The Mayor of Donut County

Six years in the making, Donut County—a game in which you’re a hole in the ground, swallowing everything in your path—has gone from online gag to game-jam prototype to fully realized adventure.

Now that this terrific indie is finally available to play, we chatted with lone developer Ben Esposito about its fascinating backstory—and how the game reflects his hometown of Los Angeles and the true meaning of friendship.

Donut County has taken quite a journey to reach the App Store. How did you come up with the idea?
It started as a goof, actually. In early 2012, @PeterMolydeux (a parody account) was tweeting ludicrous game concepts, and one of them involved playing as a hole. Later that year, I was in a 48-hour game jam where the goal was to make one of his ideas real, and I ran with it.

This is your first solo project, but before that you worked on The Unfinished Swan and What Remains of Edith Finch while at the studio Giant Sparrow. Is there a theme across those games and Donut County?
I think a lot of the games I’ve worked on have started with this really solid kernel of an emotion or idea or mechanic, and then the process is figuring out the universe outside that thing. With Donut County, the question was: What does a world look like in which being a hole in the ground makes sense and is fun?

How did your answer inform Donut County’s evolution?
Originally the game wasn’t going to have a story or characters—it was more of a toy. But everyone I showed it to felt weirded out or sad that they were going around destroying homes. They felt like the villain.

I realized pretty quickly that the most important part of the game isn’t the hole—it’s the place and the things that end up in it. So I knew I needed to build out this consistent world and characters who inhabit all these areas and a reason why they’re connected to your hero.

My solution was BK, an idiot raccoon hero who doesn’t realize the wrong he’s doing by making the holes. In his mind, he’s just taking people’s trash away for the local raccoon company—enough of it so he can earn a coveted quadcopter.

In a lighthearted way, the story also touches on more serious themes, like friendship and the consequences of one’s actions.
Yeah, it’s funny. There was always supposed to be a big reveal near the end of the game where you’d fall in the hole and see all the places you’d put down there—and realize nothing you swallowed goes away. But I ended up moving that to the beginning of the game because I didn’t want to punish you for doing your job, like, “Look at how bad you were.” The way it is now, BK has to learn everyone’s story of getting thrown into the hole in order for him to understand why it was a bad thing.

He also learns that from Mira, and their relationship is one of the things I’m most proud of. They have different perspectives, and she really disapproves of everything he’s done, but they’re still best friends and she laughs at his jokes. I think there’s something super-rich and relatable to that dynamic; I love when game characters are actually good to each other.

Why the doughnut motif? Is it because most have holes?
Well, that’s one reason they were on my mind. But the real connection is more about the story and the setting. The game’s fictional town is based on Los Angeles, and in a lot of neighborhoods here, doughnut shops are everywhere—they’re the center of the community and have a unique identity. So in Donut County, the doughnut shop is where everything stems from.

What did you learn most during the game’s development?
I went into this project very confident: I’d worked on some games, I had some artistic abilities, I could do music, and I believed I could make something really cool and unique in a year. And now that it’s five years later and I know how brutally hard it is to finish a project, I’m a lot more humble and realistic, and I understand that any game that gets finished is a miracle. So I have a lot more respect for pretty much any game, because I’ve been through the whole process and seen every little piece of it.

Donut County is available on multiple platforms, but what’s special about the Mac version?
I developed almost the entire game on a MacBook Pro, so Donut County is really native to the platform. It was a big honor to see my game on the App Store when I opened my Mac!

Is there anything about developing the game on Mac that pleasantly surprised you?
I was really happy with the Metal framework for Donut County’s graphics: I was able to get the game looking exactly the same across Mac and iOS without sacrificing anything. And I think Donut County is really fun with a trackpad. That’s how I played it when I was making it!

Donut County

Be a hole

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