{"id":43269,"date":"2018-08-28T20:19:00","date_gmt":"2018-08-28T20:19:00","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.gamasutra.com\/view\/news\/325435"},"modified":"2018-08-28T20:19:00","modified_gmt":"2018-08-28T20:19:00","slug":"why-donut-county-changed-halfway-through-development","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/sickgaming.net\/blog\/2018\/08\/28\/why-donut-county-changed-halfway-through-development\/","title":{"rendered":"Why Donut County changed halfway through development"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><em>Donut County<\/em> was finally\u00a0<a href=\"https:\/\/twitter.com\/donutcounty\/status\/1034497005656002561\">released today<\/a> after six years in development&#8211; but it was originally supposed to be an entirely different game.<\/p>\n<p>Initially a game <a href=\"https:\/\/www.gamasutra.com\/view\/news\/312142\/How_Donut_County_shifted_its_focus_on_Los_Angeles.php\">centered around\u00a0Hopi culture<\/a> titled <em>Kachina,<\/em>\u00a0<em>Donut County\u00a0<\/em>developer Ben Esposito discusses why he decided to switch gears and center the game around Los Angeles instead.\u00a0<\/p>\n<p>It&#8217;s common practice for developers to create games that draw inspiration from the histories, stories and cultures of people around the world, however, there&#8217;s a delicate balance.<\/p>\n<p>Respecting those people&#8217;s feelings while exploring their cultural touchstones is incredibly important, and as a game maker it can be easy to make mistakes,\u00a0especially as a solo dev.<\/p>\n<p>Esposito actually gave a talk as part of the Failure Workshop during GDC 2015, which addresses\u00a0the mistakes he made working\u00a0on\u00a0<em>Kachina<\/em>,\u00a0which drew from Hopi folklore, and his journey to understand and learn from what that really\u00a0meant.<\/p>\n<p>Developers interested in learning from Esposito about\u00a0important issues underlying cultural appropriation in game development can\u00a0watch his portion\u00a0of talk\u00a0<a href=\"https:\/\/www.youtube.com\/watch?v=dWadgcbtFe4&amp;feature=youtu.be\">here<\/a>.\u00a0<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Donut County was finally\u00a0released today after six years in development&#8211; but it was originally supposed to be an entirely different game. Initially a game centered around\u00a0Hopi culture titled Kachina,\u00a0Donut County\u00a0developer Ben Esposito discusses why he decided to switch gears and center the game around Los Angeles instead.\u00a0 It&#8217;s common practice for developers to create games [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":43270,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[20],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-43269","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-news"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/sickgaming.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/43269","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/sickgaming.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/sickgaming.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sickgaming.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sickgaming.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=43269"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/sickgaming.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/43269\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sickgaming.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/43270"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/sickgaming.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=43269"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sickgaming.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=43269"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sickgaming.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=43269"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}