Abstract
Problem: What weaknesses does a veteran game developer identify after decades of shipping titles?
Approach: Tim Cain candidly catalogs his four biggest professional weaknesses and two tasks he's good at but hates, drawing on concrete examples from Arcanum, Fallout, Temple of Elemental Evil, and Troika Games.
Findings: His core weaknesses are feature creep (failing to cut scope), poor game balance prioritization, limited dialogue writing ability, and weak contract negotiation. He also hated HR and bookkeeping despite being competent at both. Each weakness led to real consequences across shipped titles.
Key insight: You don't need to be good at everything — the secret is finding the intersection of what you like doing, what you're good at, and what people will pay you to do.
1. Feature Creep and Scope Management
Tim identifies his biggest weakness as the inability to pare away features. He consistently wants too many system mechanics in a single game. Arcanum was the "ultimate expression" of this — if anyone had an idea, it went in. The game ended up with races, attributes, skills, backgrounds, magic, tech, companions, summoned companions, and more.
Temple of Elemental Evil suffered the same problem. Tim argued against including paladins, bards, and druids because they were too specialized for a 12-person team working on an 18-month timeline. Atari pushed back and insisted on including them. The result: story and total play time suffered, and the game shipped buggy.
By contrast, he considers Outer Worlds correctly scoped. He recalls telling the team that if the complaint was "too short," he'd take that over "massively buggy" or "crashes all the time" any day.
2. Balancing Game Systems
Closely related to feature creep is his poor track record on balance. He freely admits he cares more about fun than balance, but acknowledges times where the imbalance was harmful:
- In Arcanum, the Harm spell was overwhelmingly the best spell — everyone took it
- In Fallout, nobody found the gambling skill worthwhile, and certain perks weren't worth taking
- Fallout had a level cap of 20 but granted two perks at level 18, giving players only two levels to use them
The root cause: when prioritizing bug lists, balance never ranks high. Crash bugs, progression blockers, and build-breaking issues always come first. Balance gets perpetually deprioritized.
3. Writing Dialogue
Tim initially thought he was a natural writer after the Fallout opening cinematic received praise. He wasn't. He wrote quest lists and design outlines for Arcanum but deferred actual quest writing to Leonard Boyarsky — which is why he can't answer many Arcanum quest questions.
When the veteran writers (Leonard, Jason Anderson, Chad Moore, Sharon Shellman) were all working on Vampire: The Masquerade — Bloodlines, Tim tried writing dialogue for Temple of Elemental Evil himself. The results were, by his own admission, "not very good at all."
He's since learned precision about his writing abilities: he can write lore text and cinematic narration effectively, but not character dialogue, conversation, or character development. A narrator doesn't need a personality — characters do.
4. Contract Negotiation
Tim's worst business skill was contract negotiation, a lesson learned painfully at Troika:
- The Arcanum contract specified physical boxed goods only — digital rights were excluded entirely. This meant no revenue from digital sales or merchandise
- All three Troika contracts (Arcanum, Temple, Vampire) failed to include the right to make unofficial patches. When publishers stopped paying for patches, Troika was legally prohibited from patching their own games — while fans accused them of abandonment
- Contract NDAs prevented them from explaining the situation publicly
The clause Tim wishes he'd included: IP reversion for non-use — if the publisher doesn't use the IP for five years, rights revert to the developer. His logic: if the IP is making money, the clause never activates; if it isn't, the publisher loses nothing. He illustrates this with a friend's story about negotiating a "no travel" guarantee backed by a first-class ticket clause — the company agreed because they claimed travel wouldn't happen, then had to pay up twice in the first year.
Tim also failed to negotiate royalties or sales bonuses for himself at Carbine Studios on WildStar, even though other employees there successfully did.
5. Things He's Good At But Hates
5.1. HR Management
Tim served as Troika's HR person for the last couple of years after Sharon Shellman left to be a stay-at-home mom. He was competent but despised every aspect: hiring paperwork, insurance, state and federal reports. Shutting down Troika — which was started by signing one paper and paying a filing fee — took eight months of contradictory state and federal paperwork that made his "programmer brain explode."
5.2. Bookkeeping
He also handled Troika's bookkeeping and bill paying, including catching fraudulent invoices from companies billing for services never ordered. He managed cash flow by timing payments around incoming revenue. Their accountant complimented his QuickBooks entries as "accurate to the penny and categorically correct." Tim's reaction: "I'm good at this... and I hate doing it."
The common question of "why not hire a business person?" had a simple answer: there was no money. The founders paid themselves half salaries for the first years. It was a catch-22 — you need money to hire someone to help you make money.
6. The Career Lesson
Tim's bottom line: it's okay not to be good at everything, and it's okay to dislike things you're good at. The secret is finding the intersection of three things:
- Things you like doing
- Things you're good at doing
- Things people will pay you to do
For Tim, that intersection was rolling up his sleeves and making games — programming and design. That's where he found career happiness, and he encourages others to find their own intersection.
7. References
- Tim Cain. YouTube video. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=v6a-neSq0VA