Cain on Games - Tim Cain's new YouTube channel

[processdaemon]

With regard to providing estimates to management I find it's easier to give accurate estimates for a task after you've been working on it for a bit and actually see what you're going to be working with. I'm not a programmer like Tim but I work a multidisciplinary field that requires input from a lot of other specialists, and you could have two superficially similar tasks on your desk only to find that one takes a week and the other takes months based on how good the information you start with is.

 

[Zed Duke of Banville]

Tim Cain should partner with Josh Sawyer on a video series about project management.

 

[Redshirt #42]

I talk about problems that team members can cause during development and how to handle them.

Not that kind of problematic.

 

[0sacred]

I wonder what accounts for the behaviour of those who want to make a different game halfway through development. Is it the urge to have your own ideas imprinted on the game or is it something else?

 

[Melcar]

Probably because they are faggots.
The fuck knows really. People always have different motives. Could be that they simple have no idea how to properly work on a team project and think they can request major changes at any point. Maybe they are just assholes and started to dislike the project.

 

[Eirinjas]

I talk about the best ways to accurately estimate the time it will take to do tasks, and what happens if you under (or over) estimate the time. Most of my examples are programming tasks, since that is the area in which I have the most experience.

Unreal. Tim should never have been in a management position. Instead of pushing back on a bad time estimate for fear of being the bad guy, he drops a feature knowing it will make players unhappy. What a stupid fucknugget.

 

[Infinitron]

Unreal. Tim should never have been in a management position. Instead of pushing back on a bad time estimate for fear of being the bad guy, he drops a feature knowing it will make players unhappy. What a stupid fucknugget.

I suspect he reached these conclusions because of the experiences he had when he was in a management position (at Troika).

 

[NecroLord]

You can't put creative people and artists in management positions.

Or can you?
What's the alternative?
Some corpo douchebag?

 

[Heroic Liberator]

You can't put creative people and artists in management positions.

Or can you?

Of course, but you do it based on their management skills and not on who is most creative. Usually the most creative are those that need to be reined in anyway.

 

[Roguey]

Selling a game design spec



"Don't bother" sums it up. Turn it into a demo or a book or tabletop rpg instead.

In the middle he also says that working with licensed IPs has always given him problems. On South Park, Matt and Trey had the Ken Levine syndrome where they'd allow a part of the game to be completely finished and then decide to throw it all away because it wasn't good enough for their liking. Tim thought these areas were perfectly fine and seethed over all the debugging he had to do that meant nothing.

 

[0sacred]

People are sending in game design docs? I always wondered what was wrong with people who sent in movie scripts. Schizophrenic behaviour.

 

[Tyranicon]

You can't put creative people and artists in management positions.

Or can you?
What's the alternative?
Some corpo douchebag?

Management is just a skillset, like everything else. It can be learned and mastered.

 

[Infinitron]

It's lore time!

I talk about the number of vaults that have appeared in the Fallout series, and why the cannon number of 1,000 is probably an overestimate of the actual number of vaults constructed.

 

[Eirinjas]

It's lore time!

I talk about the number of vaults that have appeared in the Fallout series, and why the cannon number of 1,000 is probably an overestimate of the actual number of vaults constructed.

He probably should have left this unaddressed. Vault-Tec is a corporation looking to make money. The experiments only make sense if Vault-Tec survives as an institution to collate the data and formulate agendas to capitalize off those experiments. That consumerism is predicated on the survival of civilization because that is your consumer base. Here, he is saying that not only did Vault-Tec not save enough people, but they knew they wouldn't, and they didn't even save the top one percent. I think the best you could frame it is that Vault-Tec never thought the bombs would drop, but I don't think that is a reasonable assumption to make.

 

[Butter]

How much of this is him retconning his own game to match the tv show?

 

[Alienman]

The vault tech experiments are the dumbest thing ever, and they keep making it worse with the expanded lore.

 

[NecroLord]

The vault tech experiments are the dumbest thing ever, and they keep making it worse with the expanded lore.

Vaults like the one with 1000 women and only one man?
Also the inverse, 1000 men and only one woman...

 

[Alienman]

The girl: Oh god no Jesus no.

The guy: hell yes!

 

[Cohesion]

Tim Cain: Oh god no Jesus no.

The guy: hell yes!

FTFY

 

[Saint_Proverbius]

That consumerism is predicated on the survival of civilization because that is your consumer base. Here, he is saying that not only did Vault-Tec not save enough people, but they knew they wouldn't, and they didn't even save the top one percent. I think the best you could frame it is that Vault-Tec never thought the bombs would drop, but I don't think that is a reasonable assumption to make.

None of it makes sense anymore, particularly when you factor in the layers of stuff they've been building on since they came up with the "Vaults as experiments" thing. They keep adding new layers on top of that and move further and further away from it making any sense, not only with reality but also the setting itself. If you know there's going to be a nuclear war, you're clearly going to want people as a contingency for what comes after. If the whole goal is to experiment on those people to see the effects of them being in a colony ship, you're going to want a large number of people who aren't being screwed with in order to deal with something like an invasion that might follow after the nuclear war.

They then came up with experiments which make no sense in the context of the space travel thing, like the 999 men and 1 woman vault, the gambling vault, the lottery murder vault, and so on. Even worse is that a lot of these vaults will lower the amount of people leaving the vaults at some point, which would end up screwing you should the Chinese have vaults that don't kill off people. You'd be hard pressed to get the government to go along with all this just because the only way to win a nuclear war is if there were a large population that survive it.

Another assumption you could make is that Vault-Tec didn't realize how bad a nuclear war would be, but that makes no sense considering they're a company that used to specialize in making things that could withstand the test of the time during and after a nuclear war. Meaning they'd have to have some of the best research on the effects of a nuclear war given the amount of nuclear weapons that existed at the time they were making vaults. The main two factions that would absolutely know would be the military and Vault-Tec, being a government contractor.

This is honestly something that a lot of the designers and writers of the TV show just don't seem to get. They just want to write wacky torture vaults because they're funny. They took the concept of vaults, which would be the mechanism for "winning" a nuclear war to mechanisms for losing the nuclear war in the most slapstick ways possible.

 

[NecroLord]

That consumerism is predicated on the survival of civilization because that is your consumer base. Here, he is saying that not only did Vault-Tec not save enough people, but they knew they wouldn't, and they didn't even save the top one percent. I think the best you could frame it is that Vault-Tec never thought the bombs would drop, but I don't think that is a reasonable assumption to make.

None of it makes sense anymore, particularly when you factor in the layers of stuff they've been building on since they came up with the "Vaults as experiments" thing. They keep adding new layers on top of that and move further and further away from it making any sense, not only with reality but also the setting itself. If you know there's going to be a nuclear war, you're clearly going to want people as a contingency for what comes after. If the whole goal is to experiment on those people to see the effects of them being in a colony ship, you're going to want a large number of people who aren't being screwed with in order to deal with something like an invasion that might follow after the nuclear war.

They then came up with experiments which make no sense in the context of the space travel thing, like the 999 men and 1 woman vault, the gambling vault, the lottery murder vault, and so on. Even worse is that a lot of these vaults will lower the amount of people leaving the vaults at some point, which would end up screwing you should the Chinese have vaults that don't kill off people. You'd be hard pressed to get the government to go along with all this just because the only way to win a nuclear war is if there were a large population that survive it.

Another assumption you could make is that Vault-Tec didn't realize how bad a nuclear war would be, but that makes no sense considering they're a company that used to specialize in making things that could withstand the test of the time during and after a nuclear war. Meaning they'd have to have some of the best research on the effects of a nuclear war given the amount of nuclear weapons that existed at the time they were making vaults. The main two factions that would absolutely know would be the military and Vault-Tec, being a government contractor.

This is honestly something that a lot of the designers and writers of the TV show just don't seem to get. They just want to write wacky torture vaults because they're funny. They took the concept of vaults, which would be the mechanism for "winning" a nuclear war to mechanisms for losing the nuclear war in the most slapstick ways possible.

I think they really did not know where to go with Vault-Tec and them designing their Vaults as evil and reprehensible social experiments.
It doesn't make much sense.
Why would they experiment on the survivors who were supposed to recolonize the Earth after the A-bombs were dropped and the radiation was down to a more manageable level?
If anything, they should've taught them agricultural techniques, science, survival skills, how to develop a strong sense of solidarity with their fellow vault dwellers and help their community, things like that.

 

[Infinitron]

I give suggestions on how to write evil characters in games, including player dialog options.

p.s. I almost wrote "how to write good evil characters".

 

[NecroLord]

Lacroix is a good evil character.

 

[Eirinjas]

I give suggestions on how to write evil characters in games, including player dialog options.

p.s. I almost wrote "how to write good evil characters".

Amusing to hear him bring up Tyranny, an utter dogshit RPG that centers on the sort of emo edgelord characters you'd find milling about in Hot Topic. Tyranny established a benchmark in CRPG cringe writing. The more Tim speaks, the less I care what he has to say.

 

[rojay]

The problem with Tim's discussion is that these days there is no "Evil." There are shades of grey and every antagonist, to be considered well-written, has to have some motivation that's understandable. When I started playing D&D in the late 70s, it was understood that creatures like orcs, goblins, kobolds etc. were just evil. Full stop. There was no need to explain how some kobold tribe was pushed out of their ancestral lands by climate change and just wanted to co-exist with the elves and dwarves. They were all designed to be antagonists that the party would fight and kill because that's what you were supposed to do.

There were evil gods that did evil things because they were evil, not because they'd been abused as children. They were worshipped by evil followers, who did evil things because that's what their god wanted them to do.

I understand that's not how the actual world works and there are some games where it makes sense and it benefits the gameplay, but it seems like just about every game has to deal in nuance where *intelligent* enemies are concerned and I miss the days when I could just kill a fucking orc and be happy about it.