This is The Mechanic, where Alex Wiltshire invites developers to discuss the difficult journeys they ve taken to make their games. This time, Donut County [official site].
Donut County is a physics puzzle game in which you are a hole and you make things fall into you. It s a sort of reverse Katamari Damacy, in which you grow larger as you make things disappear rather than gather them up, and it was inspired by a 2012 Peter Molydeux joke.
The idea was originally that you d just play as a hole and I thought there s probably some interesting problems there, creator Ben Esposito tells me. I also thought it d be pretty easy. But I was kind of wrong. As he found out, making a game about being a hole gives rise to all kinds of trouble, including game physics hijinks, human nature, and the surprisingly complex philosophy of what holes are. (more…)