ETAO Podcast, Episode 81.
Tijmen Tio is one quarter of the game dev collective/boyband Sokpop, who’ve been putting out a game every two weeks since 2018. It’s a way of working that requires a great deal of trust among the developers, and between them and their audience—which makes it unique, and beautiful, and especially worth exploring as the world continues to go fully nuts.
We talk about how Sokpop started doing what they do, the “stupid ideas” (Tijmen’s term) that they floated and rejected along the way, and some of the truly lovely work that Tijmen has made for the subscribers, from simmiland to Doler to Featherfall. (I do wish we’d also gotten to talk about Sproots and Bandapes, but that’s the whole thing. right? There’s just so much, and so much of it is so strange, and so, so good).
You can get Sokpop’s games on itch.io, Steam, and of course, their Patreon.
You can also follow Tijmen (and Sokpop) on Twitter.
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• That GDC talk that Tijmen and Ruben did is a good one.
• As is the one that Zach Gage and Bennett Foddy did.
• Brian David Gilbert’s video, which introduced a whole lot of new folks to Sokpop, remains a goofy delight as well.
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“All The People Say (Season 3)” by Holly Hyperion.
Some music from Fishy, and from a few other Sokpop creations.
We’re on Apple Podcasts, Stitcher, Google Podcasts, Spotify, PocketCasts, Overcast, and RadioPublic. You can also subscribe using good old-fashioned RSS.
Logo by Aaron Perry-Zucker, using Icons by by Llisole, Dávid Gladiš, Atif Arshad, Daniel Nochta, Mike Rowe, Jakub Čaja, Raji Purcell and IconsGhost from the Noun Project.