Game Development Caution

Three Stories

The Whiteboard (Fallout vs. Carbine)

During the final push on Fallout, the team used two whiteboards: one listing unfinished features, the other listing the ten worst bugs, each with an assigned name. People loved it — they'd check the board each morning and jump on tasks. It was simple, effective, pre-Jira accountability.

Ten years later at Carbine Studios, Tim tried the exact same approach. The response was overwhelming: people threatened to quit if their name appeared on a whiteboard. Even removing names wasn't enough — "people will know it's me." The culture had fundamentally shifted.

The Four-Week Estimate (The Outer Worlds)

A year before ship on The Outer Worlds, Tim requested a simple combat aggression system: NPCs track who shot them and how much damage they dealt, then attack the top of that list. About 10 lines of pseudocode. The estimate came back: four weeks.

Tim pushed back — he'd coded this exact system three times before, and it takes about 45 minutes. The assigned programmer refused to walk through his approach and left angry. The lead programmer came to defend the estimate. Tim offered to do it himself before lunch. That was rejected too ("people will have to support your code"). After Tim walked through his pseudocode on a whiteboard, the lead came back with "how about two weeks?" Tim had no options. He took the two weeks.

He never specifically asked for anything after that — he'd realized he was being viewed as an ogre for knowing something could be done faster, and there was no solution.

The Yelling (Tim and Leonard)

Tim and Leonard Boyarsky's design discussions are loud, physical affairs — raised voices, jumping out of chairs, drawing on whiteboards, pacing. Not anger, just passionate engagement with ideas. One day Anthony Davis appeared at their door: "You guys have to stop yelling. Everybody's getting nervous. It's like Mom and Dad are yelling at each other."

They explained they weren't fighting — this was just how they worked through design problems. They kept doing it behind closed doors. Some colleagues, like lead designer Charlie Staples, would join in. Others stayed away and, Tim believes, missed out on genuinely fun, engaging conversations about game development.

The Rise of Development Caution

Tim identifies a pattern across the last quarter of his career: an abundance of caution pervading every level of the industry.

How it manifests:

• Padded time estimates
• Excessive consensus-seeking before acting
• "Let's have a meeting" culture — often from the same people who complain about too many meetings
• Fear of individual visibility and accountability
• Risk aversion in design decisions

Why it happens:

• Games cost enormously more to make now — failure means losing serious money
• Game development has shifted from artistic expression by individuals or small groups to corporate-driven, money-seeking instruments
• This drives microtransactions, pre-orders, and tiered early access

The Cost of Caution

Caution does have genuine benefits: fewer bugs, better work-life balance, less stress. Tim acknowledges all of this. But cautious developers deny the downsides:

• Games take less creative risk, which strips them of charm
• Even janky games have charm — bizarre AI behavior, NPCs saying weird things. Players love it
• You end up creeping toward a mundane game that shows no passion in its development
• Players can tell. They always can

Caution in Game Journalism

The pattern extends beyond studios. Tim observes that game journalists have become increasingly cautious too:

• No one wants to risk embargo access or early review codes
• No one wants to be excluded from press events
• Reviews lack the conviction of critics like Scorpia (1980s–90s) or Desslock (1990s–2000s), who praised what worked and savaged what didn't
• Journalists hedge on anything potentially controversial — even positive observations about diversity
• The result: passion drains out, replaced by "what review generates the most clicks?"

Indie as the Antidote

Tim sees the indie space as richer in ideas — not money, but ideas — precisely because indie developers operate with less caution and more risk. AAA studios then dip into indie games to mine features and concepts, which is itself a cautious strategy: let someone else prove the idea works first.

Tim's Advice

"Just go and make it. Make what you want. You don't need a committee to sign off on it. You can always go back and change it, or if you make something and it turns out not to be good at all and unsalvageable, throw it away."

Rapid iteration toward a good idea beats cautiously creeping toward mediocrity. The passion — or lack of it — always shows through in the final product.

How the Stories Resolved

• The whiteboard: For The Outer Worlds, Tim made a personal-but-public Confluence page called "Tim Cain's Top 10" listing things he wanted addressed that week. No one could complain — it was his space. Meanwhile, the same information was always available in Jira; it was just somehow okay as long as nobody called attention to it
• The estimate: He accepted two weeks (it got done faster). He stopped specifically requesting features after that, recognizing the dynamic was unfixable
• The yelling: Tim and Leonard kept doing it with the door closed. They noted that some people were uncomfortable, and simply didn't engage that way with those people