Classic Game Postmortem: Fallout

[Music] already okay I'm going to start to talk you guys are in the fallout one post-mortem I've been asked to ask you to silence your cellphone's please answer the review that will get mailed to you the evaluation at the end of the talk and I'm going to stop ten minutes early so people can ask question if you want to ask you a question you could just walk up to the mic on either one of the aisles my name is Tim Cain I worked on fall one when it was at interplay in four three half years from 94 to 97 with the producer the lead programmer and one of the several designers a Troma team I'm going to do a quick overview our soom everybody know is familiar with fallout Fallout began development in very early of 94 I don't exactly remember when development started because I was on actually assigned to other projects I was doing installers critical sound handler critical error handler sound toad for games like to don't keep in my spare time though I was working on an engine that kind of grew into fallout I realized in 94 is a long time so to remind you guys what was going on the tunnel opened between England and France and it was very popular a large comet hit Jupiter Jupiter was okay and friends debuted on NBC and was very popular and Phoebe with my favorite character so fallout shipped in October of 97 it took about three and a half years to make so put you in the mindset when it shipped the games on the shelf for total annihilation to the top-down RTS quake 2 sequel quake 1 very popular game you may be heard of it and UO had just shipped and this is one of the first pictures that comes up a few Google you oh this is Lord British being pwned by a bunch of players the team size for Fallout when we shipped when we started with just me when we shipped at about 30 people I say about 30 it never really had a staff assignment in any official way and that's what I'll talk to you about a few minutes one of the challenges in getting this game made the total budget was about three million again I don't really know it never had a budget I never did budget work it never had really a development plan made for it very unusual the way fall of Maine it was not your typical interplay game at the time fall it was being made interplay owned several licenses Star Trek and D&D and we had no license on Fallout in fact we had no design spec on fallout it was just me working on an engine we didn't use one of the many engines available we had the Infinity engine available to us from Bioware that was we were beginning work on torment I just kind of wanted to make my own engine nobody said no that's the way thing worked it the way things work could interplay in the 90s so I just started writing engine there was no budget like I said I was named the producer but I really didn't go to producer meeting they called me a project leader that just meant that I had to write a report once a week saying what was going on but I didn't go to producer meetings I didn't write any reports and I didn't do anything but sit in my office and work on a game engine there was no staff at least his beginning talked about how we staffed up a lot of work was done over pizza at night after people were supposed to go home it was the only time I was allowed to talk to people because they were a find out of project and other producers were getting upset if I came by and talked to their guys about any anything to what I would do is I buy pizza go sit in the conference room around 6:30 and anybody wanted to come in there and talk fallout they were welcome to do so there was no plan written for this game there was no spec threatened it was really a seat-of-the-pants kind of development so on this post mortem I've divided up into several sections if there's a takeaway I want you to have though it's that the team I worked with was absolutely amazing and I'll talk about them as I go through the post-mortem I'm going to try to call out individual accomplishments that people did I tried to remember who worked on what feature and who thought of what cool idea that made it into the game and even a few that didn't but it has been 18 years so I may not remember all of them and I know some people who worked on it in the audience and they're going to keep me honest the first thing I do because it's a common question I can ask is what influences were there on the game why did we end up making fallout the way we did I'll talk about books and games and movies that we really liked I'm going to talk about challenges the theme of this talk was almost the game that wasn't was that was almost never made it was almost canceled twice one of which you may have heard about one of which you almost certainly did it it was just a very rocky road to get this game proved and finally I want to try to if I have time I'll talk about the legacy some features I see in games now that were not common at all when following made so let me start with influences I broke those up into computer games paper and pencil and board games books and movies we were a very media spongy group people every day would talk about I just saw this movie or I just read this book and we're not even talking recent one kept going back to the 50s that people would come and go I just found this book in a youth bookstore we've got to put a town in based on this book so the computer games XCOM and if you hadn't played this game wonderful we all loved the turn-based strategy strategic combat in this game the first path of Fallout actually had very ex Tommy type combat until we got the gurps like them drops we'll talk about a big challenge in making this game Crusader came out while we're making this game it was one of the first 640 480 games was incredibly sharp compared to the 320 200 games coming out it was a big influence on us and one of the reasons that fallout was made 640 480 was crusader wasteland of course can't say this strongly enough followed us very much a spiritual successor to wasteland almost everybody who played the game or who worked on fallout had played wasteland when we started I had not played it so of course somebody gave me a copy said go home this weekend and I was addicted to it played it all the time it's kind of hard playing it on a more recent computer because it if you've ever tried playing it it goes too quickly you have to put in a speed limiter otherwise you shoot across the screen in you're trying to play but this game had everything in it that we wanted to have him fallout including no strict morality like the Ultima games had we we didn't we wanted the player to be good or evil do anything he wanted go anywhere he wanted and be only really restricted by how school while he wasn't playing again and then having mentioned the officer series as a game full of morality it was a big influence on our team for me especially this is a picture of Ultima 3 it was the first Altima game I played I'd never played one or two and it's just stuck in my head this is the way an RPG should be made and while fallout doesn't have a lot in common with Ultima it really guided how I thought about making an RPG paper-and-pencil games gurps I'll talk about this later when I talk about legal challenges and making this game but as many of you know fallout was based on groups for about the second and part of third year of its development and then we lost a license or we went we stopped using the license however gurps as a generic role-playing system really influenced our game in thinking of classless skill-based characters and no longer giving people stereotypes to play in the form of character classes whiz war it's a great board game if you haven't played it great beer and pencil game what's fascinating about this game is every time you play it you shuffle the board pieces together and we would play this a lot every evening while eating dinner which we could have worked a lot and we just loved the fact that we could plate every night and it felt like a completely different game especially as we made additional cards and it's extended the game well past with the original designer had ever intended and of course camel world for all of you who played this game especially when it first came out in 1978 it was not the most balanced RPG but it was just really fun and I had a really good spirit to it and we love the idea of mutations and the wide variety of things you could run into when you're playing game as for books there were three big books and influence s chemical for Leibowitz excellent Hugo winning sci-fi novel basically about how people would cherish technology after a war occurred they were pretty much d this was part of the basis for the Brotherhood feel and follow on the I'm Legend book which turned into a Mega Man the Charlton Heston movie this book was how a individual would handle being the last thinking he was the last survivor on earth this is why and fallout 1 when you're voted to leave the vault we really wanted that sense of isolationism that sense of you're the lap you're the only person out here in the wasteland who's quote a normal person and we wanted you to feel like special in that way and finally there was a book and a movie called long beach which talked about how community would survive past a nuclear war thinking that they were the only community and they were very isolated and then what happens when they do get approached in this case it was a u.s. sub beaches near this Australian town and how those two groups interacted for movies road warrior that's a gimme if you played fallout you're see the jacket is in game the guns in the game the dogs in the game a boy and his dog that wasn't the dog this one was basically had the underground vault we used to talk about how mutations didn't have to be obvious because in this case spoiler warning the dogs telepathic it's actually a bit smarter than John Johnson so we like to talk about how the all the mutations wouldn't be obvious that didn't really make it into the game we decided to make the ghouls very obvious than the super mutants very obvious but the day after this was an eighty miniseries that talked about how rapidly civilization would collapse even the day after a bomb Falls and that was something that's very much woven into Fallout we just assumed after the war there was no civilization left it was every man for himself and there would actually be a few vestiges of civilization that would survive a nuclear war Forbidden Planet this was especially the art director Leonard Bernanke's idea that the robots in Fallout would be based or all the technology would be based on technology that the 50s projected into the future so that's how far out got explained the people were coming onto the team we didn't want to feed Terminator style robots we wanted to see Robbie the robot style robot we wanted to see Forbidden Planet style Reagan if we did wear guns at all and we often went back to this movie as a visual touchstone one no that is far more important visually city of lost children you may recognize that ocular it's the power armor ocular that's on the front cover of the ball box the art staff fell in love with this movie and would play it on continuous tape in their office just everything about this movie they love the steam-powered you know tack see how everything looked like it was had large knobs and big dials and they wanted that look and fall out and finally there's an old still film maintained it's a film but it's made up of mostly stills called La jetée it's a French film which talks about how civilization would try to recover from a horrible disaster possibly nuclear a possible biological the art director especially loved the look of the technology in this movie and he would watch it frequently now I want to talk about the challenges and making fallout there were a lot and I tried to put them chronologically and then I realized they really broke down into four big groups they're quite different and that would be team challenges of how we structured the team as it grew and how we divided up work design challenges things we argued over when we were trying to make the game technical challenges which in 90s I would on board some of you are going to be talking about the difficulties of writing to a super VGA game and dealing with 206 colours in a time where that felt like that was an amazing amount and now we don't even have to think about small number of pixels or should small number of colors and finally a number of legal challenges hit the game which almost were going to the game from shipping so I'll talk to open up the two times where the game was almost cancelled so for the team challenges the first one is that we had absolutely no resources for this team for the first six months it was just me sitting in a room working on an engine I have no idea why this picture was taken I have no memory of this I know I was stressed if you look carefully the pictures these three stress-relieving objects my pink stress ball a miniature tequila bottle with the sombrero and a tic action figure so this probably is taken while I was working on bugs after six months I got assigned a script er and an artist and they were both named Jason some people refer to it as Tim in the Jason's which sounds like a really awful band name the artist I had nothing to tell him to do because we hadn't picked a shanwa yet all I had was an engine I'm also color blind so I couldn't even tell him this is the color probably what to do I think he ended up making rocks and trees and grass for a few months almost all of us we threw out because we don't have them in Fallout sometime at the beginning of year one we really started to get more people many of these people worked during year one by coming after work and just brainstorming with us or try to come up exciting ideas and try to make assets that we could actually use in at the engine I was making during the second year we actually bloomed up to almost 15 people we gained our first lead designer Scott Campbell who I think left by the end of year two and then we got the lead designer office own keep Chris Taylor and he took the game through to completion most of the people are in here but records photographic records of this era are spotty at best and I had to scour I have no photographs and I had scour than that even to find this team groups photo finally in year three we had about 30 people this is a majority of them there are a few people aren't pictured that primarily worked on fallout but were actually assigned to other groups fallout was not under black aisle at the time black aisle got created and about the last eight months of fallouts existence so follow was produced under enterprise moniker and then followed to was done under black aisle but fergus provided us with a lot of people right at the end to let us get a lot of assets done that we otherwise wouldn't in time to make the early development game was really we're off I actually have a video here of the original prototype with a bunch of art stolen from other games being enveloped by interplay this prototype actually is on the fallout 1 disc if you look at an extra folder you can actually play it I don't know why I included it otherwise just to show people what the game would've turned out if it'd just been me for three years we had a lot of trouble conveying the idea of this game to other people especially we hired them it was in the first year we didn't know what we were making after we did know what we're making the team expanded every year to be about double the size of what the reform was hard to explain to those people as well as the marketing what fall it was about we had a dark humor style it was hard to convey we had a sort of isolationist it wasn't it didn't seem like the game would be fun when you described it someone that sounded so morose but when they played it they always thought it was a lot of fun and I had trouble expressing that to people especially administration who at least on one occasion just wanted to cancel it because they thought it was too nebulous what we were making so Chris Taylor made a wonderful vision statement but I'm going to include in the it's not part of the PowerPoint but long included in the doctor you can download when you get the talk later but I included like a page of it here he basically gave 15 reasons why you wanted to play this game and he started with mega violence it goes on to there two things like playing a game your own way deciding whether you want to be good or evil and living with the consequences and that became very difficult later when we were trying to explain why you could kill children so I'll let you read this on your own so another challenge we had with this team was we all work very long hours because it was a very small team most of would have mine effect most people just came in and worked nights and Saturdays all on their own where this became a problem was in the last say six months of this game we had to go into crunch mode since everybody was already working six-day weeks we started working every day for the last year half a year was being made people were pretty much at work every day for 12 to 14 hours a day we joke about it now when I see some of those guys but there was like six months where I never saw a movie or TV show a grocery store a lot of people just started taking their clothes to cleaners because they weren't even home long enough to do laundry you live with these people more than they live with their own families it was awesome because we're in our 20s and didn't know any better I don't know if we any of us could do that now an awesome thing I wanted to point out here though that happened was in the last six months the follow was being developed very a lot of the people who are into a volunteered to come in on the weekends and work for free and this is in an environment where if you came in if you work you a member at interplay you could come in on the weekend and get time and a half or even double time by working on a signed project but these people would come in and work on fallout for free I just wanted to point that out because I was flabbergasted that there were these guys who didn't make a lot of money and they're like nope I'd rather get all the bugs out of your game and come and work on the game I'm assigned and I just thought that was amazing so I want to talk about some of the design challenges we hit and I've hit upon this one under work times already but basically the setting for this game was very elusive at the beginning that prototype you saw gave no hint for setting so we really wanted to do a fantasy game a lot of people came on board to know we can do something that's better than D&D we can do something that's you know our own twist on on fantasy I think everybody who makes an RPG wants to do that we quickly threw that out because there were so many other fantasy games being developed and this is the one choice we made unwittingly that actually saved us from being canceled the first time I'll talk about that in just a second our second idea was epic you started in the modern world you were thrown back in time you killed the monkey that would evolve into being humans you went through space travel you went to the future that was ruled by dinosaurs they were then exiled to a fantasy planet where magic took you back to the original timeline that you restored to full and came back to the mountain world to save your girlfriend it's weird even hearing me talk about it now but we really were going to go with this and I think one of the other producers kind of slapped me and said there's no way you're going to get the storyline made it's not going to get approved you could work on up for years and no one will ever do it I sometimes wonder what it would be like if we had done this game and I believe Scott Campbell the designer at the time may still have written down somewhere I'd love to see it to see what we thought was cool you know 18 years ago from that though we really liked the alien idea that was part of the whole space travel and we all loved XCOM so we actually narrowed it down to a storyline involving aliens invading the planet and taking over the entire planet except one city so you'd go back to that city which is kind of your home base and you leave the city to go fight the alien this isn't what we went with but it was kind of what how I'm giving an idea of how it morphed into fallout the idea of the vault they use at their home base and went out into the wasteland we finally one day decided we wanted to try to do wasteland 2 so we went to post-apocalyptic and we spent the next year trying to get the waste line to license from EA they never gave it to us but we got so enamored with the idea of making a post-apocalyptic game that we couldn't stop working on it we just liked it so much that we just changed over all the the game post-apocalyptic and said we will we didn't get the waist line license we're just you know make it our own so we finally limpets apocalyptic and this is when the first near cancellation occurred for Fallout interplay acquired The Forgotten Realms and the plains gate dandy licenses in late 94 and at that time fallout came up at proof your meeting as considered for cancellation because at the time it only been developed for less than a year they thought it was a B product in fact the dirty little secret interplay what they consider to be product up an assignment shipped they had thought once it shipped they were going to get all the people on the team and move them onto real projects like to send down the mountain they also thought that that fallout was going to be way too competitive with the other games were on the Shelf they did not want to see their D and E games they're losing dollars to the side projects effectively the employers also working on so marketing was convincing Brian Fargo to cancel it because they were too competitive in the end I went into Fargo's office and I basically begged I got down on my hands and knees and I begged under the let's make this game it was just a few of us I convinced him it was tiny budget I didn't know what we could balloon to 30 people and I showed him the work we had done and I'm inmates he was he brian has a lot of positive qualities I didn't think he'd see from that prototype what we were going to end up with but he did and he ended up not cancelling the game the second big design challenge we had was deciding what view to do at the time first-person games are coming out and were considered super immersive that word has been used now for a decade and a half and I'm still not sure what it means we wanted to go third-person because it was more strategic to play a turn-based combat system that way a lot of people call Fallout isometric just to get really pedantic it's actually Cavalier oblique you can see the the the tiles on the ground are not at a perfect 45 degree angle they're actually tilted 30 60 we did that for a reason when we laid down the hexes that we're actually going to put on the game that put the hexes in a nice pattern that made it easy to do calculations from mouse clicks in the heck space which back then you didn't have a lot cycles to waste and if we rotated them at this direction you could do it with just a division by two which we do in a shift and condition so we ended up picking that angle for that sole reason and then the art director liked it because he thought buildings looked better at 30 60 s and at 45 degrees so he bristled every time somebody said we were in isometric game so like I said they were good for a rotation they're also really good for distance calculation you only have six rotations you pick two points on the screen it's very easy to calculate how many X's are between them the worst thing about this was it's really bad for up-and-down movement because you can only go along with six directions and people went up and down they would wiggle back and forth we never really came up with the solution of that and the ship with it obviously people didn't think it was that awful but the art director absolutely hated that and he wanted to go with a 12 rotation system but then there's really no good way to make someone walk from one hex to a hex to up so I Nix that for anyone who played the game that first came out there was a game timer in it the player to finish the first question a set timer the entire game would be fit would fail this was something that we put in to give the game a sense of urgency but it was really controversial even among the team half of us loved it half of us hated it we would argue about it we argued about it until the day it shipped and as soon as it shipped out the door we made a patch that actually put that out if there's one thing I could go back in time and change it would be to remove any time quest from fallout I just didn't like the Foss sense of urgency and I also felt like the player had this sense he had to rush through the game and miss fun things to do because of that stupid water chip timer a big problem we have I told you were very much media sponges in the inland team everybody wanted to put their own cultural reference camp into the game whether it was a TV show they liked or a movie did they like ruin other games they were playing they wanted to put little inside jokes into the people playing the game would go oh I know what they're talking about I was worried that not only would loose players and we had that but RPGs tend to sit on the shelf for years and I was afraid we'd look dated so I made a rule and the rule for that was if you put in a joke or cultural reference if the player didn't get it they shouldn't even know that that joke or cultural reference was being made and this image from well this is one of the perks you get for unarmed it's if you hit someone at automatically come for critical hit it's called the Slayer that makes perfect sense to somebody who just is saying hey look the good name for someone who always gets critical hit it's actually in that way because Chris Taylor was a huge fan of Buffy the Vampire Slayer and won at least one perk in there with the name Slayer another example that probably nobody would know about because it's so deeply embedded was gizmo which is one of the main characters who had voice over and knife regenerated head he was one of the people who could fight for control of a place called junk town well gizmo is a good name for somebody running a place called junk town a lot of people think it's a reference to the movie gremlins it's actually an inside joke it was the name of the skunk i owns when i was 12 years old so now you know there's a ton of references like that and fallout but just being able to pull them out I probably don't even know most of the ones that my own team put in because like I said they buried them so deeply that unless you knew what the inside reference was you'd never know it was even being made naming fallout was very difficult it was not named fallout the beginning exact same vault 13 in fact the batch file for building a game always generated vault 13 dot exe and even after we renamed it there was just the last line of the batch file just said copy you fallout that 13 dot exceed a fallout that Exe we really like this name we thought it was science fiction II and kind of mysterious but marketing didn't like it because it didn't give any sense of what the game was about they suggested things like aftermath and survivor and the wonderfully generic post-nuclear adventure which we actually put at the bottom of for a while what really happened was Brian Fargo took the game home he's president of interplay he took it home and played it over the weekend and came back and with the CD on my desk and said you should call fallout and it was just a brilliant name it was one word that we didn't think would be abbreviated it was it captured kind of the essence of the game and he was really good at naming games by the way so we actually switch the name fallout justin probably like four or five months before the game shipped we did most of the box cover the stuff I'll talk about that we wanted to name the system as well because at the time people were not only naming their games but the naming the system used in the game and when we lost two girfs everybody felt like we needed to have a name for the system and since the system we eventually developed had these seven stats agility charisma endurance lock intelligence perception and strength so I said we'll just put them in that order and it sells a slips that'll be the name of our system that lasted a day until Jason Flynn one of the other designers came in and said you know you can rearrange those letters to make the word special when everybody likes that a little better I've never forget a forgiving him for that Diablo fun game I loved it thorn in my side because it came out in 96 and it was real-time multiplayer isometric RPG I had to go to lots of meetings with marketing and the administration they wanted fallout to be multiplayer and real-time now we've been making it for two and a half years that was not going to happen but there were a lot of meetings and it came really close and it actually slowed down development for a while because we had to do feasibility studies of rewriting the code to make it real-time and rewriting a net batting a network layer into the game finally I persevered and even though there were severe doubts in the marketing projections for the success of the game they let us stay with single-player and turn-based so I'm going to jump in from the technical challenges this is a little more it hasn't aged well some that problem we're going to bring up people going to go why is this even an issue flat memory back when I started in 94 PC games are still made with 64 K chunks so you had near and far pointers you couldn't use a lot of memory the problem was if we chose a super VGA mode we needed more than the 64 K chunk a new compiler came out Tom had flat mode I chose to use it it meant we didn't have to deal with expanded or extended memory which is you ever playable games you have to tweak those memory drivers to get that just right we didn't have to worry about that we also didn't have to worry about those near and far pointers anymore the downside was all of the old code we had we just had to rewrite it for a way so most of the code and fallout is was written physically - for Fallout except for a couple pieces that I'll call out later that we grabbed from other games mainly because we couldn't go back to the hold library of interplay stuff pop code we pick super VGA which at the time was amazing 640 480 256 colors I mean who could have who could ever want more my artist wanted more they actually made all of the sprites using alias and they made it high resolution and they made it with 16-bit color that meant we had to take those all the animations they did all the free models reducing them sprite files in 6 rotations and cut out 4 colors reduce the colors from 16 to 256 but then they want to color cycling so we had to take like 16 20 colors out of that so we could reserve for color cycling so we actually redounded like 230 colors and then there was another problem we ran into a super VGA which is every video card that was been manufactured had a different way of doing 640 480 256 color not just the video card you had to know what chipset was on the video card so somebody said I have a trident card you had tried it 9600 you had to know did you have a trident 9600 chipset a chipset B or chipset C and they all Bank switched to berry GA in a different fashion and you had to write the banks which separately and detecting the cards were very difficult sometimes you just had to ask the person when they found up the game what card do have a near machine and people didn't know that luckily in late 94 basic came out standardized super VGA we rewrote all of our code to that standard pretty much is the reason probably game runs today is because we go through these standardized interrupts I doubt if you could play the game if you had to pick an old video card off of a list of 20 and hope that it matched whatever the modern specs were we chose sprites obviously I'm sorry we originally thought about doing it polygamy but the tests we did couldn't give us a level of detail we wanted but having this many sprites are led to an incredibly large footprints and it was difficulty cashing them in to this day that's why sometimes chugs just because it had to load in a sprite before it can display polygons were just trying to become popular and believe it or not we actually argued whether the industry was going to go polygonal or not people thought no spikes are just rights urges the way they're always going to do a polygons are fad obviously that was wrong the talking heads the when you're playing a game you see those heads to pop up and and they're one free two-tailed and they have voiceover this is Leonard barosky's idea but they were pretty much implemented by another artist named Scott Rowan Heiser Scott would actually form a clay head heated in a kiln and then he would sit there with a 3d scanner a point scanner and hit point by point by point by point by point on his head for hours days headed and until we had a 3d model which looked like the one in the upper left there then we would add the polygons at the color and and light it that entire process on here just to go from the clay model to the one at the bottom right took about eight weeks and then it was another two or three months to give all the phony matching done for all the voiceover that was done it was probably for man months per head which is why we only had I think it doesn't there was no way we could put more in we wanted the original design I think we wanted 40 or 50 of them but after we did a couple we realized that was not going to happen followers were not in the original spec for the game and we had no time to code it when the idea came up that hey why don't we have these guys follow you around and help you out especially in tough areas so the scripters on the team decided they could do it all on scripting we put in a few I think dogmeat was the first one and then we added Ian we sent it to QA and Qi loved it it tested really well it's one of the best features we have had people imagined that it was like this this is what was like when they're fighting through war the waistline with their follower when actuality was more like that and if you ever had en in your group and you let him have the uzi he would shoot it in burst mode and he didn't care where you were standing or where the other followers were standing and we never fixed that because it wasn't done in code and there was just no way to expose the appropriate AI to script we literally don't have the time to do it so that's why the AI is what it is and I'm kind of embarrassed about that this is one of my funnest talked technical challenges we had one day I figured - it wasn't a replacement they came and said hey we want to put the windows 95 logo on the bottom of the box so people know it's Windows 95 compatible I said sure that's my problem could we test it on every platform that's out and you know winter 55 when NT there's some other windows we tested on and it all worked fine but we failed cert because it worked on Windows NT I want to repeat that we failed certification for 95 because it worked on Windows NT now what the certification said was it should fail gracefully on Windows NT and I remember calling Microsoft and saying it fails so gracefully that it doesn't fail at all and they're like nope you can't do that so Chris Jones the other lead programmer he just made he just recoated the Installer to fail it would detect that you're on empty and just stop in hindsight is really good he did this because all the windows that came out all the windows platforms that came out after 95 were based on NT so nothing you could never play fallout after 95 if you if we didn't make sure that hand installations to work maybe just copy all the files over my hand and they worked as fine we wanted a Mac version we started with a DOS version the Amana windows 95 version we wanted a Mac version and it turned out I had put all the the OS specific calls in one set of functions and I bound up into a library which meant fallout really isn't written to run and off or Windows 95 it calls a library called Ganahl which stands for good knowledge mount windows and everything would go through that the Mac was literally developed in a weekend one of them active programmers went home rewrote they can all library for Mac and we brought it back and they had Macintosh running in the next he took it on Friday we had Mac running on Monday so I hired he was too busy to come over on the team so I hired one Mac developer and he's responsible for everything that went in to the Mac side he did the Installer he made sure the features work the efforts worked he also did something that you probably have never heard about and I insisted upon because I'm stupid I wanted the save game to be interchangeable among all free platforms talk window 95 in Matt and Mac meaning you could be sitting at window 75 save your game out to a floppy pull the pull out floppy out walk into a Mac machine put that floppy and and load it on the fallout Mac there or fall yeah and it would run which meant he had to do all the big endian little-endian swapping on the savegame I don't know why one of this nobody ever used it it was in the manual nobody's ever come up to me and say I'm so happy you put in interchangeable save games and it made Tim Kings life just hell and I've apologized to him for that Lane jumps quickly the legal challenges I'll talk about one that you've probably all heard of fallout where there is any based on the group's license we got it during our second year I would want to really wanted it I play groups all the time I love that system I thought it'd be great to have a groups RPG finally on the market on however probably but I read they begin to the second year maybe the beginning of the third there was problems with them not like in level of violence in the game we were very violent they didn't like the art style those skill deck cards with the cartoon zona they hated those and actually was just it was literally too late to change any of these things we thought we were going to be done in six eight months is actually going to be a little more than a year but we couldn't possibly change it so at this point I figured we were going to be canceled the discussions with the with Steve Jackson games went above my pay grade so it went into closed-door meetings over the administration building and the word coming out was that we were cancelled and we were going to be moved to torment or sand down the mountain or the other dandy games being made but what happened was girls was torn out I was asked to rewrite the gurps combat system Chris Taylor was given about a week to redesign it and I was given a week past that to code it and if we could do that then we would not be canceled so I'm not exactly sure how we did it my memory of that period is very vague I know we drank a lot of soda we were there all the time I know we smelled bad too but we did it in two weeks we redid all the combats in the skills and christed the entire Fallout game that you're playing with the exception of perks were done in two weeks music really briefly the Ink Spots what you're hearing at the beginning we wanted that in the game because it was a nice 1940s 50s sounding group it was also my grandfather's favorite group and the first concert my mother attended when she was six years old we went to EMI and we wanted excuse me baby I don't want to set the world on fire they wanted a ton of money for it and they would negotiate very slowly all I remember several months went by before we finally heard back that we weren't going to get it so we ended up just picking a new one not quite at random but really quickly off that our back catalogue that's got maybe and it turns out that that when you actually play the ending the starting and ending leave the fallout actually seems to fit the tone a lot better if you listen to the words it's about somebody wondering if the other person is going to miss them women are around anymore which is perfect for Fallout we had trouble with ratings I don't know why this was we were submitted 40 we never said we were T our few specs we have or caught on our mega levels of ultraviolence and blood and drugs and violence and prostitute they saw that of course and then and said you can't have T and boom we got an M rating we didn't mind that I think marketing was worried it would reduce the the people who would be able to buy it this led to the child killing controversy we allowed it we just said look we're going to have kids in the game if you shoot them it's a huge penalty to karma you're really disliked there are holes there places at once out of you there people shoot you on sight and we thought people can decide what they want to do there was a small problem with that and that if you ever get a burst mode with a gun you sometimes shot children in and Burghley discourse contributed program rating however Europe could no they wouldn't even sell the game if there were children in the game we didn't have time to read all the quests what we just did is we just deleted kids off the disk so things are there that reference children but you never seen each five time I'm going to try to really briefly go over what I think are some of the legacy of Fallout some of the things that I see in other games that we shipped in 97 it was really seen in airplay as a big risk that paid off this is what was said to me constantly by people even though I don't really think it cost that much I'm not sure what the risk was that they took but that's what the phrase and I was heard but when I play games over the next year's I started seeing a lot of things that fallout had in them so I thought I wanted to look at it we always said we wanted an open-world we thought at that before the word sandbox came out I think if all was made today people would say what's a sandbox game we what we we just said we don't care where people can go they can go anywhere they want if they go into some area that's too strong for them there get killed and in order not learn not to go in there yet and they look forward to the challenge of being able to go back we wanted a nonlinear story so the the player could choose wherever he could go and the story would still unfold and so the onus was on us for making sure that the stories could unfold that way and what we did was we said every quest in the game and all the story arcs that occur in the game had to have multiple solutions and the manner we always said was there should be way to fight your way through it there should be a way to talk your way through it and there should be a way to sneak your way through it and sneaking wasn't a stealth it could be sneaking up behind a or walking up behind a guard pickpocketing the key and then using that get in through an unguarded area in the back we always made sure that at least two of these were available in all the quests and usually all three on the main quest because of that we came up with the idea of multiple endings so the game would actually track whenever you did something in a game we'd store off but you had done that thing and the quest and short story arcs in the game would have different endings based on that and then when the game ended itself that's when we came up with the idea of hey we're going to show you slides and say because you acted this way here's what's happening to these people that you you know I've been playing this game with for 40 hours you know here's what happens people jump down or shady sands or the hub and some of them are pretty horrific they were like you know these people all died because you you know stuck their only source of water from them and we heard later that people would get these slides and then they'd replay the whole games they didn't want to see that fly they couldn't live with the idea that they had killed off an entire population I like that we didn't like morality like I said I loved Ultima games but I felt like they were too they impose too much of a you will be a good person and I'm like I don't mind if people want to play badly I just want them to live with the consequences of whatever they do this is a big thing in the game it came right out of the wasteland quest where you're trying to help the little boy at the very beginning a little orphan who's lost his dog but when you find the dog the dog is rabid and you have to kill the dog I love that quest because it made the player feel bad and made him wonder did he do a good thing or did he do a bad thing I love that kind of stuff in games the perk system like I told you Chris Taylor made the entire game except for perks and two weeks Brian Fargo took the game home played it for a weekend came back and said I love it except when I go up a level skill points on enough for me to do so Chris said hey I have an idea what we could do where for ones that would make a perk mesh of cool things you can add to your character based on prerequisites what's already in your character it was really easy to code was very successful QA love that they could make characters that were different than the guy sitting right next to me QA and they could play the game very differently because of it and I think Chris thought of it in a day and I implemented the next day so we live ahead perks in two days I two days after Fargo said there's not enough in here and he was playing it again the next weekend and he said great this is exactly what I want in the game I missed that rapidity of iteration in game development years later I was working in temple vomit weevil and the guys who from Watty told me that the perks and fallout influence the feats in D&D version 3 and then somebody told me later that the specs and Wow we're influenced by the feats and D&D version 3 so I'd like to think that if I'll just wave weaves its way to the industry and of course perks were added to oblivion and Skyrim after the follow license we went to Bethesda so I like to think that there's tiny pieces of that in there bethesda games well called shot we added those because we really like the variety of added combat you could have one attack mode but you could see different effects on on a creature depending where you shot them you might shoot their leg out and their crippled or you shoot them and they blind them it also let us get our humor in if you check any called shop screen and fall out there's usually one that's a little funnier I think this is the one with the you can't ruin the utter there's always a growing based one in robots was called the hydraulic activator we decided you know for the faces of vo and that really struck a chord with people they really felt more connected to the game when they could see these related tale faces and they heard famous actor voices coming out of them they were it was a one of the best feedbacks we got in the game and people said they wanted to see more of it really expensive to do not just for the CG but also getting these actors in other studio but I think it was it was worth it and paid off and beat music I'm a huge fan of it I didn't want a standard game music and fallout I kind of wanted something I think I wrote this next one wrong I didn't want something you listened to I wanted something you heard something you would play the game miss when it wasn't there but not necessarily be humming it while you were playing and I wanted to underscore that the game was desolate and have a sad undertone to the thing again marketing wasn't sure they came in a few times that are you sure you want this music because it's kind of depressing I said if you played the game it's everybody's dead in the world you know it should be depressing the development process that I think paid off really big is that vision statement that Chris wrote was really great at getting all these people on the same page when we were talking about the game with them we also ended up did reuse software that OS abstraction library was awesome it really paid off it went into about a dozen other interplay games after fallout shipped it was in game diverse from Starfleet Academy - max - a Thomas Bomberman I mean why are we different games well use that we ended up using a movie player there was written in-house and was in use in a lot of different interplay titles as well we also we ended up pulling a script engine out of Starfleet Academy when we gave them the abstraction library we took their script engine and then that percolated to a bunch of different games as well the last thing I want to talk about the game we treated fallout as an experience from the moment you saw the box which was fashioned to look like something you would find in the world fallout was supposed to look like a lunch box I'm not sure that ever came across the manual was a Survival Guide that was issued to you when you were born in the vault it was things like you know when you eventually get outside how you how will you deal with radiation and viruses and giant at logo this is not the interplay logo we redid it because we've got a 50 style of the game this got adopted in putting most of the interplay games as shift subsequent to fallout the interface itself was designed to look like old found pieces of technology from the game world our splash screens themselves look like things you find this is a comic book that I don't know why someone makes a comic book about the vault dweller being attacked but there is even our web page there was no division of the company that worked on webpages so we just took it over and made our own we made it look like you know found old art there was a guy on the team who did the level design scott Everett's for the game and then he turned around at night and he'd put do all of our webpage design um and that's one thing I want to tell everybody this came with amazing to work with they were incredibly talented they worked really long hours just insane hours and there were a lot of egos on the team if you ever find yourself on a team like this stay with it and we all were making the same game and I've worked on different games since then that maybe not everybody on the team was trying to make the same game everybody who worked on fallout making the exact same kind of game there was no disagreement um for the most part maybe the timer class about what kind of game we were making and that was just an awesome experience and it's something I actually miss so if anybody has any questions [Applause] [Applause] sorry is mic on yeah so the question was the ending the junk town was originally more morally ambiguous and did we change it in hindsight would we have done that it it was changed and the original ending was junk town thrive under the mob boss gizmo and did poorly under the sheriff Killian and QA I kind of liked it I kind of liked that too we were worried we led people down the wrong path though and that hey I'm finding really hard to make this to do the right thing and then I'm punished when the game ends so I'm not sure I change that but I would probably put in more indications that get if I were to change it I put in more indications that helping the seemingly bad guy would be a good thing it was just it was too random I think that's why I got changed thank you sir okay okay it's never there we go okay so I wanted to poke at the child killing thing a little bit more because these days it's basically a given that if a player controlled character in any game can harm or especially kill a minor the ESRB treats that as an automatic adults only rating you know it's basically the equivalent of hardcore porn but did you guys get a lot of static and threats from the ESRB of the era of that scale or do you think fallout kind of pushed for that or you know basically I'm wondering how much sort of drama there was behind that choice it didn't cause much drama for the u.s. rating people saw it and said well if fm but I mean you have to remember there was a lot of there's a lot of violence in the game it was just considered part of the genre in the u.s. we see movies like that all the time overseas it's completely flip-flopped in America we see a lot of sex but and violence but we don't see like nudity yeah in Europe at the exact opposite and I don't care about frontal nudity but you know the level of violence as I would say disappoints them that are moving to tend to be childish like that yes I think it fit fallout I thought it would be okay to have it in in Europe unfortunately I don't remember the name of it but there had been a shooting or something happened in Europe right before fallout was rated I don't remember what the tragedy was but that pretty much made the entire ratings board there just go we won't even consider it it wasn't dramatic it was like you won't you won't have this game or were rated whatever that rating is that you have to go into the store and ask for them to pull it out from under the shelf in a brown paper bag we didn't want that so we just we just took the kids out okay yeah I'd like to ask about the team's approach to player choice and just was there any systematic design to it or just kind of ad hoc the closest we got to a system was for every main story quest if you had to go through that quest to get to the end of the game we would play through it and I played the game from start to finish five times and then a ton of them not five playthroughs besides that and everybody on the tape team did that and if they ever found a main story quests that they couldn't finish because they made a character that was so extreme that they couldn't fight talk or sneak their way past we would go and take one of those three methods and make it much easier I mean sometimes it was as easy as you know the person who had to key who was standing by the front gate and there was a locked door in the back of the building had a perception of one I mean he would never ever say you seal no matter how bad your pickpocketing more on the side quest however I usually let people relax it if there's only one or two ways through and if they were kind of difficult that was okay because I quit didn't have to be done and that was as close as we got but like I said we we work together so closely that we all had almost the same mindset of how to put together a quest that there were never really a lot of arguments over that that just kind of slowed out hi did you have a working name for I guess what we later became the vault boy the became embraced by the public as the mascot for follow did you get that character was that created just sort of on a whim at like the last minute or was there a lot of iteration during the development of that did you realize at the time that were just going to kind of personify our game and later become like a mascot a symbol of it they talk about the the one on the perk yeah they can do little cartoon guy with a 13 he's always gets people sometimes called the pit boy followed boy and I'm like no that's a guy with the yellow and red cape on the pit boy when I first saw the drawing that the lead artist had done I was a little surprised because I did they remind me of Monopoly cards but they really did fit the game really well they had a great sense of humor especially when you read like here was a card saying you know you can viciously kill someone with a backstab and then there's a funny cartoon of someone slicing someone into from behind and it had that fallout cheekiness of look everything's going to be okay you know the things we had in the vault literature of yeah the world has been destroyed but we're okay and here's how you cook rats to make a delicious meal it just had that vibe of we're not taking this very seriously and you should be happy so I think it kind of spread the team itself had absolutely no problem with it we were little surprised when when Steve Jackson games didn't think it fit the game because I thought it was it was wonderful we didn't know how much it would take off though so you just mentioned follow cheekiness I think that dark humor which she also touched on is one of the things that I and a lot of other people love about the game can you talk a little bit about the writing process that sort of creating those jokes and also the process of communicating that that sort of ineffable sense of humor to a team of people some of them understanding by than others well I think the original designer on the game Scott Campbell he kind of laid out all the different areas in the game and so later on when people went through and wrote up the dialogue and a lot of dialogues by the way weren't written by designers some of them were but we had such a big diverse group that when the artists would finish doing their art and it would have to take a long time for the process they'd sit there and I write dialogues I remember there watching all these dark movies and everybody was on the same page so when somebody would write something off the youtubes I do people laughing extraordinary go over it and they were just looking at scripted dialogue scripts and laughing there was some editing they went through it the reason I can't speak more about it is I'm really bad at writing dialogue that's what I learned so I don't do it anymore so I'm not exactly sure what the process was but because everybody was so close I don't think that they had a formal process they just shared a lot with each other and people were willing to change things if they wrote if they wrote the dialogue people didn't get it or didn't like it they'd just rewrite it I don't have actually a real question I just want to tell you thank you and probably my best moment my best memory or video game is in Fallout 2 when I get back in time touch a computer and I think I just broke the water chip it's an awesome moment so thanks a lot you're welcome [Music] one more for any time for one more question so my question was uh in Fallout 2 the quests were a little more robust they were little harder to break and I wondered whether that was simply production changes you know better testing or whether there was a difference in the tool chain well I'd actually left interplay before fallouts who went out but I do know that it's pretty much it was the same engine actually the car was working I think before I left so it was really that you had a group of people and they all use those tools for years so it was very easy to go back and make a whole bunch of new content with tools that weren't being weren't evolving and went and had a lot of the major bugs taken out so I think fall it was just a lot faster to make and also there's some new influx of people who had really cool ideas for things that could be done with the engine that we didn't see maybe necessarily we were so close to it so it had that great mix of established tools but people know how to use them and to new people who were just they got the humor and they got everything spot-on I think that's what I follow to actually scored higher on its review ratings Apollo 1 thank you [Applause] [Music]

Channel: GDC

Views: 219,169

Rating: 4.9532456 out of 5

Keywords: gdc, talk, panel, game, games, gaming, development, hd, design, Fallout, postmortem, tim cain, timothy cain

Id: T2OxO-4YLRk

Length: 59min 3sec (3543 seconds)

Published: Thu May 04 2017

Reddit Comments

[u/headpool182]

Very good watch

[u/timmyfinnegan]

I love these! I saw one about Diablo 1 once that was really good!

[u/RealHugeJackman]

Never heard about ACELIPS. Interesting story about win95 cert.

Very interesting Video. It would be cool to have another for Fallout 2.