Setting Ideas

tim-cain narrative-design settings post-apocalyptic worldbuilding brainstorming game-design

Abstract

Problem: How do you come up with compelling settings for games, and what are the major categories of post-apocalyptic worlds?

Approach: Tim Cain walks through his personal notebooks and design journals, sharing setting ideas he's been developing — some dating back to 2002 — including a space game, a post-apocalyptic child protagonist concept, and a comprehensive taxonomy of apocalypse types.

Findings: Post-apocalyptic settings can be categorized into seven root causes: war, radiation, plague, ecological upset, supernatural causes, evolution, and aliens — each with multiple sub-variants. Setting design benefits from extensive journaling and revisiting old ideas.

Key insight: Ideas are a dime a dozen — many designers independently arrive at the same concepts. What matters is implementation and who gets there first. Keep notebooks, revisit them, and let old ideas cross-pollinate with new ones.

Source: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FF8v31SwjEM

Current Projects and Setting Explorations

Tim describes several settings he's been working on in semi-retirement. He expanded his three-day Star Raiders-inspired space game into a larger design with exploration and storyline — not Starfield-scale, but more like "Vampire Survivors with a ship in space." His main limitation is art, so he works with whatever assets he can find on the Unity store.

He also revisited his notes for a Lord of Light adaptation game, which would be heavily story-based. He decided against pursuing it after learning from Temple of Elemental Evil that writing characters solo is too ambitious. Reading those notes led him to another setting: a game that starts as magic, reveals itself as technology, and ultimately turns out to be post-apocalyptic — reminiscent of the cartoon Thundarr the Barbarian.

Improving Turn-Based Combat

While reviewing old Arcanum notes, Tim found ideas for making turn-based combat faster without losing its core benefit: nothing moves on your turn.

His approach: collapse enemy initiatives. If multiple monsters roll contiguous initiative slots (no player characters between them), they all act together. Taken further, all enemies share a single initiative roll — so it alternates: player turn, all enemies turn, player turn, all enemies turn.

Tim ran simulations and found the pros and cons roughly balance out. Enemies acting together enables simultaneous flanking (advantage), but also wastes movement if a target dies mid-round (disadvantage). The net result: much faster turn-based play while preserving the ability to plan and place area-of-effect abilities precisely.

The Secret Fallout Design

Tim mentions he wrote a complete design for a new Fallout game over 20 years ago. He won't share details because he's seen his ideas appear in other games coincidentally, and he's watched colleagues accuse others of theft when it's really just parallel thinking. His philosophy: people come from the same gaming backgrounds, so convergent ideas are inevitable.

Post-Apocalyptic Child Protagonist

One concept Tim is willing to discuss: a post-apocalyptic game caused by an AI-engineered virus (his critique of Terminator's Skynet — why nuke your own resources when a virus kills only humans?).

The twist: the protagonist is a child. This creates unique gameplay and narrative possibilities:

  • Physical: Children can squeeze through vents and slide under fences — no need for implausibly large air ducts
  • Cognitive: A child who was very young when civilization fell can't read. Warning signs appear as gobbledygook. Computer terminals are incomprehensible garble. Even the player, as an adult, experiences the world through this illiterate lens — knowing the word "warning" but nothing after it

When colleagues objected that you can't have a child protagonist who gets hurt, Tim pointed to Limbo as proof that audiences accept it — especially its mode that blacks out the screen during deaths, leaving only the audio.

The Double Art Style Death Mechanic

Tim pitched a version where the game world is rendered through the child's imagination. Upon death, the art style melts away to reveal the grim reality underneath. An artist's response: "So you want us to do two completely disjoint art styles and double the art load just for a death mechanic?" Tim's answer: "Yes." They weren't having it.

The Seven Types of Post-Apocalypse

From a file dated 2002, Tim presents his comprehensive taxonomy of apocalyptic causes:

War

Humans devastate the planet through nuclear weapons, conventional bombs, or sheer destruction.

Radiation

Nuclear weapons, solar flares, power plant accidents, or laboratory leaks.

Plague

Natural or accidental pandemics, or deliberately engineered bioweapons (including the AI-virus concept).

Ecological Upset

The category with the most sub-variants:

  • Global warming or global freezing (ice age)
  • Astronomical collision (meteor, lunar impact)
  • Natural disasters (floods, earthquakes, volcanoes)
  • Microbiological blooms (ocean algal blooms destroying plankton and oxygen production)
  • Famine (from biological attacks on food crops or other causes)
  • Solar changes (the sun waning, overheating, or emitting deadly radiation)

Supernatural Causes

  • Demonic interference
  • "Last Days" scenarios (Revelation, Rapture, religious end-times)
  • Dimensional shifts bringing terrifying entities from other dimensions
  • Sudden return of magic to the world

Evolution

  • Monstrous new creatures emerging (Godzilla-style, possibly radiation-related)
  • Next evolutionary step of humanity (smarter, psychic, no longer needing us)
  • AI/computer singularity
  • Transcendence — humans transforming into energy or a higher state, leaving some behind

Aliens

  • Invasion, enslavement, or abduction
  • Resource theft (like the V miniseries — ostensibly for water, actually for humans as food)
  • Microbiological diaspora — alien organisms landing on Earth and kickstarting an entirely foreign ecology (as in David Gerrold's War Against the Chtorr)

On Keeping Notebooks

Tim emphasizes the value of continuous journaling and revisiting old design notes. His current setting explorations came from pulling out notebooks spanning decades, finding that old ideas still spark new connections. He encourages aspiring game designers to maintain their own idea journals — and reminds everyone that his semi-retirement is anything but boring.

References