“The world changed in ways that I never expected, that’s how it goes when you’re making something for so long.” “The game ended up being a reaction and a play on the way stupid ideologies can spread when there is no mechanism to check them. “And so, I have this dynamic with the racoons of this world who are stupidly taking over for no reason and the rest of the characters. The game ended up being a reaction and a play on the way stupid ideologies can spread when there is no mechanism to check them Ben Esposito “I think the story ended up being a reaction to being online in 20 and the way the world is changing. “The story has changed a lot in the last few years and I kind of reinvented it a lot of times. “This one was my attempt to make something that’s very earnest, in terms of what it’s trying to do with its presentation, the way it feels to play the game and the characters are all very earnest,” says Esposito. Much like how Brooklyn Trash Kings teases the plethora of devs on Kickstarter and CRAP! No One Loves Me plays on the worth people find through their phones, Donut County has passed through several iterations to become a reaction to internet culture. In terms of tonal composition Donut County has more in common with Esposito’s more personal work in being a light parody of modern times. “That’s why I ended up changing the game up so many different times because I had no idea if it was good or not.” “Obviously there were technical reasons, and art takes time to make, but I think the thing I didn’t realise was not having someone to bounce ideas off of and not having someone to give a little pushback kind of drove me a little bit nuts. The point of it was to learn a lot, I wanted to see the whole process and I thought it would be so much easier than it ended up being. “One of the biggest challenges was the decision to make it by myself,” Esposito admits. “Now six years later I’m finally finishing it.”Īlthough work didn’t properly begin until 2013, Esposito admits that overshooting his initial 12-month target by five years came due to his decision to go development alone, something he felt empowered to do because of a sense of confidence. “So I knew after that game that I really wanted to make my own game and I had way too much confidence at that point so I was like ‘yeah, I’ll go make my own indie game, I have this cool idea about a hole in the ground, it’ll take one year.’ I feel like I got very lucky and I got the confidence to figure things out on my own and go out on my own Ben Esposito “I feel like I got very lucky and I got the confidence to figure things out on my own and go out on my own,” Esposito tells us. Hot off the heels of his first gig as a level designer in Giant Sparrow’s The Unfinished Swan, Esposito admits that he was perhaps too flush with confidence. “So there’s definitely a Katamari Damacy influence there because there is a similar sense of path planning and ordering gameplay that I think is very satisfying.” “Then I realised that it was interesting if you start small and have to plan your path to pick up objects so each one makes you a little bit bigger. “The very first thing I realised was ‘oh wait, this is kind of boring if you’re just a hole,” Esposito tells PocketGamer.Biz. The account gained popularity throughout 2011, which led to a game jam with Molyneux’ faux ideas as the theme and Esposito with a tweet about playing as a hole. The parody account on Twitter presents Molyneux as a tragicomedy character with hopeful but outlandish ideas of what video games can be which land on the ears of uninterested bystanders. Published by Annapurna Interactive, the concept for the hole in the ground-inspired gameplay comes from an unlikely combination of a parody account of Fable developer Peter Molyneux and third-person puzzle-adventure game Katamari Damacy. Other games are sombre and wide-ranging in their renown, such as last year’s What Remains of Edith Finch by Giant Sparrow, of which Ben did prototyping and consulted on game design for a major part of the development.Įsposito’s story-based physics puzzle game Donut County has only just launched, but the idea was conceived way back in 2012 when he was first starting out in games development. Some of it is more tongue-in-cheek and low-key like 2013’s Brooklyn Trash King, a currently unattainable title about a hotshot dev who must grovel to a king rodent to snag funding for their reasonably poor crowdfunding campaign.
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