After working at developer Giant Sparrow on indie darlings akin to “The Unfinished Swan” and “What Remains of Edith Finch,” Esposito would go on to create “Donut County,” an indie success story if ever there was one. Released by arthouse indie game writer Annapurna Interactive in 2018, the game about raccoon app builders swallowing up Los Angeles with a gap in the floor caught the present of mainstream success.
While Esposito had been the sole developer of some interactive music movies and noticed some success together with his 2016 Furby survival horror game “Tattletail,” “Donut County” was completely different. Esposito was the sole title behind a game that might escape of the indie sphere and into the highlight of the bigger gaming world. Its single mechanic, shifting round an ever-growing gap, coupled with an enthralling, lo-fi artwork type, made the game approachable and simply adaptable throughout gadgets.
“Neon White” isn’t attempting to repeat that success. It’s not even attempting to attraction to everybody. It’s a hyper particular but hard-to-categorize undertaking that struts round, sporting its inspirations on its sleeve. Don’t prefer it? Too unhealthy.
In “Neon White,” you play as a damned soul, White, competing together with your fellow hell spawn for an opportunity at penance. White is joined by some previous pals, members of a mercenary group who died in a heist-gone-wrong. Together once more, they’ll battle via heaven, slashing and capturing the demons infesting it (and attempting to kill one another once more) at breakneck speeds.
Upon beating a stage, you’re awarded a medal starting from bronze to ace. Achieve an ace runtime, and also you’ll unlock a leaderboard of the quickest instances of different gamers. Maybe somebody obtained the soar a half second earlier than you could possibly, or perhaps somebody’s halved your time with a shortcut you didn’t learn about. Beat a stage quick sufficient, and you might unlock the secret purple ace medal. That feeling of eager to shave fractions of a second off your time is the game’s actual origin.
Building “Neon White’s” first prototype was a reprieve for the developer, one thing he mentioned he simply needed to get out of his system in 2017 whereas engaged on “Donut County’s” extra informal, puzzle-focused gameplay. After that title shipped, Esposito returned to the shelved “Neon White” prototype with recent eyes. The roguelike deck-builder “Slay the Spire” launched round that point, inspiring a wave of indie builders to combine card-based mechanics with different genres, resulting in beforehand unparalleled mixtures. Esposito was amongst that crowd, nevertheless it took some time to strike gold.
“I was working on that for a month or so, then I almost gave up on it,” he mentioned. “Randomly getting weapons dealt to you is not fun at all, it turns out.”
What saved the undertaking was competitors. Esposito dropped the randomized deck strategy in favor of looting enemies for playing cards, which opened up new prospects for stage design. In “Neon White,” every card represents a weapon that, when discarded, prompts a motion means: double soar, sprint, grapple and so forth. Stringing these collectively in succession whereas choosing up new playing cards from fallen foes is the second-to-second goal of any given stage. Building ranges round particular playing cards and combos allowed for extra fascinating challenges for each developer and participant, however what actually stored Esposito engaged was a message from a pal who demoed the undertaking: “Here’s how long it took me to beat this level.”
“Pfft,” Esposito thought, “I could do better than that.”
Development picked up in earnest in 2019, and this time round, Esposito wasn’t going it alone. Working with a bunch of indie builders gathered below the title Angel Matrix (the first of many nods to ‘90s anime), Esposito and his team began work on what would become over 100 levels of platforming, shooting and storytelling.
Going into development for “Neon White,” Esposito decided to forgo any assumptions about what a good fast-paced first-person shooter could be. That approach would lead to a tangle of design decisions that, together, created the genre-defying experience at the core of “Neon White.”
For instance, including a player’s gun in the on-screen person interface wasn’t important to “Neon White’s” gameplay, in order that they removed it — only one break with conference that had cascading results. With no bodily presence of the participant character’s physique onscreen, the builders discovered there was no idea of actions taking time via animations. When gamers lacked that reference level, the concept of carrying three of the similar mild machine weapons as you jumped off a waterfall didn’t appear fairly so weird.
“Those early choices to not be beholden to FPS conventions, those are the things that I learned early on that I was able to bring to this and make something that was weird and counterintuitive,” Esposito mentioned.
“Neon White” doesn’t share many similarities with the hottest video games in Esposito’s portfolio. Games like “What Remains of Edith Finch” are labeled “walking simulators” (with each affection and derision) for their sluggish tempo, with a story expertise unfolding largely round the participant. Walking is sluggish. “Neon White” desires you to be consistently pondering of how you can be quicker.
But Esposito defined that “fast” is a relative feeling, finally an impact of what the participant has the choices to do. In “Neon White,” every stage has an apparent path out there to gamers. But to enhance their runtimes, gamers are inspired to “break” the stage in the similar approach that pace runners do, discovering new routes or utilizing the playing cards they’re dealt in seemingly unintuitive methods.
“It’s not about moments of extremely high speeds, it’s about feeling like you can always be going a little bit faster at any given point in the level,” he mentioned.
Though “Neon White” has been a important success, many have recoiled at its bombastic and hypersexual writing. But Esposito mentioned he simply didn’t wish to do “a wholesome thing” once more: “I wanted to do something that was just stupid and over the top and really self-indulgent.”
Luckily he had a few of the finest folks on-hand to make an uncouth, anime-fueled assault on all issues holy: visible novel developer Aevee Bee (“We Know the Devil”), animator Ryann Shannon (storyboard artist on “Infinity Train”) and Geneva Hodgson (“Trick Moon”), character designer, co-creator and Esposito’s spouse. Together, the group made a character-driven crime drama about explosions, intercourse and useless gods.
“Its wacky,” he acknowledged with amusing.
The story breaks additionally function a reprieve from the game itself, an opportunity to decelerate and recoup earlier than setting off once more on one other string of ranges at ever quicker speeds. That juxtaposition is stark — and deliberately so — one thing Esposito mentioned he realized from “late ‘90s Japanese import games that had pre-rendered cutscenes and fast video game[play].”
Ultimately though, Esposito wasn’t involved about cohesion between the story and gameplay. “Ludonarrative dissonance?” he mentioned, referring to a line of critique in video games research that highlights gaps between gameplay and narrative. “Awesome, I don’t give a s—.”
“Neon White’s” recognition got here as a shock to the group. The game is a pastiche of early 2000′s video video games and anime, that includes the voice of Steve Blum, finest recognized for his portrayal of Spike Lee in the English dub of “Cowboy Bebop,” a staple of Adult Swim and its Toonami programming block since the sequence premiered in the U.S. in 2001. If you weren’t there, or haven’t read-up on the lineage of “Counter Strike: Source” and “Trigun’s” affect, “Neon White” can seem inimical.
Esposito will get that: “Sometimes when people don’t get what we’re trying to do, I just think, ‘Oh you haven’t played enough localized, mid-budget PS Vita games.’ ”
The group steeled itself for rejection.
“We thought we were like ‘screw the awards,’ we’re just going to make something that feels cool and fun,” Esposito mentioned. “But it was totally the opposite. People get it. They talk about the ways that — even though it’s counterintuitive — it works together. So we’re just shocked to be honest. It’s very cool.”
Unlike White, Esposito isn’t attempting to return off as a suave motion hero. You don’t get a game like “Neon White” by attempting to be cool — or attempting to design one thing with the aim of creating it “cool.” It’s a ardour undertaking via and thru, from stage design to character writing to thematic via strains.
As Esposito would put it: It’s “purely vibes-based, ultimately.”
Autumn Wright is a contract video games critic and anime journalist. Find their newest writing at @TheAutumnWright.