Interview with Carbine Studio’s Timothy Cain

Saturday at PAX, I had the pleasure of sitting down with Timothy Cain, Carbine Studio’s recently promoted design director.

Even though Tim wasn’t allowed to talk to me about their super-secret game that shall not be named, I was allowed to have an interview with him about his past experiences, what he has brought to Carbine’s playing field.

A little background on Tim is pertinent before reading the interview. Tim was the producer, lead programmer and one of the main designers of the popular computer game, Fallout. He worked at Interplay six years before founding Troika Games with Leonard Boyarsky and Jason D. Anderson. His last Troika project, before the company shutdown, was on Vampire: The Masquerade – Bloodlines. Other games that are credited to his name include: Arcanum: Of Steamworks & Magick Obscura, Atomic Bomberman, Fallout 2, , Star Trek: Starfleet Academy, The Temple of Elemental Evil: A Classic Greyhawk Adventure, and others.

Kayhynn: What influenced your decision to be a part of the video game industry when you started out?

Tim: Well… 27 years ago I was a sophomore in high school and was doing programming on the Atari 800. A friend who had already graduated needed someone to code a cable game and asked me if I could do it. Obviously, I couldn’t use an IBM PC for it as those had only 4 colors and Atari could do 16. So, I ended up working there after school and summers and the gig paid for college. After that I worked there during the summers to pay for graduate school. After all of that I realized I wanted to make games full time, not just on the side. Interplay was my first full time job in the industry.

Kayhynn: What developments, technology wise, would you say have had the most impact on game development?

Tim: Video cards, by far, have had the largest impact on game development. I’ve seen whole games based around what features on video cards are available. Luckily, these days, the importance of video cards on development is going away because operating systems have matured.

There was a time when we had to write a specialized code which knew what video card chipset the computer was using, which brand of CD-Rom, or what type of mouse a person was using in order to run the game. It made for a ridiculous and insane time in programming. Now, everything has become more standardized and we don’t have to code for every type of hardware out there.

Kayhynn: What lessons from previous games have you brought to this endeavor

Tim: One of the biggest lessons I realized is people are not aware of the importance of a storyline in a game. Storylines play a huge role for games. People want a reason to be doing what they are doing. If you give them a true sandbox game, they complain that there isn’t a storyline. They still want to be led through the game somehow, even if they don’t realize it. And for some of them, it can even be as simple as a quest that opens up a whole new area for them to play in.

Kayhynn: Most favorite/ memorable game development experience?

Tim: I’d have to say that one of my favorite times was when I was working on a game that was supposed to have a rocket launcher in it and we didn’t have the rocket launcher art. So I grabbed any art available as a placeholder. Thus, we ended up having small dogs that were shot at people and they would then run at people and blow up.

Kayhynn: What advice would you offer for high school or college students looking to enter game development?

Tim: My advice is to decide what it is you love doing and are good at and just do it. This is an industry where cream will rise to the top. You will get noticed. It doesn’t matter how you get into the industry, even if it’s starting out in Quality Assurance Testing or Content Writing, people will notice you if you are good at what you are doing, take on tasks that you complete and accomplish goals.

I was dismayed to hear a panel here that discussed getting into the game industry implying that you had to be in some form of a clique to get in. That isn’t true. You can get in by being good at what you do.

If you are an artist, make a good demo reel. Show the various textures you’ve designed then applied to models. Show us the best you can do and let it go from there. Sell yourself.

Kayhynn: What, if any, MMOs do you play? What aspects do you look for in a game?

Tim: Currently, I play City of Heroes, Guild Wars, World of Warcraft, Dungeon and Dragons Online, and Aion. I like to tell myself that the job requires me to play, but honestly? I do it because I love to play games.

Kayhynn: What draws you to a game to make you interested in playing it?

Tim: It’s wierd because I look at games in layers.

When I hear about the game, something about the game has to interest me. It could be they have a good, interesting story, or there is some feature you haven’t seen in an MMO before.

When I buy it, the graphics will be something that interests me for a few levels, then graphics don’t interest me anymore. All the bad graphics in the world aren’t going to keep me from playing a game. Being pretty helps a game to get in the door. However, you have to look at is the game balanced? Is it fair? I hate being griefed because the designer wasn’t thinking about the characters abilities being imbalanced. Then I look at the pacing of the game. If it’s too slow, that’s bad, and players, including myself, lose interest.

Kayhynn: 10 years ago, playing MMOs seemed to be limited to “geeks” and “nerds”. Now, in the past five years or so, it has become mainstream and “cool” to play MMOs. What do you think is a contributing factor behind this?

Tim: Part of it is culture. It’s cooler to be a geek now. When I started in the industry, everyone was wondering why I was doing this, why was I going into the video game industry. When I left grad school my thesis advisor was very upset that I was leaving to work on video games. Then, three years later, he asked me to come back and teach a class in game development. There has been a shift in culture — a shift towards being a geek or nerd implies you know a lot about technology and have all sorts of friends online.

Kayhynn: Why do you think some old school MMOs, such as UO and EQ, have lasted so long where as games like The Sims Online, and The Matrix Online, to name a few, did not?

Tim: Part of it is inertia. Once you start playing a game and you really get into it, it becomes really hard to move away from it and leave it behind. Games like UO and Everquest had an extensive amount of itemization. Getting an item in EQ was an epic event. In UO you have homes and characters with tons of items. People have grown attached to the second life they have and they don’t like losing what they have grown attached to, so they keep paying and playing.

Kayhynn: Tell our readers a bit about Carbine Studios and what you guys are doing.

NCsoft officially announced Carbine Studios in October 2007, but we’ve been around and working on our product for a while – I joined the group August 2005. It is a big studio and is getting bigger. Currently we have between 85-90 people on our team. They are comprised from former staff of almost every MMO out there, including WoW, Warhammer Online, Fury, Stargate Online, Pirates of the Burning Sea, and almost every Sony Game. We have a lot of talent and a lot of breadth from which to design.

It’s really cool when we talk about aspects and concepts of the game. Quite often we have someone who has used that concept in a game they worked on and they would give input as to how it worked or didn’t work and why and what could be improved. It’s amazing to see how things come about from the variety of games that have been worked on in our past experiences.

Kayhynn: I know you can’t tell us anything about the game, but can you say something about it?

Tim: I’m really excited about the game. We have some really cool stuff planned.

Kayhynn: Can you give us a release date?

Tim: I’ll blink it to you in morse code.

Unfortunately for our readers, I do not understand nor can I decipher Morse code, so I was unable to get that piece of information. I had an awesome time sitting down to chat with Tim and look forward to seeing great things from him and the folks at Carbine Studios.

About Carbine Studios™

Carbine Studios is a software development company focused on making high-quality, cutting-edge, and conceptually innovative Massively Multiplayer Games.

Located in Aliso Viejo, California, Carbine was founded in 2005 as a division of NCsoft North America by ten former members of Blizzard Entertainment’s World of Warcraft core development team. Since that time the studio has grown considerably, drawing some of the top talent in the industry; many of Carbine’s talented employees have worked on such award-winning products as Diablo II, StarCraft, Metroid Prime, Fallout, Everquest and a number of other successful titles.

Currently, the studio is in pre-production of an unannounced MMO.