![]() Annapurna InteractiveĮver since playing Sonic the Hedgehog as a kid, Esposito had wanted to make video games. Esposito’s entry into the world of video games coincided with his entry into the world of doughnuts LA’s doughnut culture was the inspiration for Donut County. The doughnut motif, though also born out of Esposito’s move to LA, is unique to Donut County, and serves as the connective tissue tying the whole game together. “They were kind of inspired by my first LA apartment, where the place was definitely run by raccoons. “I really wanted you to take on the role or the perspective of the gentrifier of the place, and for you to be the one who’s playing this video game, or Uber-type app, that’s kind of destroying the environment around you so that you can get stupid prizes, and raccoons made a lot of sense in terms of them invading the place,” Esposito explains. “When you play the game, you intuitively know that you’re being an asshole,” he adds, laughing. He’s wrong, but you kind of get it, and it’s a story of trying to change his mind.” “That’s when I realized, ‘I need to flip this.’ I need this game to be about you being the bad guy, but being able to understand where he comes from because his perspective is so different. “You know you’re destroying something and being bad,” he says of the game’s central mechanic. When it became clear to Esposito that he wasn’t going to succeed in trying to tell someone else’s story, he returned to the drawing board, and to that little hole in the ground. ![]() In many different ways, it hurts them and it hurts you, because it’s not a genuine story.” “It doesn’t pay to tell someone else’s story. “Research does not equal lived experience,” he said during the talk. As a result, Kachina was met with criticism, and in a 2015 “ Failure Workshop” (in which developers share stories of, yes, past failures), Esposito spoke about his missteps in development, both in the original Kachina concept and in the year that he spent trying to prove the criticisms wrong. It was named after the spirit being in Hopi culture but seemed to have nothing to do with Hopi culture besides the name and cribbing the look of kachina dolls. This premise would become reality in the first, failed iteration of Donut County: Kachina, which made waves when it was featured in GDC 2013’s Experimental Gameplay Workshop. You play a hole, you must move around an environment making certain elements fall into correct targets at the right time.- petermolydeux January 5, 2012 ( Molyneux is a game designer whose reputation in the video game community is near legendary.) ![]() Meanwhile, the idea of controlling a hole in the ground came from a tweet from a Peter Molyneux parody account. The game’s description reads as such: “You play a hot shot tech nerd gentrifying Brooklyn who must grovel in the face of a king rodent in order to get funding for their shitty Kickstarter project.” Running with that concept, in 2013 he created Brooklyn Trash King - though in that game, the roles were reversed. “Raccoons are these creatures that are extremely adaptable to a human environment, and they seem kind of harmless and cute, and then all of a sudden they run the place,” he explains. These raccoons - and their leader, the Trash King - grew out of Esposito’s concerns about gentrification and technology. In Donut County, the hole is used by a band of raccoons, via a mobile app, to essentially take over the county, i.e., as a means of gentrification. Raccoons, tech, and gentrification are all entwined in Donut County’s DNA The seeds of Donut County can be found throughout Esposito’s past work. I spoke with Esposito ahead of the game’s release to figure out just how he brought Donut County to life. Though anticipation for the completed product has been building steadily since the game was first announced, Esposito has had to deal with copycats on top of constantly tweaking the game’s physics engine and figuring out just how much he could do on his own as an independent developer.īut despite all those twists and turns, the game is finally here, available on iPhone, iPad, Mac, PC, and PS4 in all its hole-y glory - and published by Annapurna Interactive (a subsidiary of the motion picture company Annapurna Pictures), no less.
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