You do, however, develop a heartfelt love of sunlight... as these are the only moments of tranquility. Praise the sun \o/ + if you survive it, you are one of the toughest fuckers around.
When I get insomnia, I lie there like a vegetable for hours. And the next day, I have a hard time getting any work done. Tim just gets up and does stuff when he's at his worst, in the middle of the night? Jesus Christ. This is very high willpower.
I feel like the people who designed a certain dice roll combat dungeon crawler game would have greatly benefitted from this video. That was a wonderful insight into the creative process and how one thing leads to another. I will try implementing what I can learn from you moving forward.
It’s good practice to get out of bed and go do something low-key instead of just staring at the ceiling. Then when you feel tired go back and try again.
As someone who suffers insomnia fairly regularly, and cannot sleep easily without medicine, I can empathise with you here. Good for you for getting up and doing something. I just lay in bed dreading the next day or listening to podcasts for 6+ hours at a time.
Little projects/tools/toys are fun to learn and develop, and it is nice to see someone with decades of industry experience still making things like this. Helps to encourage the rest of us they we /don't/ need to jump right in to the deepend. Might forward this to the middle school coding class at work. Not had the time to really sit down as much as I want to, so I spend my lunchbreak making little games in excell with functions and VBA, or learning Zscript. One day I orta mess with the larger engines. Insomnia sucks. While quieter and less excitable than your awake vids, I enjoyed this 9 minute one. Hope you get a better sleep another night.
Thanks for sharing these with us, Tim, very cool! I especially like Dungeons & Dices, I can see it becoming a fun mobile game if you added some visuals. And it's always fun to see what sort of projects game devs are up to in their spare time. Been playing around with Unity for the last couple of months myself... by rebuilding Arcanum from scratch, incidentally. P.S. Typing this at 4AM.
Very relatable. I work in the Japanese games industry as an engine programmer but in my free time I play around with unity and learning 3d modelling in blender. Sometimes those toys turn into little games, sometimes they're just fun to make. It feels much more productive than just lying around failing to fall asleep at least.
The first thing I did in Unity was trying to make map/maze generator, but it was important to me so that it would be 3d with a lot of stairways so it wasn't particularly interesting otherwise and I don't believe I finished it :(
I love playing around with different side projects while I'm working on my main game. It keeps things interesting for my ADHD and I also learn a ton every time because I'm usually trying to work on something completely unconnected with my main project so it forces me to stretch as a designer. It does have the disadvantage of making it take a lot longer for any one project to get finished, but I'm okay with that :)
tim, have you heard of the wave function collapse algorithm? its a bit scary looking but it lets you generate dungeons from a tile set and example dungeons, like a dumb AI, it’s amazing
I really enjoyed this video. It was kind of reassuring to see that even a well known industry professional has prototypes like this just lying around. I have many projects like this that I use to learn different things and sometimes I put them on itch. Very neat insight here
Couldn't agree more that it's good to make "toys". I've made a couple of little game mods and it feels good to have even a small idea come out and be tangible
🤩Ohhh this is exactly what I meant by toys in the comment posted in the community section. I had missed this video. Very cool! Loving the dice roller. Sorry about the insomnia though. But can relate
I've been dealing with insomnia since I was 3 years old, I feel your pain. Being productive in those times is the best thing we can do though. I really liked your prototypes here! My passion lies in music production, usually hip-hop, but I like a wide variety of music personally. Appreciate you sharing, Tim! Hope you get more rest soon, it is good for us I hear. lol 🙏😁
One of my first attempts at making a PC game was copying Fallout's hexagon system in Perl when I was twelve years old. It was the wrong tool for the job, but I learned so much. A coding toy, if you will. Thanks for the continued inspiration.
You making a little indie RPG in Unity would be super cool. Please do keep making little videos like this that show off some of the stuff you're tinkering with in your spare time.
I like the multi step (pick and reroll) system more than just a single dice roll in RPGs. This add more player agency to the randomness. (player can choose risk to take)
I do the same thing. If at 4 am I can't get to sleep, I will get up and start writing something. Some of my best word came out of such periods. I think this is absolutely correct. Realisation of ideas is more important than ideas. It's a big, beautiful and messy process, but even if your realisation is just, like, writing a novel,or making videos, then you learn so many skills to compensate for the pieces you don't know.
Few more sleepless nights and one day one of those toys might end up as a proper Vogelware. I'd buy the first Humble Bundle it appears in in a heartbeat!
Ah man. One of my dream toy projects is to create prodecurally generated dungeons and whatnot. I might release such a system in Warcraft 3. I suppose I could always take away 50 hours or so from my daily average 4 hours of sleep to accomplish this!
Here is a list of questions, maybe some will be interesting to answer: 1. How much does the development tool shape the game? Do you think that huge engines like Epic and Unreal can be universal for everything? 2. Do you think there is a best formula for each genre? For example, 3D is rarely suitable for strategies and isometrics. Factorio is a great game and it's in 2d. 3. Have you tried VR, Half-life Alyx? Thoughts on these technologies? 4. With the advent of AI technologies that write texts and imitate voice, are RPGs possible in which there will be no written dialogue trees and quests? And let's say that NPCs are given only some parameters that describe their behavior. Everything else will be completely random and unique. Thank you
Cool idea to play poker with dice and convert the results into damage and health. Very creative! Man, the first thing I wanted to write was that you look like someone who could have fit in the Blair Witch Project movie, but then I heard insomnia. I wish you a good rest.
Dungeons & Dices for the win! That would be amazing on my phone or a Switch! Dungeon Generator is awesome too! Hope you have a better night Tim, insomnia sucks! Thanks for sharing!😄✌️
Your dungeon generator would be an interesting baseline for a rogue-lite blobber! The deeper (more levels you go), the harder the foes you encounter. Perhaps add a final room/boss to the algorithm for area transitions. Journey to the Center of Arcanum-not-Arcanum-for_copyright-reasons.
Solid advice. I remember making some very basic, half functioning games when I was younger and among all the things I could say were a waste of my time they are not among them. Even if they have no direct impact on my career there is always a benefit to challenging yourself and making things. I've seen you credited for working on the Bard's Tale construction set and was curious if you have any thoughts on that series or rpgs of that era in general. I personally think there was a sort of magic in a lot of those older games that is sort of lost today. Also I want to say thank you TIm. Fallout and Arcanum are easily among a fairly short list of what I could consider favorite games and they've brought me a lot of joy over the years. I really should play Temple one of these days. I think I've only avoided it because of the 3.5 ruleset since I'm more familiar with older editions. I shouldn't let that stop me since I do like the original module and the idea of a game based on it.
That GURPS character editor is really cool! Stuff like that really gets me really excited! Wonder what tools was used to make it? Really interested in UI & menu creation in general.
Hello Tim, no need to say insomnia is a pain! With those dungeon layout generation and that dicegame battle game, those both combined would be a fun little roguelike project. and the roguelike/lite scene is still active (from the graphical UI to the traditional ASCII art). so i have a question have you ever played Rogue or Nethack before?
Insomnia!😮 get some sleep when you need it!😪 I honestly enjoy these little toys you make, i honestly thought it was small toys like a tiny rubrics cube😅
Ah, sweet Insomnia at 3 in the morning, a great time to come up with crazy ideas or to have deep introspective conversation with your sleep paralysis demon... I myself have done both. Anyway thats a fun little dice simulator you made in unity. Do you think you can make the dungeon generator within a certain set of perimeters like having boundaries, certain room types and requirements for that room? That could be a cool tool for my current Pathfinder (Will give Gurps a shot after).
Sorry to go off the rails, I was just watching a youtube video about how DR WHO has snuck into video games. Didn't know Fallout had the Tardis as a encounter. Who's idea was that?
I don’t remember. We put our crazy ideas in to the random encounters, sealed behind minimum Luck requirements. I think it’s safe to say that anything in a random encounter could be considered non-canon, if you wanted.
Do you ever feel frustrated with Unity and similar tools, and just want to open a simple editor, a c/c++ compiler, and a library like SDL to do basic I/O (window, keyboard, mouse) and prototype like that? I often feel the hidden complexity of the tools eventually show their ugly face, and create more problems than they solve. I wonder what you think of that.
i feel the same sometimes, it’s good to just setup a simple SDL c++ template project to switch to when you get tired of unity or whatever, and you can switch back when you hit a limitation
@@CainOnGames I think it makes sense since you probably don't need visual programming tools too much. I've tried to do things with Unity and used it for some of the projects I was involved with. However, It seems that AAA video game industry keeps switching to UE5, so it feels more relevant to me to invest time specifically into mastering UE. Also, somehow UE feels easier to use with all the Blueprints. nodes etc.
I had insomnia last night as well. Trying to switch your brain off can be tricky sometimes. Have you ever tried the Godot game engine? It is open source, well made and quite feature rich.
Hey Mr. Tim Cain! Is it a myth that you can get true randomness in a dice roll that is digitally generated? Random number or dice generators accurate? Why did I hear this was not so?
Being productive is a good way to pass the time
No need to apologize Tim, insomnia is a beast.
You do, however, develop a heartfelt love of sunlight... as these are the only moments of tranquility. Praise the sun \o/
+ if you survive it, you are one of the toughest fuckers around.
Even disheveled at 3 am, barley together, he still ends with that brilliant and adorable smirk at the end😂
Funny thing. I'm watching this cause I can't sleep😂 Thank you Tim😊
I guess I should try making more little things. I have no motivation left to do anything, at least I could try to occupy my time with small things.
>can’t sleep at 3 am
>decides to just stay up and play video games
He’s just like me fr
When I get insomnia, I lie there like a vegetable for hours. And the next day, I have a hard time getting any work done. Tim just gets up and does stuff when he's at his worst, in the middle of the night? Jesus Christ. This is very high willpower.
I love how casual and natural this video is. Also completely relatable.
I feel like the people who designed a certain dice roll combat dungeon crawler game would have greatly benefitted from this video. That was a wonderful insight into the creative process and how one thing leads to another. I will try implementing what I can learn from you moving forward.
It’s good practice to get out of bed and go do something low-key instead of just staring at the ceiling. Then when you feel tired go back and try again.
As someone who suffers insomnia fairly regularly, and cannot sleep easily without medicine, I can empathise with you here. Good for you for getting up and doing something. I just lay in bed dreading the next day or listening to podcasts for 6+ hours at a time.
What medicine are you taking for insomnia?
Little projects/tools/toys are fun to learn and develop, and it is nice to see someone with decades of industry experience still making things like this. Helps to encourage the rest of us they we /don't/ need to jump right in to the deepend. Might forward this to the middle school coding class at work.
Not had the time to really sit down as much as I want to, so I spend my lunchbreak making little games in excell with functions and VBA, or learning Zscript.
One day I orta mess with the larger engines.
Insomnia sucks. While quieter and less excitable than your awake vids, I enjoyed this 9 minute one. Hope you get a better sleep another night.
Thanks for sharing these with us, Tim, very cool! I especially like Dungeons & Dices, I can see it becoming a fun mobile game if you added some visuals.
And it's always fun to see what sort of projects game devs are up to in their spare time. Been playing around with Unity for the last couple of months myself... by rebuilding Arcanum from scratch, incidentally.
P.S. Typing this at 4AM.
Very relatable. I work in the Japanese games industry as an engine programmer but in my free time I play around with unity and learning 3d modelling in blender. Sometimes those toys turn into little games, sometimes they're just fun to make. It feels much more productive than just lying around failing to fall asleep at least.
Чем больше я смотрю эти видео, тем больше мне хочется попробовать все это. Спасибо Tim! Желаю тебе крепкого сна!
The first thing I did in Unity was trying to make map/maze generator, but it was important to me so that it would be 3d with a lot of stairways so it wasn't particularly interesting otherwise and I don't believe I finished it :(
I love playing around with different side projects while I'm working on my main game. It keeps things interesting for my ADHD and I also learn a ton every time because I'm usually trying to work on something completely unconnected with my main project so it forces me to stretch as a designer. It does have the disadvantage of making it take a lot longer for any one project to get finished, but I'm okay with that :)
The concept of the dungeon generator would be so good for a private prison to torture some careless archaeologist in an endless enigma-solving.
You take care of yourself, buddy. Re the labyrinth cool for classic DOOM.
Dijkstra’s algorithm take me back to studying computer networking.
Lowering carbs and doing some fasting has an amazing effect on insomnia over time.
tim, have you heard of the wave function collapse algorithm? its a bit scary looking but it lets you generate dungeons from a tile set and example dungeons, like a dumb AI, it’s amazing
I really enjoyed this video. It was kind of reassuring to see that even a well known industry professional has prototypes like this just lying around. I have many projects like this that I use to learn different things and sometimes I put them on itch. Very neat insight here
You can't sleep but your soft spoken video hits so close to ASMR videos that I started to get tired, but it's 1pm here.
Couldn't agree more that it's good to make "toys". I've made a couple of little game mods and it feels good to have even a small idea come out and be tangible
> It's me, Tim, it's 3 a.m. and I can't sleep
Literally the face of indie-game dev 😥
Take care of yourself, Tim.
Even the venerable Tim Cain couldn't evade the checkbox vs radio button pitfall
Sorry about your insomnia, that really sucks
But seeing some cool things you make is awesome
🤩Ohhh this is exactly what I meant by toys in the comment posted in the community section. I had missed this video. Very cool! Loving the dice roller. Sorry about the insomnia though. But can relate
I've been dealing with insomnia since I was 3 years old, I feel your pain. Being productive in those times is the best thing we can do though. I really liked your prototypes here! My passion lies in music production, usually hip-hop, but I like a wide variety of music personally. Appreciate you sharing, Tim! Hope you get more rest soon, it is good for us I hear. lol 🙏😁
One of my first attempts at making a PC game was copying Fallout's hexagon system in Perl when I was twelve years old. It was the wrong tool for the job, but I learned so much. A coding toy, if you will. Thanks for the continued inspiration.
Your videos are always so informative and well-presented. Thank you for sharing your knowledge with us!🚀😎
I actually liked that this video is more quiet it is relaxing
Hope you’ll get better as soon as possible, Mr. Cain. These little things you created are awesome!
You making a little indie RPG in Unity would be super cool. Please do keep making little videos like this that show off some of the stuff you're tinkering with in your spare time.
I like the multi step (pick and reroll) system more than just a single dice roll in RPGs. This add more player agency to the randomness. (player can choose risk to take)
I was so scared starting game design being color blind and look at Tim colorblind as well 😂😂😂 yes thank god
I do the same thing. If at 4 am I can't get to sleep, I will get up and start writing something. Some of my best word came out of such periods.
I think this is absolutely correct. Realisation of ideas is more important than ideas. It's a big, beautiful and messy process, but even if your realisation is just, like, writing a novel,or making videos, then you learn so many skills to compensate for the pieces you don't know.
Thats some cool stuff he does 3 in the morning, for me 3 in the morning I just zombie mode my phone😀
This is incredibly relatable. I too was lost down a rabbit hole when I got the notification of your upload. Hope you find some winks!
Few more sleepless nights and one day one of those toys might end up as a proper Vogelware. I'd buy the first Humble Bundle it appears in in a heartbeat!
You're the best. Thanks for letting us into your life Tim. I'd probably watch you eating bacon.
Ah man. One of my dream toy projects is to create prodecurally generated dungeons and whatnot. I might release such a system in Warcraft 3. I suppose I could always take away 50 hours or so from my daily average 4 hours of sleep to accomplish this!
May I recommend Dicey Dungeon by the creator of Super Hexagon, pretty close to your experimentation on physic based dice roller game.
I feel this video. we need more 3am content in our lives
Here is a list of questions, maybe some will be interesting to answer:
1. How much does the development tool shape the game? Do you think that huge engines like Epic and Unreal can be universal for everything?
2. Do you think there is a best formula for each genre? For example, 3D is rarely suitable for strategies and isometrics. Factorio is a great game and it's in 2d.
3. Have you tried VR, Half-life Alyx? Thoughts on these technologies?
4. With the advent of AI technologies that write texts and imitate voice, are RPGs possible in which there will be no written dialogue trees and quests? And let's say that NPCs are given only some parameters that describe their behavior. Everything else will be completely random and unique.
Thank you
Ah, hello fellow insomniac! I slept 1 hour today.
Cool idea to play poker with dice and convert the results into damage and health.
Very creative!
Man, the first thing I wanted to write was that you look like someone who could have fit in the Blair Witch Project movie, but then I heard insomnia.
I wish you a good rest.
Perfect timing. Here I am, struggling to write a simple shader having just woken up after a long sleepless night.
Dungeons & Dices for the win! That would be amazing on my phone or a Switch! Dungeon Generator is awesome too! Hope you have a better night Tim, insomnia sucks! Thanks for sharing!😄✌️
Sleep well Tim Cain
Hey Tim! Thanks for the video, your little experiments are quite cool. Take care, insomnia sucks!
Your dungeon generator would be an interesting baseline for a rogue-lite blobber! The deeper (more levels you go), the harder the foes you encounter. Perhaps add a final room/boss to the algorithm for area transitions. Journey to the Center of Arcanum-not-Arcanum-for_copyright-reasons.
Great video! A perfect example of turning a negative situation into a positive!
Solid advice. I remember making some very basic, half functioning games when I was younger and among all the things I could say were a waste of my time they are not among them. Even if they have no direct impact on my career there is always a benefit to challenging yourself and making things.
I've seen you credited for working on the Bard's Tale construction set and was curious if you have any thoughts on that series or rpgs of that era in general. I personally think there was a sort of magic in a lot of those older games that is sort of lost today.
Also I want to say thank you TIm. Fallout and Arcanum are easily among a fairly short list of what I could consider favorite games and they've brought me a lot of joy over the years. I really should play Temple one of these days. I think I've only avoided it because of the 3.5 ruleset since I'm more familiar with older editions. I shouldn't let that stop me since I do like the original module and the idea of a game based on it.
Great vid, thank you for uploading.
Super interesting. Like little game development science experiments.
Thank you for the video and advice. Speaking of advice, do you have any suggestions for someone that wants to be a producer in the games industry?
That GURPS character editor is really cool! Stuff like that really gets me really excited! Wonder what tools was used to make it? Really interested in UI & menu creation in general.
respect the 3am vod
This my favorite video of yours
Hello Tim, no need to say insomnia is a pain!
With those dungeon layout generation and that dicegame battle game, those both combined would be a fun little roguelike project. and the roguelike/lite scene is still active (from the graphical UI to the traditional ASCII art). so i have a question have you ever played Rogue or Nethack before?
Insomnia!😮 get some sleep when you need it!😪
I honestly enjoy these little toys you make, i honestly thought it was small toys like a tiny rubrics cube😅
Ah, sweet Insomnia at 3 in the morning, a great time to come up with crazy ideas or to have deep introspective conversation with your sleep paralysis demon... I myself have done both.
Anyway thats a fun little dice simulator you made in unity. Do you think you can make the dungeon generator within a certain set of perimeters like having boundaries, certain room types and requirements for that room? That could be a cool tool for my current Pathfinder (Will give Gurps a shot after).
Hahah. Awesome. Nice hair my man.
I wish I could when I can’t sleep just take and make a small video game 😅
Sorry to go off the rails, I was just watching a youtube video about how DR WHO has snuck into video games. Didn't know Fallout had the Tardis as a encounter. Who's idea was that?
I don’t remember. We put our crazy ideas in to the random encounters, sealed behind minimum Luck requirements. I think it’s safe to say that anything in a random encounter could be considered non-canon, if you wanted.
Question: what is Fallout’s engine called? Think you refer to it as ‘Maya’ in the GDC talk, but not sure.
Thanks ! Bonne nuit !
We didn’t have a name for the engine. Maya is the 3D art tool that our artists used to make assets for the game. It’s made by Autodesk.
wow man. can you make asmr videos? you are so good at it
Do you ever feel frustrated with Unity and similar tools, and just want to open a simple editor, a c/c++ compiler, and a library like SDL to do basic I/O (window, keyboard, mouse) and prototype like that? I often feel the hidden complexity of the tools eventually show their ugly face, and create more problems than they solve. I wonder what you think of that.
i feel the same sometimes, it’s good to just setup a simple SDL c++ template project to switch to when you get tired of unity or whatever, and you can switch back when you hit a limitation
Staying classy in typical insomnia.
Any interest in starting a patreon to teach people? 😅
Hey Tim, hopefully you'll get a decent sleep asap. Do you ever use Unreal for prototyping your ideas?
Yes. It’s more powerful than Unity, but I find I can prototype faster in Unity.
@@CainOnGames I think it makes sense since you probably don't need visual programming tools too much. I've tried to do things with Unity and used it for some of the projects I was involved with. However, It seems that AAA video game industry keeps switching to UE5, so it feels more relevant to me to invest time specifically into mastering UE. Also, somehow UE feels easier to use with all the Blueprints. nodes etc.
I had insomnia last night as well. Trying to switch your brain off can be tricky sometimes. Have you ever tried the Godot game engine? It is open source, well made and quite feature rich.
Do you currently playing any game, Tim?
Hey Mr. Tim Cain! Is it a myth that you can get true randomness in a dice roll that is digitally generated? Random number or dice generators accurate? Why did I hear this was not so?
Flexing 💪
lmao this is relatable
You ever play Hoyle Card/Puzzle/Board Games?
You are beautiful 😍