Transcript

Don (00:43)
hi, my name is Don Ballinger. I am a game developer from Oakland, California. I’ve worked on indie games for something like 10-ish years now, you know, to great and small acclaim. So before that, I worked as an engineer in a studio.

Aaron Nemoyten (00:56)
You

Don (01:01)
kind of burnt out real good doing that. kind of in between all that, I’ve tried to go find, a career in tech and mostly hated it and tried to find my people in various things. And it’s like, you know, mixed, mixed results.

Aaron Nemoyten (01:13)
You’re an Oakland person in a San Francisco world, so to speak.

Don (01:17)
That’s

incredibly true. I know exactly what you mean. I’m 100 % agreed. Yes.

Aaron Nemoyten (01:20)
Hahaha!

Yes,

So since this podcast is called Make Games Drink Coffee, I have to ask what you’re drinking because you just took a swig.

Don (01:30)
Oh,

yeah. Yeah. Okay. So I’m drinking water. It’s pretty cool. I gave out caffeine entirely last year and that’s been

Aaron Nemoyten (01:41)
You know, drinking water out of a mug, that’s subversive.

Don (01:44)
Yeah, I’m subredding really hard. So good.

Yeah, I used to drink a tremendous amount of coffee, like four cups a day, and it was not so good for me. Yeah, now in the morning, I’ll just drink really hot water. Throughout the day, I’ll just drink really hot water.

It saves a lot on heating bills, especially when you’re like an indie game developer and you don’t want to like heat a whole house when you’re ultimately just trying to heat yourself. so I tend to just drink really warm fluids all day to stay warm. It’s great. It’s a, it’s a clever budgeting hack is to just insert the thermal units directly into your body. Instead of trying to absorb them through your skin, like some kind of, you know, billionaire.

Aaron Nemoyten (02:24)
Hahaha!

Yeah,

So I have a list of questions. They’re very interviewee, podcasty, fresh airy even. Yeah, we’re So here’s my first very podcasty question. Aesthetically, your indie games are very bright and shiny. They’ve got that sort of future neon look to them.

Don (02:37)
Yes, yes. We’re going, we’re doing it.

Aaron Nemoyten (02:52)
But I think in terms of attitude, you are the most punk game developer that I know. So your company is called the Beauty Cult and there’s a manifesto on the website that mentions games as subversive art. And I’m wondering how does your game in progress, which is called Nectar Mancer, sort of fit into your view of games as subversive

Don (02:58)
Aww, that’s really nice of you. Thank you.

Mm-hmm.

Yeah, so first, it’s, I think, gameplay wise, it’s really weird. It does a lot of things that I think you could only do if you just worked on your game forever, like Silksong. So it has the benefit of, I think, interesting mechanics that are just there to kind of needle the market in some way. I think also the story and the job you do as the player character is very subversive. You’re tasked with

basically being a tax collector for this evil government. this happens to basically be a death sentence. And you’re like, all right, well, let’s, let’s do that. But instead of laying this job, kill me, let me like, hack around it. Let me like, find a way to kind of cheat at my job and actually survive it and not have it kill me.

which is a very thin metaphor for the world. So what is the least I can give of myself to this job, which kind of demands more and more of it every day. And that to me, think exemplifies or like kind of sums up how I feel about working in games and how I kind of allocate my labor across multiple projects.

Yeah, I’m only really here because I think working in tech or wherever it was, I just got like, kind of disgusted with like, I’m going to spend eight hours a day working for some guy or like some VC who like already has two Teslas. Like I don’t, I don’t need to do that. That’s like no one, no one needs me to do that either. and there’s, there’s so many market forces that unfortunately push us in that direction and push us, you know, put us in that situation. so I think Nectar Man.

Aaron Nemoyten (04:43)
You

Don (05:01)
is very much related to that. It’s, you know, how little could I actually give to this job that pays me and how much could I actually indulge like a passion of mine which is, you know, in the game it’s staying alive.

Aaron Nemoyten (05:14)
That is very cool.

You mentioned market forces and obviously that plays a role in determining what you’re gonna build even as an indie developer, right? Nectar Mancer is a Metroidvania and that is something that the market wants. And I’m curious if time and money were no issue, are there any subversive game ideas that you have sort of stuck in your head that you really, really wish could exist?

Don (05:40)
I think making people more self-sufficient is in fact a subversive idea.

I would really like, you know, I also bake as like a thing to save money and to pretend I provide for my family. But in this case, I think, you know, how baking works and how people approach baking from the outside of it. They like, they’re kind of.

missing it for so, long. They follow recipes and they think baking is this really exact science and it’s not. Baking is like all jazz to me. And I think I would like to make a really, really bonkers baking simulation. Kind like the Rimworld or Dwarf Fortress of baking. I’ve seen other games do it and they don’t go nearly as far. They don’t model ambient temperature. They don’t model the culture in your

sourdough. They just don’t go far enough and it’s baking is like the easiest thing. It’s basically the first food we figured out besides like water and alcohol. So yeah, it’s really primitive. I think if people had that skill, they would feel a lot less. they would have several degrees of freedom that they may not currently have. And that to me would be pretty cool.

Aaron Nemoyten (07:06)
That’s awesome.

Speaking of subversive, you are into horror films, are traditionally a vehicle for subversive ideas. Is there anything in that area that has excited you recently?

Don (07:23)
I think I’ve seen stuff that is genuinely really scary to me. And I haven’t seen horror films, you know, any new ones in a while, but I did see Barbarian, which came out a few years ago. And I saw Nosferatu, which I thought was kind of a snoozer. I didn’t really like it, to be honest. yeah, it has like, it’s got vibe. It’s like, it’s got production, but it didn’t, it didn’t like…

Aaron Nemoyten (07:34)
Mmm.

Don (07:52)
It didn’t talk to me. didn’t really scare me. It didn’t freak me out.

I love the substance. That was a messed up movie. That was incredible. It turned into like basically like an early Peter Jackson film at the end with like just all the blood and guts and turning like dead alive. And like, okay, this is cool. It was maybe the only way to just like resolve this crazy story. And like, that’s fine. I had a good time. I liked Infinity Pool. That’s kind of a weird one.

Aaron Nemoyten (07:57)
Mmm. Yeah, that’s so fun.

I haven’t seen that.

Don (08:20)
But I thought Barbarian was really scary. Just how the stakes kept increasing. I thought that was just a dreadful movie to watch. I really, really liked it. It was just terrible. It was so scary, It was so scary.

Aaron Nemoyten (08:39)
I don’t I don’t experience movies like that. I enjoy the experience and Like I loved Nosferatu because it was just an awesome experience I don’t care if I’m scared or not, but I what’s weird what surprised me is I felt the emotional stakes of Nosferatu and by the end of it like I really cared about without spoiling it I really cared about the sacrifice that was made and

Don (08:54)
Yeah.

Aaron Nemoyten (09:10)
And I was surprised about that because I felt like the director’s previous movies felt a little bit more emotionally disconnected. But Barbarian, I thought, was an awesome ride. And I don’t know that I felt like it was scary, but I was just like, this is so much fun.

Don (09:27)
Yeah, I think maybe I do like the indie game developer thing where I approach a medium with way too much like specific thing I need out of it where like, you know, this movie isn’t scary, I don’t know what it’s for.

Aaron Nemoyten (09:43)
So I’m gonna bring back the past here and I know that this is not necessarily something that you enjoyed doing, but we both have background in so-called mid-core games. You were at Kixeye working on Facebook games and I was at first a Facebook startup called KlickNation and then we got bought by EA and then I was on mobile games, what my question was.

Don (09:55)
Yeah. Yeah.

How fun was it? How awesome was it? Did you have a great time, Donald? Yeah, I did. It was pretty great.

Aaron Nemoyten (10:09)
no, no, it works. Hello, hello.

Is there anything you can bring from that experience into the games that you’ve made, or is that something where there’s sort of a, you know, a wall and you’re like, this is one thing and this is another thing and there’s not really anything can translate between this sort of free to play model that’s meant for constant engagement, attention, monetization versus, you know, making an indie game about.

trying to survive your job.

Don (10:38)
Yeah, no, I think actually, I think back to that time a lot and I think it was very relevant. think it’s still kind of a teachable experience. There’s things that are still with me from that. I think that’s really where I turned into, where I went from a junior software engineer to a senior engineer. just the things I picked up during that time doing that work, it doesn’t really matter what the

project or product was, doesn’t really matter. That’s all, know, some of that stuff is like still in kind of the work I do. There’s systems now that have followed me from project to project to project and they started all the way back there. And I think also just seeing how that company ran and

how kind of the culture of the place and kind of how teams function is also kind of its own informative experience. Luckily, that’s a time that is never coming back. Like nobody, you you can’t run a team or a studio that way unless you’re doing some, you’re writing some like VC trend, like, I don’t know, like I imagine a web three company like three years ago was kind of like that. Like they’re just, you know, they’re, they’re going to strip clubs. They’re just blowing money on stupid stuff.

Aaron Nemoyten (11:56)
Yeah. Yeah.

Don (12:02)
You know, there’s just like this toxic workplace because, know, we’re king of the world, you know. That, that I’m so glad that is not coming back, at least not in my life or anything I’m going into.

But yeah, that’s, that’s just a crazy time to, to be there. You know, that, that company made every dumb choice talking about like, you know, making dumb choices in a film. this one, this, company was at Kixeye They missed a mobile. They’re like, they saw mobile coming and happening and they even had a port of one of their games running on a device. they’re like, nah, we’re, don’t, we don’t think so. We’re gonna, we’re gonna sit this one out. We think, we think this is.

No, this isn’t it. And just to see like a whole lot of people getting paid a whole lot of money be so wrong about something. It’s like, man, it kind of, I think it helped me have a lot less respect for people who just happen to be in positions of authority and power. they don’t, nobody at that at Kixeye knew anything. They were babies. They didn’t know anything.

They made terrible choices. It was great. I think about it a lot, actually.

Aaron Nemoyten (13:21)
think for context, anyone listening who isn’t familiar with this, I’ll just say that if you’re familiar with Clash of Clans by Supercell, which is one of the most successful mobile games of all time, it’s made billions of dollars at this point, Kixeye invented that kind of game back on Facebook with a game called Backyard Monsters. And the way that Kixeye originally raised money is because they made a hit flash game on congregate called Desktop Tower Defense. And they basically built

something like that into Backyard Monsters, which is a sort of free to play, highly monetized version of Tower Defense. And they could have brought that genre to mobile and done really well, but they didn’t. And then Supercell came along, built Clash of Clans, and ate their lunch, so to speak.

Don (14:00)
Yeah.

ate their lunch. You know, people were using that phrase a lot at the time, ate our lunch. It’s extremely appropriate.

Aaron Nemoyten (15:08)
Okay, shifting gears quite a bit. You’ve been with this nonprofit called Gameheads for almost a decade now, and you’ve mentioned this to me a bunch of times, but you said this means a lot to you, so can you talk about this a bit?

Don (15:13)
Yeah. Yeah.

Yeah. so I, mean, I, where was I burnt out at Kixeye and I was kind of messing around, like just trying to like be a software engineer at some like SAS companies like the sucks.

And I saw that, you know, my old kick-side coworker, Marcus Montgomery, he was starting this thing called game heads. I’m like, wow. This is cool. I like, cause I had just like personally been like sick of like making evil games, like games that preyed on whales to like survive. Like this is, it just felt really gross to me. and I just, I saw this game heads thing like, this is actually really cool. will. And the phrase that I kept kind of coming back to is like, I’ll get to use my

powers for good. And it started, you know, I was at some other job and I had a call with the program director, Damon Packwood, and just to be a volunteer mentor.

Aaron Nemoyten (16:08)
the

Don (16:21)
So I did that and he, he assessed that I was not like a total psycho. he was like, okay, you get to be around kids. So, uh, so, you know, we, did that for, uh, one summer and I, know, they basically pair you with, uh, another, another, like a young person, um, who at the time, you know, and still it’s always disadvantaged black and brown youth in Oakland, California, uh, and who are basically being mentored into a career in video games. These, uh, students get put into, uh, groups.

and they’re part of the Summer Accelerator program. They get paired with a mentor. That was me. And I would kind of just give them advice and mostly just kind of be there for them. We meet every now and then. And at the end of the summer, they have a big showcase. Basically all the student projects are there. So I did that for a couple years and then I was invited to join the board for this new thing called Game Heads.

studios, where they’re going to take money from Humble Bundle, which still existed, and like 2K, which had money and like Hangar 13, which had money at the time. And they’re going to, they’re basically going to like, you know, just give, give money to some of these student projects and basically try to turn them into commercial releases. So, you know, a lot of the student projects, they’re high on ambition and low on just kind of best practices. But they’re, it’s very scrappy. They get the job done.

and the Game Ed Studios projects, it’s like, all right, well, how do we kind of turn these into something closer to a commercial project? So I’ve been doing that for…

I don’t know, like eight plus years. And we’ve had a lot of games come through. Some of them have done really cool things. One game, Pack-A-Pomo, it showed at Games for Change. all these projects are kind of crazy. They do really ambitious things. And…

Yeah, it’s really cool. They had a showcase. The showcase keeps getting better. it’s always at like, it’s lately, sorry, last few years, it’s been at Mills College. And they have an expo and they do an award ceremony. And…

It’s just like an amazing environment. It’s really, really positive. It actually makes a difference in these people’s lives. And, um, you know, I’ve seen kind of these young people start in the program. Um, and now this one student, uh, she works at double fine. She’s, she went from there to there. Uh, and this other guy, he, uh, this kid Duran, he, where did he wind up? I wind up at like sledgehammer. Um, yeah, it’s like, it, it actually, it actually works. Um,

Aaron Nemoyten (18:53)
That’s so cool.

guys.

Don (19:07)
Doesn’t work for everybody. It’s, you know, it’s a lot of kids going in. Not everybody finishes it. But it’s, you know, for a few kids, it’s just right. And it’s really cool. Yeah. Quick aside, Damon Packwood is, I think, he’s a program director for game ads. is, think, my…

Aaron Nemoyten (19:09)
I mean, of course not.

Don (19:29)
my business icon. Like this guy has got hustle like no one’s ever seen. There’s a game heads HQ in Oakland. They actually have a building for this like nonprofit and they’ve they’ve kind of like gone through a few locations like these really scrappy like community hubs that like mold problems. But now they have like this like two story building like this industrial ish building and like Jack London square area. And and they have a

mocap studio in there that’s all just like hand-me-downs from 2k they have green screen they have like a whole they have just like a ton of VR equipment just and when you talk to Damon about damon how’d you do this like how’d you turn a non-profit into a thing that has this and it’s it’s just like the most amazing stories every time and that guy i think has kind of shown me like actually what is possible if you’re willing to

kind of forge your own path. He’s incredible. He’s really hard to get a hold of. He’s really busy, not the most organized person, but my God, this guy is just amazing. It’s really cool to see him work.

Aaron Nemoyten (20:31)
Mm-hmm.

So since you’ve had so much experience giving advice to young game developers, I’m curious, is there a piece of advice that you have discovered works exceptionally well and is useful? And is there a piece of advice that you have given that you’ve discovered is actually not helpful?

Don (21:05)
Man, I don’t know. There’s so much advice out there and I feel like it’s all, like it all makes sense for some people and not for others. It’s very contextual. You know, it…

for so many people, especially like young people or people like they’re just trying to get in, right? That seems far and away that’s like the biggest thing I hear is like, I’m just looking for my first job in games or just like my next job in games. And even, you know, when I’m like between things, I’m looking for a job, it’s it’s terrible out there, it’s so bad. And there’s, I don’t think there’s any amount of vice that could like,

Aaron Nemoyten (21:28)
Mm-hmm.

Don (21:49)
solve that problem for anybody. It really is, I think, always kind of who you know. And that, yeah, that when I look back to everything that I’ve had, you know, it really is down to like, okay, here’s a personal connection. We work together. And I think just

Aaron Nemoyten (21:58)
Yeah, sadly.

Don (22:13)
being really social is kind of the answer. Yeah, I think that’s, that’s, not the answer, but the best advice I could give is to like, go be social and like, go be a human and don’t be all weird about it. That’s like, yeah, it just like be yourself.

Aaron Nemoyten (22:27)
Yeah. I agree.

Don (22:33)
um, yeah, I don’t, I don’t know. Um, there’s so much advice out there. Uh, none of it seems to work as far as I can tell.

So people say like, just make a bunch of small games. Like, I don’t, I don’t know if I agree with that. I think it’s like, get good at your craft. Do that any way you can. I don’t know if a bunch of small games that no one’s going to care about is better than, you know, one medium sized game that also no one’s going to care about. Like, so

Aaron Nemoyten (23:01)
Hahaha

Don (23:04)
Yeah, I don’t know. there’s there are, I think if you’re really early in your career, there are a lot of moments where like, no, I got to just junk this whole thing. I got to go to something new. I think that is that is totally fair. I think that’s real. I would do that. I don’t know, just knowing yourself, I think, and knowing the quality of what you’re doing is very important.

stuck. I don’t have an answer to this.

Aaron Nemoyten (23:34)
That’s

fine, you don’t have to.

Is there anything you’ve seen in how the youth’s attitudes towards games have changed over the years you’ve been doing this? And also now you have a kid that’s old enough to like have opinions about video games. And I always kind of wonder about this now that there’s stuff like Roblox and Fortnite that sort of are dominating the attention. And you know, when we were growing up, we would always just go from game to game to game, I assume, you know.

Don (23:48)
Yeah.

Aaron Nemoyten (24:03)
I assume you did as well, and there were just constantly new releases and, here’s the next new thing, here’s the next new thing. And now we have these platforms that are giving people new experiences, but they all generally have the same flavor. you see kids, I don’t know, feeling like we did, wanting more new stuff, or are they just settling in and going with what they know?

Don (24:05)
Yeah.

Yeah, you know, I see, I’m thinking about like my kid and, a family friend and how they approach games. and my kids really into games and our friend is very into games also. and they’ve, they’ve kind of done a full tour, full tour, you know, they’ve hit Fortnite, they’ve hit Roblox, they’ve hit indie games. they, they hit Mario Kart. and I think they, they do like really evil mobile games. and I think they really, if, if,

anything, they have a much broader palette for games than we did just because there’s so much more out there. You know, we had arcade, we had computer games, and we had video games, and that was like about it. And, you know, kids these days have so many just like drastically different kinds of games, including platform games like Roblox.

Aaron Nemoyten (25:08)
Mm hmm. Yeah.

Don (25:18)
I would expect, think it’s kind of early, at least just because these kids, I know, are really young. It’s kind of early for me to like draw a conclusion and say like, aha, these kids like that. And that, you know, I couldn’t say that. But I would suspect that with them being exposed to so many different kinds of play and games and hearing kids that are like interested in

Aaron Nemoyten (25:30)
Mm-hmm.

Don (25:44)
making games in the future and are already making games. Like Jules has this other friend who’s DMs their group and he’s 13 and he just downloaded Unity and Game Maker. He’s just kind of like futzing around with both.

Aaron Nemoyten (25:52)
awesome.

Don (25:58)
I would suspect that, you know, when they kind of get their skills up and they’re ready to make something, you know, that it might be really interesting. I don’t know. The game heads kids are making the weirdest stuff you’ve ever heard about. Like, like Hyphy games, like sideshow games, competitive dance games. Yeah, really, really neat stuff. So I always look at that. I’m always really inspired just like.

kind of where kids choose to go. But yeah, I’m excited to see their work as they get older and see what happens.

Aaron Nemoyten (26:38)
I would love to see Hyphy games. That sounds interesting.

Don (26:41)
yeah, high side in. That’s the game. That was a game heads game. They did a high side in.

yeah, they did Highsidin’ and Hyphy edition, which is basically the dance battle game. But the original Highsidin was a sideshow game. It was really cool. And the game heads showcase, you see just like the craziest stuff. Somebody made an alt control game at this year’s game heads showcase, which use a shopping cart. And you played with two people. One of them is in the shopping cart and the other is like kind of like pushing the shopping cart, just like basically pressing on these pressure pads. And then there’s another game, another

alt control game that was really cool that came out game that’s called the competitive waffle eating game where you it’s a head-to-head competition where you’re making waffles for your opponent to eat and when they eat it they actually use the waffle iron they go smash smash smash smash to like chew the waffle it’s it’s so cool that the game was got accepted into alt control GDC

Yeah, I think there’s really cool stuff that really stretches the limits of kind of what people are used to with games.

Aaron Nemoyten (27:50)
Don Bellinger, thank you so much for being guest on Make Games Drink Coffee.

Don (27:55)
Thank you, Aaron It was really nice to be here.