GR: You consulted on What Remains of Edith Finch. What exactly did you do and how did it help with Donut County even though both are pretty different?
BE: My job was to work with Ian Dallas [creative director at developer Giant Sparrow] on prototyping the stories that would eventually be in the game. I’d either take an idea that Ian had or pitch my own and I would build out an actual playable prototype of the story in Unity just so we could experiment and if it would be interesting. I prototyped a lot of the smaller, physics-y stories. Like the swing set one was mine, the bathtub with the frog, the photography one, the kite one where you’re collecting trash and making a more massive monster, and a bunch more that didn’t make it into the game.
You can kind of draw a line between that work and what I was doing with Donut County. It’s similar because the Edith Finch stories don’t have fail states and are one-off intuitive puzzles about a growing scale of something. A lot of the thinking that went into Donut County was echoed in that project or vice versa. I don’t consider them that different even though aesthetically they’re very different. The work I did on that game is pretty similar to the stuff I’m doing with puzzles in Donut County.
GR: Has Adam Capone [the person behind the Peter Molydeux parody Twitter account] said anything to you about Donut County?
BE: We’ve talked a few times. Since I’ve started working that game in earnest, he was super excited about it. Like he really loved it and encouraged me along the way. We’ve touched base a few times and then just recently before the game came out, I asked him ‘How can I credit you in the game?’ And he told me to just put ‘Peter Molydeux.’ And that was OK with me. I keep thanking him for doing that jam way back when. I think his work is very funny.
GR: This game is out on PC and mobile but also PS4. Did Sony come to you or anything?
BE: That was handled by [publisher] Annapurna so I don’t know the exact origin of that. But I know Annapurna Interactive has a really good relationship with Sony because some of them used to be at Sony Santa Monica. That’s actually how I knew a lot of Annapurna folks because they worked on The Unfinished Swan or Edith Finch.
So the connection was there and then PlayStation was really excited about the game when we showed them and when we talked to them. Things worked out in a way where it made a lot sense to invest in making it a PS4 game. Especially since there is no development team for this game. There’s no way I’d be able to also ship on other consoles at the same time. So PlayStation was really good to us. They showed us at PSX and we got a platinum trophy. [laughs]. So I feel like that worked out pretty well.
I didn’t think [Sony] was going to let me do the platinum trophy joke [in the PSX trailer] but I threw it in just to see what they’d say. They modified it a little bit but they probably knew they were going to let us have the platinum trophy.
GR: Speaking of the PS4, I’ve heard of the bug in that version where a sound effect would play at a thousand times the normal volume. How did you stumble upon that?
BE: [laughs] We could not figure out why that was happening. It was horrible. It was a monstrosity. It was only in one of the sound effects so it would randomly happen and it would be ‘What the fuck was that?!?’ It sounded like a dumpster falling off a roof. It was so funny.
It took a lot of debugging and then finally Josh Sarfaty from Annapurna was like ‘Hey I noticed something really weird.’ So apparently in the PS4 version of Unity, they don’t cap how loud something can be. They do it on PC, which is why I never noticed. On PS4, they’re like ‘Sure, you want to play it that loud? Whatever!’ [laughs]
GR: Since you’re going to take a little break from development after so many years making this game, what games are you going to catch up on?
BE: I want to get into some longer games because that’s basically the first thing that drops off. Like RPGs. I’m a big Mass Effect fan and I didn’t play Andromeda.
GR: That’s maybe for the better.
BE: I’ve heard, yeah. [laughs] I never got into The Witcher 3. That’s been in my backlog for forever. I’ll probably have time to sink into a few of them. I only played the first few hours of Persona 5. I want to get into that.
I also want to just play games in genres that I’m not that into. I’m not a strategy or RTS person and there are games that are really popular that I just do not understand the appeal of. Like Rome: Total War was always like ‘Ew. Rome? What? You point and click and they go and do stuff?’ I really want to get an appreciation for more genres that I’ve always written off because there’s always more stuff to find. I’m ready to expand my palate.
GR: There’s a glaring flaw in the sticker pack that comes with the iOS version of the game. It doesn’t come with the duck emoji from the game. What gives?
BE: Oh right. That one fell off the table at the end. But it might come back. No promises either way. But I agree. The duck is an omission from the sticker pack. That’s all I can really say. [laughs]
