“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. It is the result of six years of solo development, dozens of donuts (for research), and one fateful encounter with a raccoon.Ben Esposito’s body of work is eclectic. The hole won’t stop until the whole county is all gone.ĭonut County was created by Ben Esposito, designer on What Remains of Edith Finch and The Unfinished Swan. You can use it to solve puzzles.or just destroy stuff. COMBINE objects inside for crazy effects: cook soup, breed bunnies, launch fireworks, and more.MOVE the hole to swallow up their stuff, growing bigger each time.EXPLORE every character’s home, each with their own unique environment.When BK falls into one of his own holes, he’s confronted by his best friend Mira and the residents of Donut County, who are all stuck 999 feet underground… and they demand answers! You play as BK, a hole-driving raccoon who swallows up his friends and their homes to earn idiotic prizes. Raccoons have taken over Donut County with remote-controlled trash-stealing holes. Meet cute characters, steal their trash, and throw them in a hole. Donut County is a story-based physics puzzle game where you play as an ever-growing hole in the ground.

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