The Small, Weird, Wonderful World of Indie Game Collective Sokpop
Indie game collective Sokpop’s latest game is called Frog Struggles. Like much of their output, Frog Struggles is a small, weird, satisfying game built around low-poly graphics and limited controls. You play as a bug, flying around a languid and peaceful swamp, only interrupted by occasional combat bouts with enemy bugs or by the ever-present, gigantic frog looming in the center of the gameworld.
It’s a testament to Sokpop’s ingenuity that they’ve been able to keep making games riffing off of simple ideas for this long. Other games in their history include Zoo Packs, a turn-based-strategy title starring adorable animals; Simmiland, a god simulator where your actions are limited by how many cards you can play to affect the world, before it must develop on its own; and Kamer, a “game about thinking” that begins as an exploration of a small apartment and grows quickly to be far more than that.
Their output is notable not just for its breadth, but also the speed at which they release new works. Sokpop makes two games a month—meaning that they release a new game about every two weeks. The Sokpop Patreon has been a huge factor in allowing this to happen, as Sokpop developer Tijmen Tio explained to Paste over email.
“For the Patreon we make two games a month. We can create smaller games through [the Patreon], which we normally wouldn’t have done, because they take too much time and we’d feel unsure whether we could sell the games well by themselves. The Patreon enables us to make more experimental games and try out prototypes before we turn them into full big projects,” Tijmen wrote.
Sokpop’s games all play with simple visuals and control schemes in unexpected ways. Some feel like genuinely fascinating explorations of genre, such as King of the Sandcastle, an asynchronous card game with permadeath, and with the ability for cards to level up and eventually become random encounter bosses for other players. Others feel like jokes taken to their greatest mechanical end, such as Llama Villa, described as “the Sims, but with Llamas.”
