THE TIM CAIN PAGE

 

The "real" Tim Cain

 

The "Arcanum" Tim Cain

 

The "surreal" Tim Cain

Little Known Facts About Tim Cain:

IRC Nick: TimCain

Birthday: August 25th

Height: 6'1"

Weight: A little more than Mike (McCarthy)

Favorite Snack: Candy (especially chocolate)

Most Rewarding Thing About Designing Games: Reading people talking about playing the game, the good and the bad stuff

Dream Project: SimRPG

Favorite Movies: Raiders of the Lost Ark (Indiana Jones), Manos: Hands of Fate (I hope he was kidding about that one :p)

Favorite Book: Lord of Light by Zelazny

Animal He Would Most Want To Be: Dog, they have good lives

Favorite Music At The Office: Ambient - Eno, Biosphere, Global Communication, Mi dios, me he ejecutado del caramelo.

Words That Make Him Laugh: Titmouse, DirectX

Weirdest Game Idea: Hell Hath No Fury (about a very angry woman...she had guns), Arcanum 2?

Favorite Hobbies: Reading, Walking the dog (cooter) and picking up his nuisances, eating candy

Where He Would Be If Not With Troika: Walking the dog and picking up his nuisances

Kind Of Computer He Uses: I have a monitor who's color is off. Mike didn't want it and I can't tell. :)

Childhood Hero/Idol: My childhood is a blur.

Hardest Part Of Designing A Game: Being Tim. Reducing the run time of non-polynomial algorithms! Making A.I. that people will not describe as "retarded".

Opinion Of Other RPGs: I like EQ (EverQuest)! But it aint much of an RPG...I liked the Ultima Underworlds, those were great.

Where He Will Be When Arcanum Hits The Computer Store Shelves: I plan to walk the dog and pick up his "nuisances".

What He Will Do With All The Money He Makes From Arcanum Sales: Buy shiny things and look at them. I plan to work towards world peace.

 

To interviews with Tim Cain:

Interviews Sorted By Date:

July 4, 2001 - Electric Playground Interviews Tim Cain
(This is a video. The text version can be found below.)

April 6, 2001 - Freelancer Interviews Tim Cain

June 16, 2000 - Computer Games Online Interviews Tim Cain

May 29, 2000 - RPG Vault Profiles Tim Cain

April 25, 2000 - Next Game Interviews Tim Cain

October 20, 1999 - RPG Vault Interviews The Troika Founding Fathers

Interviews Sorted By Source:

Computer Games Online Interviews Tim Cain - June 16, 2000

Electric Playground Interviews Tim Cain - July 4, 2001
(This is a video. The text version can be found below.)

Freelancer Interviews Tim Cain - April 6, 2001

Next Game Interviews Tim Cain - April 25, 2000

RPG Vault Profiles Time Cain - May 29, 2000

RPG Vault Interviews The Troika Founding Fathers - October 20, 1999

 

 

July 4, 2001 by Jason MacIsaac of Electric Playground: (The video interview can be seen here. Thanks to our own Aldin for sending me the text version)

Tim Cain is the co-founder of Troika Games. He developed Fallout for Interplay and started the initial design of Fallout 2 before departing to form Troika in 1998. Now of course, he's awaiting the release of their latest RPG, Arcanum: Of Steamworks and Magick Obscura, and considering future projects. Recently, he let Jason MacIsaac quiz him vigorously on Arcanum, RPGs, and two different Tim Cains.


Electric Playground: What were your basic contributions to Arcanum on a day to day basis?

Tim Cain: It changed a lot, but for most of the game, I pretty much was programming. I did the AI, the in-game character editor, the inventory, stuff like that. Also, I did all the system-level design. I did the stats and skills and spells, and basically how the game engine controls them; how particular stats were used in AI, and how a particular rank converted to a chance of success. All the factors that affected the chance of a skill succeeding, like lighting, distance, line of sight, things like that.

EP: You're not just a sit-back manager, you're really in there getting your hands dirty.

TC: Oh yeah. We really don't have anyone to just manage, we're too small for that. And that's why we deliberately didn't put roles next to our names. [Editor's note: Cain is referring to the game credits] Everybody here did design, everybody here contributed to scripting, and so many people here did dialogues. I mean, Leonard [Boyarsky] and Chad [Moore] did most of them, but Sharon [Shellman] did a lot herself too. So it's hard to point at somebody and say, "You're an X." So we just put all our names on the credits.

EP: That's a rather unusual way of putting together a game. I wouldn't think that most companies do it that way. Has it been structured that way with your other projects?


TC: Well, was a lot more like that. That actually caused some problems, because people were saying, "Oh, you have your artist doing design and that's a problem." And I kept having people tell me that, "You're having a game made by committee. No-one will want to play." But I think the reason it worked is that it lets people do the things they're best at. As long as we were honest with each other, and [said], "Ok, you're doing something that stinks, you can't do that anymore."

It lets people do what they like to do, and what they're best at. I think you get a better game by doing that as opposed to saying, "Okay, you're an artist, we don't ever want to hear a design idea out of you."

EP: I've known many companies like that. I guess Arcanum is pretty much done, you're just waiting for some of the localizations to catch up?

TC: Right.

EP: Now that it's done, are you happy with the results?

TC: I think we are. I think you always look at games that ship and go "God, if I just had more time I would have done that or this or the other thing," but overall I think we're pretty happy with it. It certainly seems like it's fun, which is the whole point of a game, and people seem to have enjoyed it.

I wish the demo could not have had some of the problems it did, because I think it turned some people off. Every time we do a demo we always seem to have the same problem. Some mistake in either how we process art or something causes game slowdown. It doesn't occur in the full game. We had the same problem with the Fallout demo.

FP: Well, Fallout was a success. Maybe the problems with the demo are a good omen.

TC: [laughs] Well I certainly hope we follow the same path with Arcanum.

EP: Let's get right back to the basics. How did the idea for Arcanum come about?

TC: Well, it's funny. The way it worked was... we were talking about what we wanted to do. We knew we wanted to do an RPG. I said I wanted to do a fantasy RPG, which I think surprised Leonard and Jason [Anderson] a bit because when we worked on Fallout, I said, "We're not doing a fantasy RPG. I will entertain ideas for anything except fantasy, because there are too many fantasy games on the shelves." But when we were done with Fallout, I was kind of tired of that genre. I didn't want to do Fallout 2.

I really wanted to do a fantasy RPG because I thought, "Well, I've earned the right to do a fantasy game." I know there's a bunch on the shelves, but that's really what everyone's prime RPG is in their minds. And I wanted to do one. Leonard didn't want to do one. Most of the RPGs you play are technologically 14th Century. You don't really have machines of any kind, but you do have some metallurgy and stuff like that. And Leonard's idea was to move it up to the 18th Century. And I said, "That's going to be weird because we're going to have technology and we're going to have magick, and I'm not sure how to get it together." It was Jason's idea to have the Magick/Tech aptitude scale, and have magick and tech actually be diametrically opposed. It kinda grew out of all that. It took a few weeks of us talking until we were all happy with how it sounded like it would work. Then we started writing. Jason started working on interfaces, I started working on the system design, Leonard started working on the background system and environment. That's pretty much how we got started.

EP: Once the development go under way, what did you want to deliver with Arcanum that was lacking in other RPGs?

TC: One the big things we wanted was a big world. I mean, the continuous world was there from the beginning, because we wanted a big world that felt like you could explore it, but at the same time we wanted a strong storyline. We could satisfy the two different camps of RPGers, one of which wants to play through the storyline, and the other camp wants to ignore it, and run around the world doing their own thing. When I used to play D&D--I still do, but not nearly as much--I used to like the judge's guild modules. They would have these gigantic maps with villages and mountain ranges and dungeons all over the world, but then you could actually buy supplements that led you through big areas on a particular path. And I thought that was a really good way of handling it, because there's a lot of stuff out there to explore on your own, but if you really wanted to progress in a story and feel like something's unfolding, there's that play as well.

EP: The other thing that you've delivered that a lot of people are talking about of course is the toolset so that gamers can make their own maps and their own adventures. When did that decision come about? When did you say, "We should put that in?"

TC: We really had that idea at the beginning. And the reason we felt it was important was when Falloutgot so popular, probably the top request we got--besides doing the sequel--was "Can you release your mapper tools?" Even though it was single player, they wanted to make their own modules. We knew we were adding multiplayer capability to Arcanum, and we thought "Well gee, if we make these tools from the very beginning with the idea that somebody will be using them at home, then we'll have a lot more groundswell support. We'll have a much better community because these people have things that they can make themselves and share."

We had the idea from the very beginning, and it actually affected our design. Sometimes we'd be arguing and one of the programmers would say, "Gee, that would be so easy to do...if I didn't have to support people at home wanting to edit that." In fact, that's where the big constraint of items came in, that you can't take items from one module to another. Somebody pointed out that if people could edit items any way they wanted, then there are so many ways of making items just too powerful. Even if we tried to catch it, there are just so many ways of doing it that people could sneak an item in under our tests and bring items from one module to another that don't really belong.

EP: There's always someone out there who will cheat a little.

TC: Yeah. It's easier to catch with characters, because if you're this level, you should have this many character points to spend. And I can look at your stats and say, "These are way beyond what you could have spent." But with items, you can attach scripts to them, and there's no way for me to really look at those scripts and see what they're doing. So people could make an item that looks like a regular sword, but it has a script attached to its hit, and that script does an ungodly amount of damage.

EP: You mentioned that there were certain challenges in having a very powerful toolset right from the beginning, but do you think it made the overall game design easier or harder, knowing that everything you do, you want to give to the user?

TC: I think it worked both ways. Some things were much harder. We had ideas later that we wanted to do, and we added them into the editor, but they were much harder to add in because we thought, "We've got to add this in such a way that it's still an editable feature for the home user." On the other hand, some things were easier because we ended up with tools that anybody here in the office could use. When we made Fallout, our mapping tool was so hard to use that there was only one guy on the entire team that could make maps that looked good. It was easy to make a map, but it was really hard to make a map that looked good. The way the tools work now--the way the tile sets work and the wall sets--pretty much all that was automated. It's very easy for someone to just throw down whole villages and towns, and they look good. So I guess it went both ways.

EP: There are several RPGs coming, like Morrowind and Neverwinter Nights, that are promising a very deep RPG experience and they're also going to have editors for the gamer. What do you think sets Arcanum apart from them?

TC: We have a really, really, easy tool to use. I think we've shown that. And as Leonard would like to say, "Hey, we artists are using this." I think that 3D toolsets are just that much harder to use. I think Neverwinter Nights will be cool, but it's still D&D. I think we have a much less restrictive system. You can use the WorldEd to whatever depth that you want to. The power of adding the scripts and being able to adjust almost any stat and build anything really lets you make a really complex module if you want. But if people want to make a Diablo-like dungeon crawl, they could probably have that whipped out in about half an hour. I'm not sure if the others will be that easy to use, and I'm not sure if they provide the depth that our editor is going to, especially if you want to explore how the script editor works.

EP: This is not the first time you've worked on a game that's had a toolset for the users. You also did Bard's Tale Construction Set.

TC: Right. In fact, that was the first game I actually did that got me back into the industry. Way back in '92.

EP: The original Bard's Talecame out on the Commodore 64, didn't it?

TC: Yeah, in fact I hadn't really played those games. Interplay hired me to do the construction set as a contractor. They had the code, but it was really old, and it didn't really work very well. So I pretty much had to rewrite combat and maps and all that so that it looked like Bard's Tale, but it really ran a new set of code.

We were all excited about that game. It was one of the most popular games on Compuserve. [laughs]

EP: I find it interesting that here you are, years later, and you're kind of doing the same thing with Arcanum. You're providing tools so that gamers can make their own adventures. Obviously the technology has made some huge leaps forward, but I was wondering if there was anything philosophically that remains the same?

TC: It's funny that one of the first toolsets that people tried making was Forgotten Realms (which had the Unlimited Adventure toolset). And that toolsets came out for RPGs, which are much harder for people to make. With first person shooters, everybody has toolsets. And that's what people really seem to get into. Making Quake mods and Doom mods...I think now people are trying to advance beyond just making a map and plopping down a couple monsters and saying "Ok, now I've got my first person shooter." I think people are ready to make something a little more complicated. So it seems like we've gone full circle.

EP: So you're not one of those people that believe story is dead in computer games?

TC: Oh no. In fact, some of the ideas for games I want to make are really more adventure games than RPGs. And everybody goes, "Oh, adventure games are dead." And I say that's what people told me about RPGs back in '94. Fallout got started in 1994 and RPGs were dead . The whole trickle was drying up. The Ultima , people were saying, "Oh, these aren't very good anymore. Wizardry , no-one's playing those anymore." The ideas I have for adventure games I'm thinking these will probably make good games, but of course everyone's telling me adventure games are dead.

I think no genre is dead, people do ideas into the ground, and then the public gets tired of playing the same idea over and over.

EP: I personally believe that a good game--an innovative game--will do well regardless. Just let people know it's out there, market it well...

TC: Right... It was sad to see Grim Fandango--a great game--but it didn't sell very well. And I'm not even sure why. So I'm not convinced I could make a great adventure game and get it sold. [laughs]

EP: Do you see Troika and yourself as primarily RPG makers? Because it certainly sounds like you would like to branch out into other genres.

TC: I think we would. We understand that a lot of people may expect RPGs from us, and we'll probably stick with it. But I think occasionally we'd like to branch out, try something else. We all have ideas for things. Somebody will say, "That's a great idea, but it's really more of a first-person shooter idea. Or an adventure game idea." We just shelve it. But I think someday we'd like to try some of those. Plus RPGs are the most complicated games to make and we wouldn't mind trying to make a more straightforward game at least once.

EP: If you do decide to go into another genre, what philosophies of Troika or yourself will you bring into making it.

TC: I think we all bring different stuff. Leonard likes to bring a certain style, both in the art and the dialogue, and how the game feels. He likes a certain darkness, a certain angst. I like games that don't impose upon the player, "Here's how you will play this game. You will be the nice guy; you will be the hero. You will go do this in order A, B, C." I'm big fan of non-linearity, if that's the way the player wants to go.

I think we all bring different things to it and all of that gets pooled together, and I guess people outside the company think of that as "the Troika thing." It's really the combination of what people here like to see in games.

EP: I'm just trying to imagine a non-linear adventure game, or a non-linear 3D shooter, at least in the same sense that Arcanum is non-linear. It's a very interesting idea. How do you envision that?

TC: Imagine if you had Quake II (I loved Quake II and I played it to do death), but instead of playing it that you go through a level, then a new zone, new level, new zone, imagine the whole map is laid out once and you know the big bad guy is in the central area. But the closer you get to that area, the harder everything gets. You might attack some of the fringe outlying areas first; pick up some good items and some good armour, learn tactics, then slowly move your way in. And there'd be several different ways you could attack that base. You might go underground, you might fight your way across the surface, and you could pick which zones you wanted to go through.

It's weird. I had an idea for a game about six or seven years ago that was like Quake II , only you chose which direction, or how to approach the big end boss. I think it was a tank game. Everybody was getting into neural nets, which I didn't think really applied. The whole game was predicated on a genetic algorithm that controlled how the enemy created units to attack you. Basically it would inspect your style of play and create units that would be good to function against you. I wouldn't mind making that game, but I think people would superficially look at the game and say, "This is no different. This is not a game at all like I'd expect Troika to make." But I think after you played it, you'd go, "Oh, there's lots of ways of playing through it and it's non-linear..." And I'm sure Leonard would add all the angst [laughs]. It would have that Troika feel, even though it wouldn't be an RPG at all.

EP: Not that I'm ask you to slag off the competition or anything like that, but what's your impression of RPGs today?

TC: I find a lot of the times that I'm playing RPGs I feel forced to play a certain way. I liked Planescape: Torment a lot, but the biggest complaint I gave Chris Avellone, even before it shipped, was I really hate the fact that you're giving me just one person, and I can't play anything else. But of course, the power that give him was that the story was incredibly intense. Of course, I couldn't play it any other way. I was the Nameless One and I was going to progress to the end, and everybody was pretty much going to discover the same thing.

That's the other thing. I feel that a lot of RPGs...The way I played, if I talked to someone else, they had the exact same experience. And that's what I loved about Fallout . I often found people would be coming to their friends, "Yeah, I played Fallout last night. I found this crashed flying saucer and I got this really cool weapon and it let me go into this base and then I found this, this, this..." [And the friend says] "What are you talking about? I never saw that. I never had that encounter. I never had that follower. How do you get that follower? He won't join me." That's the kind of experience I want in an RPG, and I don't see it as much.

Someone just asked me recently why I don't like what they call the "Eastern-style" of RPG, like Final Fantasy . And I think that was one of my biggest complaints. I feel too constrained. To be given a character and play it the way the designers expected me to play through.

EP: When you are given a choice of characters, what kind of characters do you prefer to play?

TC: Like in Arcanum , or in RPGs in general?

EP: Both really.

TC: With Arcanum it's funny, because I really thought I was going to go magick. My first few characters were always these Elvin magick users. Very quickly I fell in love with the big stupid Half-Ogre, mainly because of the dialogue that Leonard and Chad wrote. Some of it I laughed so hard I was literally having trouble breathing. It's great. And for me, that's much more important when playing the game. I just said, "I'm enjoying myself so much with this character, this is the character I'm going to take. Even though it's not the character I conceived would be the one I would enjoy the most."

Then I played the game through with a character that didn't do magick or tech. I thought, "Wait a minute, you spent so much time making magick and tech systems and now you're playing the game through not touching either of those." It's a bit ironic.

My second favorite character was a thief, who did magick and tech. In other games, I almost always play the spellcaster. In games like EverQuest and Baldur's Gate I have to play somebody who can cast spells. Otherwise I found the games a little boring. I just don't like being a person who says, "I've got good armour, I've got a good weapon, I go up and hit the thing a few times and it dies." I find that boring by the third or fourth dungeon.

EP: In Arcanum, there are still traditional fantasy elements, but you've given them a different spin...

TC: We especially tried to do quests that weren't necessarily, "Go find this object and bring it back to me." [Editor's note: Tim and Jason here discussed a quest related to a thief-style character that definitely falls into spoiler territory. But it is quest that we guarantee you've never seen before. Here's a juicy hint from Tim "You have to give up a bit of your integrity." And yes, even a thief's relative integrity.]. I don't want to give anything away, but it's not Fedex.

EP: That's true.

TC: What you have to do isn't that hard, but it's got ramifications in the game later on. And you know what they'll be. It's not like we spring them on you. I like that because all the other games would say, "Give me your gold, give me this object..." I'm saying, "Give me a little bit of your integrity. Give me a little bit of your feeling of self-worth, and then I'll give you this skill you want so badly." And I like that kind of stuff. It's the kind of thing that makes people look at our RPGs and then look at other RPGs and say, "I find you wanting. I want more of this stuff."

EP: Very few companies are going for anything different though. They're either going for your standard swords and sorcery, or the online persistent world. Why do you think that is?

TC: I think it's always been the way in this industry that innovation has been second to trying to reach the masses. So what happens is Diablo comes out. It does really well. People go, "Well, let's make more action-oriented RPGs that are quasi-swords and sorcery." A lot of people wouldn't even call that an RPG. Now of course, we're getting great stuff. Dungeon Siege and looks like a great game. And yet it struck me as Diablo 3D. But it looked like a great game so I'm not saying that in all these cases, we're not getting fantastic games. But I think there are only so many games that can be made like that before the public really wants something new. But innovation is hard. So most of these companies don't want to risk making three or four games and only having one of them really be innovative. So what they do--especially the marketing people--they go, "Look, this is what's selling. We want a 1st person fantasy RPG that's got a lot of action and a lot of nice cinematics and a very a small learning curve, and we want you to make it in 18 months and get it out on the shelves."

EP: What do you think RPGs need to evolve a little further? Kill all the marketing people?

TC: [laughs] I think the environment needs to become even more of a simulation, so that you can have even more freedom. I want people to be able to up to a building and go, "Inside there's a chest with something I want in it." I don't want every different solution to getting that object out of the chest to be something that a scripter has to put in. I want the world to be so simulated at the physics level that I can go, "I want to try breaking that window. Oh, but that creates a lot of noise. Well, maybe if I cut the glass off the window, cut the glass and go in." I think that would really make people open up to just how creative they can be in trying to achieve their goals in one of these RPGs.

It will eventually happen. When all the engines go 3D, which most of them are, and people concentrate less on using their CPU power and their hardware power to make it look good, and they instead concentrate on making it very interactive. I think we're starting to see RPGs going like that.

EP: The sort of thing you're describing is almost like a pen and paper RPG where you have a judge or gamemaster. They don't actually physically simulate the world, but they have their imagination and can improvise anything...

TC: When I was a GM I very much discouraged people from doing the standard rush-in-beat-everything-up-and-take-the-stuff approach, because that has ramifications that most people ignore. If you do that often enough in the real world, people are going to come after you. Bounty hunters. People are going to be scared of you. Shopkeepers are gonna close-up when they see you coming. It's going to be hard for you to interact with the normal population, because they're gonna know who you are. So I'm a big fan of reputation and alignment and factions. I really feel like going in that direction in RPGs helps.

EP: Do you think there's anything that can be done in computer RPGs to make them more like pen and paper?

TC: I looked at the Vampire stuff because it had a GM that was actually running parts of the world because there are some things that a computer just won't do well. I would love to have dialogue generated, because we spend so much time writing it. So much time is spent on the design side making the dialogue for all people. But it's so hard to make a computer do reasonable dialogue that it has to be a human being. So I was so fascinated by the Vampire approach and that I can take over control and I can handle the dialogue, which a human does well, and the computer can handle the combat, which it does well. I think that direction is a good direction to go. Eventually. I'm not sure the mass market bought that. They have to be exposed to it a few more times before they grow to like it.

To wrap the interview, Tim told me that Troika is spending the time before release assisting in the localization, and pitching new game ideas to Sierra. Sadly, he wouldn't reveal what they were, but he did say that Sierra is very open to ideas and is not pressuring them in any direction. We ended the interview discussing Tim Cain, the award winning children's recording artist. Tim has visited his site, and has even listened to the MP3 of his song, "Shark." The two have never met, but both are located in California, so Tim jokingly speculated that they might do a game together someday. I proposed Shark: The RPG. This is not likely to get pitched to Sierra.