“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.
#Donut county game demo Ps4
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. All rights reserved.It hasn’t been an easy road, either. For more about us, Girls on Games, check out girlsongames.ca.Ĭopyright 2014-2022. Thanks for listening! The GoGCast comes out weekly so make sure to subscribe and you won't miss an episode.
Vicarious Visions merged into Blizzard (00:54:54)Īpple launching VR headset next year (00:59:23) Valve has more games in development than ever (00:49:13) Microsoft ups the Xbox Live Gold pricing then quickly backpedaled (00:40:25)
Plus, we chat about Xbox Live Gold pricing, Valve actually making games, Vicarious Visions merging into Blizzard Entertainment and Apple working on a VR headset. She and Ali also went to Donut County to meet a friendly racoon and collect all the things. Leah travelled to a scary remote village in Eastern Europe and met the mysterious Lady Dimitrescu as she played the Resident Evil Village demo on PlayStation 5.