Abstract
Problem: How do you handle the inevitable mismatch between a game's design requirements and the actual strengths and weaknesses of the team assigned to build it?
Approach: Tim Cain draws on decades of experience across multiple studios—where he both hand-picked teams (Arcanum) and was assigned random people (Fallout)—and compares game development to filmmaking to illustrate the problem.
Findings: There is no perfect solution. You can redesign the game around your team's strengths, cut weak areas and hope players don't notice, shore up weak features with strong ones elsewhere, take on extra work yourself (at the cost of burnout), or restructure hiring entirely. Each approach has serious trade-offs.
Key insight: Every team has gaps. The critical skill is recognizing those gaps honestly and making deliberate decisions about what to build, cut, or compensate for—rather than pretending the mismatch doesn't exist.
1. The Core Problem
Everyone has strengths and weaknesses—this is true for individuals, teams, and entire studios. In a perfect world, a team would perfectly balance all the skills a project needs. In reality, you always end up with a mismatch between what the game design requires and what the team can actually deliver.
Tim emphasizes this isn't about denigrating anyone. It's simply the reality of project-based work, whether in games, movies, or any other field.
2. Two Ways Teams Come Together
2.1. Hiring for the Game (Arcanum)
With Arcanum, Tim, Leonard Boyarsky, and Jason Anderson designed almost everything before hiring a single person. They then tried to recruit people who matched the game they were building. Even so, the game's design was so broad—with wildly different features requiring different kinds of expertise—that they still ended up with gaps.
2.2. The Team You're Given (Fallout)
At most studios, especially when working for someone else's company, you don't pick your team. People are assigned to you. Fallout is the prime example: it was a game built on the strengths of whoever happened to be assigned. Tim built three engines—isometric, 3D, and voxel—and the isometric one won because it was the best fit for the team's abilities, not because of some grand design vision. Had they made Fallout later, it would have been 3D, but mid-90s 3D was too primitive (low-poly, smudgy textures) and wasn't Tim's personal strength.
2.3. The Movie Analogy
Film directors typically pick their cinematographer, actors, editor, and script writers based on the project's needs. Imagine instead being assigned random people—getting a fresh acting school graduate instead of Leonardo DiCaprio for Titanic. You might get lucky, but probably won't. Game development routinely works this way.
3. Options When Your Team Has Gaps
3.1. Redesign the Entire Game
Look at your team's strengths and redesign from first principles. This will anger your publisher (who was promised a specific game), your leads, and team members who signed on to make the original vision. Almost nobody will be happy.
3.2. Cut the Weak Features
Remove design elements the team can't execute well. The risk: if you cut a design pillar—say, amazing gunplay in an action RPG—the whole structure crumbles. Even if it's not a pillar, players may notice the absence and wonder why it's missing. You can't exactly say in interviews "none of us were good at that, so we tossed it."
Tim notes he's watched interviews where he can read the subtext of a director and knows the real reason a feature was cut: they simply couldn't figure it out.
3.3. Shore Up Weakness with Strength
Keep the weak feature but compensate with excellence elsewhere. If the gunplay is mushy, surround it with cool weapons, perks, and mechanics. This is a viable approach Tim has seen work.
3.4. Do It Yourself
If you've done it before and you're better at it than the team, you can take on the work. But this leads to crunch, weekend work, and destroyed work-life balance. And if you're still weak in that area, the feature will still suffer.
3.5. Hire Per-Project (The Movie Model)
Lay everyone off after a game ships and hire fresh for the next game's specific needs. People hate this idea, but it's exactly how the unionized film industry works. A side effect: if you're hard to work with, you struggle to get hired, even if you're talented.
3.6. Build a Huge Company
A large enough studio probably has someone good at anything you need. But big companies are bad at moving people around efficiently, people hate being shuffled between projects, and many players find big-studio games "soulless" and "passionless." Audio designers know this pain especially well—thrown into projects at a certain stage, adding sound, then moved on.
4. The Unavoidable Reality
If you're working with a smaller team, Tim sees only two real options:
- Ship a game with some parts that aren't as good as you wish. You designed a feature expecting a certain quality level, but your team could only deliver less.
- Make a different game entirely. One that plays to your team's actual strengths, even if it's not what you originally envisioned.
Both have problems. There's no clean solution—only decisions you have to make deliberately.
4.1. This Applies to Solo Devs Too
Even solo developers have strengths and weaknesses. You're either making a game with parts that aren't great because you lack the skill, or you're making a different game than the one you truly want because you can't execute certain elements.
5. The Takeaway
This is the reality of any team-based project—games, movies, manufacturing, anything. The key is to match your project and team as well as you can, then make tough, honest decisions wherever the match falls short.
6. References
- Tim Cain. YouTube video. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=puYzP1Uax0k