Abstract
Problem: What does a game director actually do day-to-day, and how should they approach playing and evaluating their own game?
Approach: Tim Cain expands on his first game director video, drawing on decades of experience directing Fallout, Arcanum, Temple of Elemental Evil, and The Outer Worlds to answer viewer questions.
Findings: A game director must play the game more than anyone else, approach it as a critical craftsman rather than an audience member, touch every discipline (not just their specialty), maintain tone and design pillars from start to finish, and own the final prioritization of bugs and issues at ship time.
Key insight: No one should have a broader overview of the game than the director — specialists know their area more deeply, but the director must see across all of them and hold the entire experience in their head.
1. Play as a Craftsman, Not an Audience Member
Tim opens with a personal confession: after four decades of game development, he can't help being overly critical when playing games. He notices bad cinematics, poor menu design, and missing options immediately. He used to feel bad about this habit — until he watched a documentary about the making of Good Omens 2.
In it, Neil Gaiman describes how early writing classes taught him he was reading books wrong. He was reading as a member of the audience, trying to enjoy the story, when he should have been reading as a fellow craftsman — analyzing what works and what doesn't, learning from both.
Tim draws the parallel directly: as a game director, you cannot approach your game the way a home player would. You must think past "are they enjoying this" to "is this good? Is this the way it should be?" This critical lens extends to balance, tonal consistency, contradictions — things many players won't notice, but that still need fixing.
2. Touch Every Discipline
A game director's responsibility spans all disciplines: design, code, art, music, and audio — not just their personal specialty.
Tim offers a telling example: despite not being able to play a single instrument, he personally sourced all the music for Fallout because it mattered to him. He regularly visited audio departments to flag sound effects that felt wrong, understanding that the sound of a weapon — reloading, firing, hitting, missing, landing a critical — is a core part of the player experience that often gets attention last.
As his color blindness worsened with age, he found it harder to give credible art critiques. On The Outer Worlds, Leonard Boyarsky handled that side. But Tim still made comments on art and narrative — the director's role requires it.
3. Play the Game More Than Anyone
A game director should play the game more than anyone on the team, with the possible exception of QA — and sometimes more than them, because they approach it differently.
QA replays specific areas repeatedly, hunting bugs and imbalances, often with different character builds. The director jumps around: sometimes starting from the beginning to see how far they get, sometimes dropping into random spots.
Tim distinguishes two critical testing perspectives:
- Vertical slices — A single level that contains all the gameplay systems (combat, stealth, dialogue, crafting, companions) to verify they work together
- Horizontal slices — Playing from beginning to end to check pacing, logic, and whether the game feels right longitudinally
The director must also play in styles they personally dislike. Tim may not enjoy pacifist playthroughs or talking to every NPC, but he must ensure those players have fun too.
4. Maintaining Tone and Design Pillars
The game director writes the design pillars — the foundational rules that define what the game is. While the director won't write every design document, every document should comply with those pillars, and nothing in the game should violate them.
This means playing from start to finish with those pillars in mind: checking every level, every item, every character for tonal consistency. The director is also the person who represents the game as a whole in publisher meetings, answering questions about tone, pacing, mysteries, humor, and lore.
Tim admits he didn't do this well enough in his early games. Looking back at Fallout, he wishes he'd caught issues like First Aid and Doctor potentially needing to be combined, or energy weapons lacking enough early-game utility.
5. Prioritizing at Ship Time
At the end of development, there are thousands of bugs and issues — some technical bugs, some "this doesn't feel right" items. The publisher mandates certain fixes, but the director is ultimately responsible for prioritizing everything else.
This won't always align with what the team wants. A committee will never reach 100% agreement. The director listens to leads but makes the final call. This is why every game ships with known bugs — in a complex game, you can't fix everything, and a crash bug takes priority over a balance issue in a specific play style on specific levels.
Tim also cautions against the opposite extreme: trying to include everything. He references his Arcanum retrospectives, noting that throwing in "everything and the kitchen sink" wasn't necessarily a good idea either.
6. The Core of the Role
Tim summarizes the game director's overriding purpose: holding the entire game in your head — its tone, its priorities, its direction — and getting everyone on the team moving the same way, making the same game.
The role is inherently vaguer than specific positions like "sound effects engineer." This vagueness means a director will always wonder: Did I get everything done? Did I look at everything? Did I prioritize correctly? That uncertainty, Tim suggests, is simply part of the job.
7. References
- Tim Cain. YouTube video. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sYZCYDRQtSs