Semi-Retirement

tim-cain career semi-retirement obsidian contracting personal-projects unity unreal star-raiders

Abstract

Problem: What is Tim Cain doing after leaving full-time employment, and why can't he answer certain questions about Obsidian or Microsoft?

Approach: Tim addresses viewer questions directly, clarifying his employment status and describing how he spends his time.

Findings: Tim left Obsidian as a full-time employee in June 2020 and now works as a contractor for multiple companies while making personal games for fun.

Key insight: Semi-retirement for a veteran game developer means staying engaged with the industry through contract work and personal projects, without the constraints of full-time employment.

Source: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cdHqBi1IPOY

Employment Status

Tim clarifies that he has not been an Obsidian employee since June 2020, when he moved to Seattle. He addresses this because many viewer questions assume he's still at Obsidian or has insider knowledge about Microsoft's plans.

He currently works as a contractor for three companies:

  • Obsidian Entertainment — paid contract doing design advice and review
  • A second unnamed company — paid contract, also design advice and review
  • A third company — unpaid, providing both tech and design advice. He took this on because the people involved had made a game he loved (one he says viewers have all heard of), and the opportunity to be involved in any capacity in their new project was too good to pass up.

What He Can't Answer

Because of his contractor status, Tim cannot answer many questions about:

  • What Microsoft is planning to do with Obsidian
  • The Activision Blizzard merger situation
  • The future of the Arcanum IP (owned by Activision) — though he says he'd love to see something done with it, he has "absolutely no say" in that

This is partly due to NDAs and partly because he genuinely doesn't know.

Making Games for Fun

Tim describes himself as semi-retired: he doesn't work full-time but is still involved in the industry and still working on games coming out in the future.

What he spends most of his time doing is making small personal games. His technical toolkit:

  • Unity + C# — learned Unity through Pillars of Eternity and Tyranny; already knew C#
  • Unreal + C++ — learned Unreal through The Outer Worlds; has programmed C++ "forever"

The Star Raiders Clone

As an example, Tim describes buying Atari 50 to replay Star Raiders (a space combat game on the Atari 800 that was one of his favorites). After playing it, he realized he'd been looking at it through "nostalgia lenses" and decided to make his own version.

Since he's not an artist, he grabbed assets from the Unity Store and built a Star Raiders clone. Key details:

  • Not for sale — he wasn't even planning to show anyone
  • Reused old AI work — he incorporated formation-flying AI he'd originally developed when Interplay had a Star Trek license
  • Vampire Survivors-inspired upgrade system — instead of letting players pick any upgrade, the game offers a random subset of available upgrades when you collect enough cargo (inspired by Vampire Survivors' level-up perk selection)

Channel Plans

Tim mentions several future video topics viewers have been asking about:

  • How he got started in the industry
  • What inspires his designs
  • Why he left Fallout 2 mid-development
  • A full PowerPoint presentation on Disneyland as design inspiration

He commits to answering questions both in text comments and through longer video responses when topics require more depth.

References