Abstract
Problem: What was it like developing South Park: The Stick of Truth at Obsidian Entertainment, and why did a game planned for a six-month ship take nearly three years?
Approach: Tim Cain shares his firsthand experience as a programmer on the project, covering the technical challenges, cut content, creative dynamics with Matt Stone and Trey Parker, and the chaotic overlap with Pillars of Eternity's kickstarter.
Findings: The game suffered from massive scope changes driven by Matt and Trey's evolving sense of humor, resulting in entire finished levels and systems being cut. Despite the turbulence, the project shipped successfully in March 2014 and did very well commercially.
Key insight: Video game comedy is fundamentally harder than TV comedy because developers live with the same jokes for years rather than weeks — leading to enormous amounts of completed, polished content being discarded when creators decide something is no longer funny.
1. Tim Cain's Role and Arrival
Tim Cain joined the South Park project in October 2011 as a temporary programmer, replacing someone moving to another project (Stormlands, which was later cancelled). The game was supposed to ship in six months. He was planning to move to Seattle afterward — that never happened, and the game wouldn't ship until March 2014, about two and a half years later.
He emphasizes that unlike his other games where he was project lead, on South Park he was primarily a programmer with limited visibility into the full picture. He did some design work, but his perspective is that of an individual contributor.
2. Technical Challenges: Onyx Engine and Consoles
South Park used Obsidian's in-house Onyx engine from Dungeon Siege 3, which explained why many C++ methods were prefixed with Ds_. This was Tim's first console game, which excited him.
2.1. Xbox vs PlayStation 3
The Xbox 360 was straightforward to code for — very similar to PC DirectX development. The PS3's Cell architecture with multiple processors was a different story. Tim's biggest frustration: setting a breakpoint didn't reliably stop execution at the right line. Multiple processors would cascade their stops, sometimes halting one line past where you wanted. His strategy: whenever a QA bug wasn't PS3-exclusive, he debugged on PC or Xbox instead.
3. A Huge South Park Fan
Tim was a long-time fan, remembering watching the original Jesus vs. Santa Claus Christmas special at Interplay's Thursday night gatherings. When it first aired, everyone assumed it was a one-off — then it became a show.
He acknowledges South Park's humor isn't for everyone. Some team members had issues with the content and either avoided the project or skipped the more disturbing tasks. Artists in particular had to spend days frame-by-frame modeling and animating things like Mr. Hankey or characters' private parts. As Tim puts it: someone's entire job was staring at their monitor making a dancing piece of poop look right.
4. Matt and Trey Changed Their Minds Constantly
This is the core tension Tim identifies. Matt Stone and Trey Parker would approve jokes, mechanics, and entire levels — then later decide they weren't funny anymore. The fundamental problem: TV comedy gets written, animated, and aired in a week. A game takes years. You see the same jokes hundreds of times during development, and what was hilarious in month one feels stale by month eighteen.
The result was staggering amounts of cut content — fully finished, coded, art-complete, debugged, and optimized levels that never shipped.
5. Cut Content That Could Fill a Second Game
5.1. The Cemetery / Goth Kids Level
A complete level set in a cemetery full of goth kids, featuring a werewolf fight and Michael Jackson. Tim describes it as "such a cool level" — all cut.
5.2. Christmas Town
An entire area north of Canada (the "North Pole"), separate from the already-shipped 8-bit Canada section.
5.3. The Stupid Spoiled Faction and Paris Hilton Boss Fight
Tim worked extensively on a faction of girls who idolized Paris Hilton, called "the Stupid Spoiled." Paris Hilton herself appeared as a boss with a special attack called "the vag blast." Tim recalls debugging this attack frame-by-frame with an artist, watching a baby shark and a pineapple spewing across the screen until they found the bug.
5.4. The A.S.S. Advancement System
Designer Jesse Farrell created an alternative character advancement system where all classes had names like "Smart Ass," "Kick Ass," "Dumb Ass," and "Jackass" — matching archetypes (spellcaster = Smart Ass, fighter = Kick Ass). Tim thought it was great and very on-brand for South Park. It wasn't approved.
5.5. Alternative Turn-Based Combat
Tim himself designed a combat variant where characters stayed wherever they ended their move rather than returning to formation. Running up to attack someone meant you stayed in melee range if you ran out of action points. It made the combat screen "all jumbled up" in a fun way. Also cut.
6. Chris Parker Gets It Across the Finish Line
The original producer was replaced partway through, and Chris Parker — one of Obsidian's five owners — stepped in. Tim praises Parker as someone who excels at the hardest part of game development: the final stretch. He references the industry joke that "the first 80% of development takes 80% of the time, and the last 20% takes another 80%." Parker was skilled at cutting through bureaucracy and organizing the messy endgame of bugs, optimization, and unexpected problems.
7. The Pillars of Eternity Overlap
In September 2012, Josh Sawyer and Adam Brennecke launched the Pillars of Eternity Kickstarter while South Park was still in development. Tim got involved — designing classes, the stronghold system, stretch goal recipes from his previous games. He started splitting time, eventually got moved to Pillars in 2013, then got pulled back to South Park because programmers are needed until the very end (unlike artists who can transition earlier). The day after South Park shipped, he swapped from Microsoft Visual Studio to Unity and was on Pillars full-time.
8. Reflections
Tim calls it a fun game that did "super well." It was his first console title and a welcome return to pure programming after his time at Carbine Studios. Despite the enormous amount of discarded work, he looks back on the experience fondly.
Source: Tim Cain — "Developing South Park: The Stick Of Truth"
9. References
- Tim Cain. YouTube video. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vQj5rJry4Pw