Alright – so today we’ve got the honor of introducing you to Daniel Pomidor. We think you’ll enjoy our conversation, we’ve shared it below.
Daniel, thanks for joining us, excited to have you contributing your stories and insights. How did you learn to do what you do? Knowing what you know now, what could you have done to speed up your learning process? What skills do you think were most essential? What obstacles stood in the way of learning more?
I got into games sort of through not really fitting into one medium cleanly. As a kid I drew a lot, made comics, did crafts, and made board games. I also spent the most time experiencing games, out of all the other mediums (though comics was close), and as a result it’s sorta how my brain is wired to think about concepts – taking experiences and breaking them up into verbs, into visuals, into spaces and places and time, thinking about how to transmit those experiences and dreams to other people, in a way that they can interact and feel immersed. Figuring out what is playful.
Because of Edmund McMillen, I really started to see games through the lens of personal art. I’d picked up “This Is A Cry for Help” as a kid, which was a demo disc of all his flash games, web comics, notes on the making of all of his games, and his sketches. It was later collected and expanded into The Basement Collection – but he was really the first person that showed me that games could be an expressive art form, not just a fun experience. It was the most substantial peek I’d gotten into the black box of “game development” besides my dad, who also makes and mods games. McMillen was really effective at synthesizing his personal experiences of being alienated and feeling regret and grief and fear and confusion, and taking the humorous and idiosyncratic and strange moments of his life, and putting them into games. Games like Time Fcuk, Aether, Coil, Triachnid. Some of his games are disgusting, some of them are funny, and all of them have an intimate and irreplaceable sense of Ed to each of them where his games’ mechanics directly pull from his life, and as I’ve gotten older that’s really what I’ve found myself striving for with everything I create.
Being an indie game designer and developer means you wind up doing a lot of things you maybe didn’t intend to along the way. “Interactive art” is a sorta nebulous term that can really encompass quite a lot, and depending on the game, making it really entails “doing whatever it is you need to do to get it out the door.” It also isn’t terribly pretentious, which fits for a guy that spent most of high school in football pads and didn’t really fit in with the local fine art crowd.
At SCAD, I wound up falling in with the Humans VS Zombies crowd, which was a group of about 100+ people that met up weekly to shoot each other with nerf blasters and pretend to be zombies in a big game of tag, practicing for the big yearly event that had, usually, 300+ participants playing together for 5 days of missions. I think at other schools, most people would just shack up in their dorms, but since SCAD campus was spread across Savannah, the organizers put together missions for each day that players had to finish to progress the story, which would draw everyone together.
Over the years, it got more and more convoluted, and by the time I got there you had these unique trailers for each year with actors and special effects, you had special props that represented different abilities, and you had people acting out a story and pretty complicated missions like building things, escorting people, and so on. The school was loaded with talented artists, so of course you also had genuine zombie makeup and fake blood. People got extremely into it – it was all consuming for some people. It was, basically, a game of tag that was also like a giant interactive play or something.
And that was what showed me games could be far beyond just tabletop experiences or video games, that it was this kinda nebulous communal “thing” that you can just imagine and come up with on the spot, so long as there’s collective agreement and trust. It can be completely unrestricted from medium. And games also have a lot more crossover with other forms of art than I’d really considered.
Senior year, I was getting farther and farther along in the game development track, and by this point I’d also helped run HvZ for two years, when I got the idea to make my own kind of game of this sort, with its own rules and cyberpunk setting, called DAEMON. I picked a group of friends and acquaintances I thought would be a good match for the project, and we started dreaming up what our own version of such a game could be.
It morphed into this crazy, augmented reality thing that nearly went off the rails – we had been talking about secret missions and clues hidden in rented storage units, hiding stuff through the city that players had to find, house parties the players had to infiltrate, and so on. We were looking at stuff like Sleep No More and trying to get really conceptual with it, to really push the envelope with experimental tech as hard as we could. Eventually we dialed things back a bit to what we already knew how to do and could get the permits for, but we did wind up curating this new media gallery show that we’d wanted to be part of the game itself as the last mission, since we were making a cyberpunk game. 40+ artists wound up taking part in the show, many of which were international, which was awesome.
It was still this weird, unruly beast, and we were competing with the HvZ game that year as well. We were funding it through a tiny Kickstarter and out of pocket on our student jobs. Regardless, we kinda blindsided the HvZ community by announcing it with a trailer and everything, and we had about 100 people come out to participate. It was really quite exciting and strange and fun to have 100 people in headsets trying to solve an augmented reality mystery full of audio logs and secret VHS tapes and such, while fighting each other for three days, then have a bunch of new media video art get beamed into their brains at the end.
And DAEMON was, more or less, how I wound up getting my first job making UI interfaces for Virtual Reality, because we were using Google Cardboard headsets for the game. And that whole community was really the foundation of my confidence in making games independently, and learning to work with friends and in a group, with collaborators I still work with now.
Great, appreciate you sharing that with us. Before we ask you to share more of your insights, can you take a moment to introduce yourself and how you got to where you are today to our readers.
I’m kind of a jack of all trades, but all that winds up falling under the enormous umbrella of “Game Designer/Developer”. I lead, and also work solo as the moniker of Forward Instinct: a video game studio. I write, design, code, 3D model, make music, video edit, and art direct. I do other work, as well. I write, edit, and design a regular zine called The Virtual Haus. I also create glitch art and risograph prints. My day job is design, which obviously has a lot of crossover with games – UX/UI, Product, Brand, Graphic, and Motion design. I do a fair amount of photography. I was recently in a group show at The Bakery in Atlanta, for my glitch camera photography. But really, when I think of myself, I think of myself as an interactive designer and artist, with games as my medium of choice.
The work I make, I think, comes from a pretty recent tradition of trying to make games as art – games with personal motivation, with feelings and a reaction to their world. Edmund McMillen, Brendon Chung, Terri Vellman, Lilith Zone, Jess Harvey, Kitty Horrorshow, Lucas Pope, Scott Benson, Cosmo D, Grace Bruxner, Carter Lodwick, Ian Endsley, Jan Willem Nijman, Ville Callio, Yoshiaki Koizumi, Jake Elliott, Tamas Kemenczy, and Ben Babbitt are all game designers/developers I’m very inspired by. Time Fcuk, Thirty Flights of Loving, Sludge Life, Hotline Miami, Betrayal at Club Low, Crypt Worlds, Paratopic, Night in the Woods, Kentucky Route Zero, Frog Detective, LSD Dream Simulator, Disc Room, Wide Ocean Big Jacket, Hotline Miami, Cruelty Squad, and Majora’s Mask are all favorites.
Over the last few years, I’ve been taking that approach to the games I’ve been making, a few of which are:
• Keepsake County, a cartoony and satirical immersive sim game about midwestern farmhouse robbery, but also the American experience of perpetually grinding to get out from under debt, and the things we’ll do to survive. Currently in early release and coming to Steam later this year, developed as a team.
• Broke Signal Badlands, a faux-tabletop game where players drive around a desert sandbox and play through all the weird and beautiful desert experiences I’ve had from hiking and photographing the area, and stories and urban myths I’ve read, in order to find spiritual fulfillment. Also in early release and coming to Steam in the next few months. Developed solo.
• Panchin is Frustrated, a sorta strange virtual pet that serves as a rumination on my own creative block and frustration, where players are able to play through strange and vivid dreams that I’ve had upon collecting enough “tears of frustration”. I made it as a game jam last year, in about a day.
• Midnight Ultra, a hazy FPS that is equal parts my experiences driving across the country to Los Angeles, my imaginary idea of what the original DOOM is like, some nightmares I’d had, Queens of the Stone Age, and the color pink. We released this as a team on Steam back in 2017.
• DAEMON, a weird and wild cyberpunk Augmented Reality Live Action Role Playing game, played live over 3 days in April 2016 by 100+ players. We made a documentary about both the making of the game as a team, and the experience of playing it. You can find it on Youtube, made in 2017.
We often hear about learning lessons – but just as important is unlearning lessons. Have you ever had to unlearn a lesson?
As I’ve gotten older, I’ve found one of the most important things I can really be doing is rushing my games out. This doesn’t mean making slapdash junk, but it does mean intentionally designing and making games that are intended to come out within a few months, not a few years. This sounds antithetical to the Miyamoto saying of “a rushed game is bad forever”, but I’ve found that many games make the mistake of dragging on forever in production, even smaller ones. Doing so can make the creators mentally get away from the vital ideas and inspiration that initially drove them forward (plus run up costs unsustainably).
As I’ve started creating games by myself (and in some respects, for myself) I have been trying to get closer to that ideal state of red hot passion that illustrators, musicians, cartoonists, writers, poets, and sculptors can live in, where what they’re making reflects the world and life they’re currently living, not one two years ago. Where they can work feverishly for a few days or weeks and say “that’s done, I’ve processed that feeling, now I can move on”. That means not agonizing over every perfect detail, or padding things out with large quantities of bespoke content. Working lithe, agile, and planning for the future. Procedural generation helps in some regards here, but so does simply setting expectations – telling players, honestly, that the game may only be a couple hours long. As an adult, I certainly appreciate that with games that I play – knowing that it respects my time and doesn’t force a grind, where I’ll get to experience the whole thing and feel content. Some art is meant to be a single delicious meal, not an engorging feast with several courses.
I’ve made games that took several years to create, and especially as a group, I find that momentum starts to drag. I question what I’m doing, or my opinions change and mature. It can start to even feel alien, or dishonest to my current beliefs and interests. People get tired of working on it. It’s no longer an interesting place to live in, it’s a chore – no matter how polished and good to play it is. I think larger developers have the luxury (and maybe the curse) of having fanbases that hang onto everything they make with expectations, but when you’re an indie, you’re often having to generate that enthusiasm and interest in a project yourself.
If it’s art that has meaning to me, then it needs to convey how I feel, what experiences I’ve had, what I’m interested in. It can’t just aspire to be a nebulous “entertaining product” that maximizes fun and ignores everything else. The fun has to also have the meaning. You can do both. I need to care about what I’m making, a LOT, because I’m putting a lot of time and brainpower in, especially if I’m coding a lot. Entertainment is great, especially for games, but a lot of fun and meaningful experience also comes from relating to someone else and seeing life in it, which is what good art often does.
Have you ever had to pivot?
The summer after graduating in 2016, I mostly felt a bit lost and frustrated. I had taken a lot of interactive design (now known as UX design) classes, and my portfolio was more design and programming focused and less about strictly game art, which is one of the main game jobs that really consistently hires junior positions. I wasn’t really having the most luck finding work because my skillset was so spread out and weird. I didn’t have a true engineering background either thanks to going to art school. So I started working on the prototype that’d become Midnight Ultra, really just for myself, and then I finally got a job offer out in Los Angeles and left it alone.
After DAEMON, we’d all graduated, and my friends were all still in contact with each other, and we’d all moved away to various parts of the country and world. There was this weird sense of “…ok, uh… so what do we do now that we’re out of school?”
And so we all started meeting just to show stuff we were making. I started sharing bits of this other game I was working on at the time, just by myself, and my friends started getting interested. And we worked on that for about a year, but it was too large of a concept to really finish – we didn’t know what we were doing, and it was too big of a concept for me to code properly the way it needed to be.
I think we were all a bit frustrated by then, so I dialed it back and said “OK, what about we finish this little prototype I bashed together last summer?” We pivoted and decided to concentrate all our energies on Midnight Ultra, putting together levels and a soundtrack and concept art for the various enemies, and cramming all of that work into basically two months to rush the game out onto Steam for Halloween. Two months of development, because I had also been making a DAEMON documentary for our Kickstarter backers at the same time that needed to be done first.
This was 2017, and expectations for an indie Steam release were a lot higher and harsher than they are now. Although we asked our collective friends to buy the game and review it, we basically got savaged by the average player. People hated how it looked, they hated how it felt to play, and they weren’t satisfied by how long it was. And that was really like the first time that I’d had this harsh experience releasing art so publicly on such a huge platform, where I was able to fall on my face and have people who didn’t know me in-person at all interacting with something I created and judging it, and essentially saying the game was bad.
And then Alec Meer at Rock Paper Shotgun very rapidly wrote two articles about it, quite surprisingly positive pieces comparing us to David Lynch and Twin Peaks and Hotline Miami, which generated even more publicity on something that I was now quite frustrated and unhappy with. It wound up getting shown on IGN’s Snapchat account, in a weekly PCGamer roundup, and in a few other little places, because of that article.
We quickly put together an update for the game in a few months, but more or less by then we’d missed the train to get additional, positive followup attention for our fixes. We wound up putting Midnight Ultra in a few bundles since then, and it’s had something like 20,000 players play it as a result of being in the itch.io Bundle for Justice and Equality. As unpolished as it still is, as lukewarm as it was received, people play it. It’d be nice to revisit!
Zach, a very dear friend of mine who did concept art for the game, wound up going to a convention that year where he was talking to other artists, who asked what he’d worked on. He mentioned Midnight Ultra, and they said,
“Huh? What’s that? Lemme google it-”
And, as he described it, he couldn’t see what they were looking at, but he saw their phone screens bathe their faces in fluorescent magenta.
And they said:
“Ohhh… this game. I know this game.”
In the years since, we’ve all worked other jobs and careers while making games both together and separately. We started working on another prototype game that stretched on for years, that was conceptually too overcomplicated, and during the pandemic we threw in the towel and resolved to pivot again and try to make something more concentrated.
We started work on Keepsake County towards the end of the pandemic, and have spent the past two years updating it, pitching it to publishers, demoing it at conventions, and submitting it to festivals and shows. Then, this past December, we surprisingly won a few local awards for it at Dreamhack ATL. We got Best Production, Best Sound, runner up for Most Fun, and third place for Best Design. I had the brief pleasure of talking to Warren Spector about it, who was on the awards jury, which is really amazing for making an Immersive Sim, considering he more or less founded the genre.
And in the past two years, I’ve also started revisiting the games that got me into games and sorta rediscovering my passion for playing and experiencing new games, honing my craft and really leaning into making small, personal games.
People are starting to become interested just in our games in general – at that same convention that Keepsake County was at, I was also demoing Broke Signal Badlands next to it, out of competition, which I’d knocked together by myself in about two months. I just wanted some feedback from players. A few people played through it, and they were just enraptured. People played through the entire game in a single sitting. They told me they’d never experienced a game like it before, and that it felt intimate and fascinating to them. It was my first time making an RPG.
So hey, pivoting works. Trying new things works. And I’ll probably keep doing it for the rest of my career.
Contact Info:
- Website: https://danielpomidor.com
- Instagram: @deadhandsdan
- Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/in/daniel-pomidor/
- Youtube: https://www.youtube.com/@forwardinstinct
- Other: https://forwardinstinct.itch.io/