Hello, everyone! Our core team introduction round comes to an end, for now. With a great final chord, so to speak. Not only is Dominik one of our studio’s founders, he’s also a person of interest in other regards. Cultivating the spiciest chilis around, growing bonsai trees or building nice gadgets with Raspberry Pis… his love for experiments is seemingly endless. Read along to find out more about him, and make your Carrot deck even more powerful with this card.
Who are you and what do you do at Chasing Carrots?
My name is Dominik, I’m one of the founders and my main jobs and passions are programming and game design. There are also a lot of other things that come with running a business, so I do some of those, too.
What is the best about being a game developer?
Having bold and huge ideas. And the worst thing: realizing that game development is hard and those bold and huge ideas probably never get done. But still: dreaming about them is nice!
How and why did you become a game developer?
After playing games as a kid I always had ideas for new games in the most mundane situations. And when I got Klick’n’Play at age 12 I made lots of small pointless games but I had so much fun making them. Obviously, game development isn’t a proper career (or so everyone said), so I lost sight of that. But I liked programming in general, so I studied computer science and got into a GFX company doing serious games and that’s where I met Patrick. We started to develop what would later become Pressure in our spare time there. After a while, it grew beyond a spare time project and we used that to start up Chasing Carrots.
What kind of games do you like? What are your all-time favorite games?
Journey left a lasting impression on me, I got sucked in and played through the whole game on one Sunday afternoon. I loved the atmosphere and the way it told a story without using words. I would put Elite II Frontier in that same category for being very atmospheric and placing me firmly in the pilot seat despite its simple graphics.
But I also like twitchy skill based games like Super Meat Boy. Same thing with Quake III Arena: I misused the maps trying to find impossible lines to do trick jumping on.
Honorable mentions:
– Final Fantasy VII: loved the story and characters
– Diablo I – III: dark atmosphere and lots of loot
– Factorio: building complex factories, bit by bit
What was your first gaming experience?
That probably is playing Digger on a 386 with an orange monochrome screen at an age of maybe 5. I still remember the way the music sounded on that machine.
What’s your craziest hobby?
I love scuba diving, but that has become pretty normal, right? So my craziest hobby would probably be building and flying my own fpv racing drones!
If you could be a game character, you would be?
Super meat boy! He always seems so happy even though he doesn’t even have a skin!
