the pipeline to be used. Can't expect everyone in that system to know those deadlines, you'll be telling people they need to get something done by Friday when the official deadline is next month. There's a lot of people who are going to need that asset, and you know that.
Third thing is knowing game development works. Some producers disagree with this, Cain has heard from some of them stuff like they might as well be making shoes, he disagrees with that. For example, making modern 3D assets is complicated. First it's modeled, then it is textured, then it is rigged, then it is animated. At every stage, a lot of design needs to be known. The modeler needs to know what it's supposed be shaped like and how big it is, the texture artist needs to know what it looks like and what environments it is expected to be in (Can it blend in?) The rigger has to know what parts to rig, is it ok if it's face isn't that expressive or do you need it to be ready to make a lot of expressions. The animator has to know what animations are needed, maybe it's never going to be attacked and doesn't need a death animation, maybe it needs multiple different death animations for all the different ways it can be attacked. As a bonus, can any of those things be done at the same time? Once model is done, can one person texture it while another person rigs it? Producer has to know that, if they look at the schedule and they see a model is being textured and rigged at the same time, they need to bring it up if they think that can't be done. Maybe your lead artist should have caught that, but making and managing the schedule is the producer's duty at the end of the day.
Fourth thing is proactivity, very important for a producer. You need to deal with problems before they happen, look for chokepoints in the schedule, notice when something has been to assigned to someone on leave/vacation, notice when someone quits and you had something you had scheduled them to do next month. You don't wait to get to the point where that person is needed and now you have a problem, you constantly check the schedule for possible problems and deal with them. Don't replace someone who quit just as you realize you need them for an asset, do that far earlier.
Finally, producers have to be very good at deadlines, figuring them out and enforcing them. They'll be looking at deadlines publishers set (Money, when they expect a demo), deadlines set by press (They want to see a walkthrough at this time showing off features), and localization. Localization needs dialogue locked way ahead of time.
If you think you'll be good at those five, you could be a good producer. To figure that out, go to a company and be an assistant producer. Sometimes they are hired, sometimes they come from other disciplines (Why good communication and good game development knowledge are important.) Cain had some great producers coming from QA or programming, Cain has also had some very good ones that started out wanting to be producers.
 
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