In 2008, Mortis Ghost made a game with his friend, composer Alias Conrad Coldwood. It was a surreal roleplaying game about a baseball player fighting ghosts called Off. He shared it for free on a French-speaking forum, where it garnered a small audience. One player was a French artist who was inspired to make a piece of fan art, which she shared with her then-girlfriend. “I was very intrigued,” says Quinn K, now a writer and game developer. At the time, she was a 15-year-old living in Austria who had no idea how influential Off would be for her, nor she for Off.

After beating the game, K lay awake at night thinking about the ending. “Something had gotten its hooks in me,” she says. Wanting to show it to more friends, she resolved to translate the game from French to English — neither of which were her first language. “I wasn’t the right person for the job,” she says. “I was just the person that did it.”

Fan translation for games is often a tricky process, not just because of linguistics but also technical limitations and potential copyright claims by the original developers. But K knew it was possible to make her version work because there was already a partial translation, and when she contacted Ghost, he gave his approval. With the help of some friends in proofreading and asset creation, she put together a translation of the 10-ish-hour RPG by 2011. She posted it on the forums for a website called Starmen.net, which was popular among fans of the Mother / EarthBound series. K was partially inspired by a Mother 3 translation, and other Mother fans quickly connected with the similar vibes in Off. 

After the initial release, K put out an improved version in 2012. By 2013, Off was an “astonishing success,” says Ghost, with users who discovered it on the Starmen forums spreading it via fan creations like art and cosplay to DeviantArt and Tumblr. On the latter, it was the sixth-most-talked-about game of the year, behind major franchises like Pokémon, Animal Crossing, Kingdom Hearts, The Legend of Zelda, and Mass Effect. Unlike those established hits, Off was free, spread only through word of mouth, and was still clearly finding a devoted audience.

Despite its popularity, K was aware that the translation wasn’t perfect. “A lot of people rip [it], and I get why,” she says. “It was full of very severe flaws, just born from the fact that I’m neither an English native speaker nor a French native speaker. So it was possible to make mistakes in both languages.” There were also other fans making their own translations or patches that added to K’s work. One of these, released in 2017 by artist Lady Saytenn, added an option for the player themselves to be referred to with they / them pronouns.

“That inspired me so much,” says K. Having had a few years of space from Off, and having improved in both English and French as well as “grown a bit wiser as a person,” she embarked on making a third version of her translation. This time, she collaborated directly with Lady Saytenn, as well as another artist who created image assets, Rosie Brewster.

K categorizes the second translation as the one that “most millennials” have played, while the third reached a younger wave of fans. K says that she was actually surprised to find that many people who encountered Off through the third translation hold it in high regard because “back when it first came out, that translation was not particularly popular.”

Some changes were straightforward, like correcting pop culture references that K had been unaware of, as well as an error where she had interpreted the French word femme as “wife,” rather than “woman.” It can mean either, but K’s choice changed the implication of a key line, and Ghost let her know it wasn’t what he originally intended.

However, some fans felt that the newest translation was overly sanitized; K says she deliberately made some characters “a little less crass” since “a big sign of an inexperienced translator is swearing a lot.” She also removed an instance of the R-slur, which upset “some edgy people.” 

More nuanced was the shift to clearer language and a tendency to stick more closely to the original lines. The 2.0 translation had been vague and sometimes confusing in a way that players appreciated; it seemed to reflect the atmosphere of the game. “The little weirdnesses [in the 2.0 translation] really twist the knife on how strange and off putting the world of the game is,” says K.

But some of that was down to K’s imperfect French and English, so in the third version, she chose to clarify some lines, leading some players to feel that she had removed an aspect of whimsy and poetry that they had actually enjoyed. 

These are tensions inherent to the act of translation, which is always adaptive. Now that Off is getting an official remaster, there will be a fourth version later this year, and it’s not clear how they’ll balance clarity and atmosphere, as well as its own adaptation, with K’s. The announcement was careful to acknowledge K’s work and says that the remaster will be “based on” K’s translation. She’s also been paid for what was once years of fan labor. But it does seem that the script is in the process of being readapted by professional localizers. (Publisher Fangamer did not respond to requests for confirmation.)

For K, the readaptation is a good thing. “The one thing I can say from everything I’ve seen of their updated version of the translation is they’ve improved it in every conceivable way,” she says. “I’m excited to rediscover the game.”

On the other hand, “it’s a strange feeling to be most well known for the work that you did on somebody else’s work,” says K, who has made several of her own games and is now working on Blanksword, a roguelike RPG “very strongly inspired by Off.” Ghost, too, says he’s changed a lot in the 17 years since Off’s original release. “I am of course very proud to have produced a game that has touched so many people, but I think that the game now belongs much more to the community,” he says. He is currently working on a new game called Help.

The remake won’t just feature an improved script but will also have updated combat mechanics, new animations, and some additional content written by Ghost. The goal was to “completely preserve the original atmosphere, while polishing everything that could be [polished],” he says. As with all remakes, this will be a difficult balancing act; adding in the complex adaptive work of translation, there will always be divided opinions over which of the now four major versions is the best.

But K’s efforts undeniably made Off what it is today, and the remake acknowledging and building on that history is a rare step in an industry where fan translations are usually unacknowledged at best and taken down at worst.

“I couldn’t walk away from the pen and ink thing,” says John Evelyn, creator of The Collage Atlas, a dreamlike storybook adventure recently released on Steam. The entire game is hand drawn, from tiny flowers and insects to huge buildings and the clouds that float over them. Exploring this world unwraps its dreamlike story, with environments folding out in response to your approach.

“I had been drawing for many years before that […] and I’d always draw with ink straight away, without any kind of prior pencil work or sketching,” he says. “I liked all the incidental details and the accidents that come out along the way.” He compares it to improv music — “actually, sometimes it goes horribly wrong!” — but says that the feeling of getting into a stride and being surprised by unexpected outcomes was important to the whole game.

It’s because of this that the art style underpins the rest of the experience. Where individual pieces of game art can fall into the background, The Collage Atlas requests your attention to detail — and rewards it. At the very start of the game, a pinwheel appears from a grassy plain; look at it, and it begins spinning. It was one of the first things that Evelyn created, for what was originally an app meant to accompany a picture book.

The book, a follow-up to a self-published work called Asleep As The Breeze, was intended to explore themes of agency and the feeling of disempowerment that can come from traumatic or chaotic life experiences. “You can start to feel like life is something that’s kind of happening to you rather than something that you have meaningful control or authorship of,” says Evelyn.

While experimenting with that theme, “everything clicked into place,” when the pinwheel spun, he says. “It suddenly made sense that, actually, this was the crux of what I was trying to talk about. That, actually, even when it doesn’t feel like it, just your presence within the world is genuinely meaningful and actually does have an impact on it. Even your gaze and your observation is also meaningful.”

Evelyn built on the app idea for a short art experience, which he exhibited at the Leftfield Collection at UK gaming convention EGX in 2016. At the time, he says, he had no intention of continuing to expand it into a game that would eventually make it to Apple Arcade and then Steam. Instead, he says, it was “something that I personally felt like I really needed to do.”

“I had gone through a pretty bad run of years,” he says, “and I was finding it difficult to find media that spoke to me about the things I was experiencing.” Other media seemed deeply specific to others’ situations, whereas Evelyn wanted something broader. “Things that just nudge at universal themes I find really useful.”

At the show, people connected with his piece. In particular, Evelyn was swayed by the attention of “business-type people,” who would ask him how long the full game would end up being. “In my mind, I was like, ‘Oh, do you actually think that people would want that?’” He says he was swayed by them because, if they were coming at it from a “fairly cold financial standpoint” and thought there would be an audience for it, he might be able to believe it himself.

He knew that he wanted the experience to be something that could “slowly absorb you” — meaning a couple of hours, rather than 10 minutes. For the next four years, he threw everything at filling out that scope. Although he had experience and knowledge from a career that included time making Flash games, working in freelance illustration, and releasing music EPs, he also had a lot to learn. “The day that I started The Collage Atlas as it is now, not the little demo version, that was the very first day I opened up [game engine] Unity,” he says.

In order to convert illustrations to 3D, a process he had never done before, he began by creating the models in Unity before printing their maps and drawing in the details with pen. Once scanned back in, those textures were readded to the model to create the world of The Collage Atlas and everything that makes it up.

After nearly five years of work, in 2020, the game was released on Apple Arcade, but in 2023 it was delisted when the exclusivity period ended. Not long afterward, even people who had downloaded it weren’t able to launch it. “This is the sad thing about the way our kind of creative mediums are going: works don’t have any kind of permanence — they can just vanish,” he says. Evelyn felt he owed it to his past self who did all that work to make sure the game was still available and recently launched it on Steam.

After the game’s Apple Arcade release, Evelyn thought he might be done working on games. “I spoke to one of my friends who’s a AAA developer and I said, ‘That’s it. That’s me done. I’m never doing this again.’ He said, ‘I’ll give you six months.’” Almost exactly six months later, he started working on his next game, The Wings of Sycamore. Also hand-drawn, it’s something of a spiritual sequel to The Collage Atlas.

“Atlas is trying to explore the idea of falling inwards,” he says. “Wings of Sycamore is about flight. After you manage to climb back out of the depths, hopefully, that’s when you just have the pure joy of flying.”

Scavengers Reign is a beautiful exploration of a complicated, fascinating, sometimes brutal ecology. Nidus is also a beautiful exploration of a complicated, fascinating, sometimes brutal ecology. Their approaches and styles are different, but the underlying themes share a connection — and an artist. Caleb Wood is an animator and now game developer who worked as a concept artist on Max’s sci-fi show while simultaneously solo-developing his recently released arcade bullet hell game.

Having begun his animation career 15 years ago, Wood decided that he wanted to figure out game development in 2020. Nidus was meant to be something simple that he could use to teach himself programming. “But because I’m able to produce some pretty good art quality,” he says, “I felt like I had to at least try marketing and see what I could accomplish.”

In Nidus, players simultaneously control a flower and a wasp in a symbiotic relationship, as they struggle against all manner of strange insects and critters in their wider ecosystem. Wood draws parallels to the symbiosis in Scavenger’s Reign, where dozens of strange alien creatures live in tenuous, dangerous harmony. In some moments, the humans who crash land there also figure out how to coexist with the nature around them, to varying degrees of success.

But he calls these parallels “autonomous” — he says he wasn’t deliberately planning much about them as he worked on each project. “I definitely gravitate towards natural themes and that sort of thing,” he says. “[But] the only thoughts going in my head [for Nidus] were that I wanna use these creatures and bugs and even the background as a canvas for looping animation.”

Much of Wood’s professional experience is in creating these looping animations. Nidus specifically draws a lineage from some of his earlier short films, like 2015’s TOTEM. Here, animations build up from intricate details, becoming more complex over time, and it’s easy to see it as another example of both the natural themes and the fluid, repetitive style present in Nidus.

During development these kinds of animations became increasingly influential on the game overall. Woods began to create “weaving loops” in specific areas, such as insect shells. “It was a way of putting more and more information into a small piece of animation,” he says. And as these animations became increasingly detailed, he began to realize that overwhelming the player’s attention was ultimately going to become a part of the game’s difficulty.

“Because the game was slowly becoming about splitting the players’ ability to focus, I just decided, ‘Okay, what if I lean into that and make everything absolutely overwhelming and hard to look at?’” Wood says. Combined with the neon colors and simultaneous control of two characters, Nidus is frenetic. (Perhaps more frenetic than intended — Wood says that he might not make design choices like the twin controls again, calling it “not super accessible.”)

By contrast, Scavengers Reign has a much more stripped-back art style. “It’s like you’re playing with geometric shapes whenever you’re designing,” says Wood of his work on the creature designs. It was “refreshing,” he says, to switch back and forth between the two projects. 

Both animation for TV and games felt similar in that he was trying to create solutions to restrictions. On Scavengers, Wood would get requests from the show’s co-creator and art director Charles Huettner to fill a certain narrative function. In Nidus, the art would need to fit in with the game. “Whenever I’d work on creature designs for the show, it would clear my mind to go back into the mess of Nidus,” Wood says, and vice versa to get back to the reduced designs of Scavengers Reign.

He also says that working on a team for Scavengers meant things were simpler for him personally. “You’re just focusing on your small part that is going to serve a larger purpose,” he says. Working solo, making one design choice also meant dealing with all the knock-on effects. Changing an enemy’s weak spot, for example, isn’t just editing the art, but also everything further down the line of dominos — code, game design, and so on. “That spirals out of control real quick,” says Wood.

Wood isn’t sure exactly what’s next, but he would like to keep making games — in a team, if possible. Although he says Nidus was useful to give himself a rounded understanding of all the different parts of game development, he says it would be “amazing” to get a dedicated programmer. But whatever his next project ends up being, given his existing body of work, it’s fair to say there’s a good chance it’ll involve strange creatures and the ways they coexist.

When indie video game development collective Sokpop finished its 100th game, it took a while for the achievement to sink in. “It felt like, ‘Woah, we made 100 games. How did this happen?’” says Tijmen Tio, one-fourth of the group alongside Aran Koning, Ruben Naus, and Tom van den Boogaart. (Three of the four spoke to The Verge; van den Boogaart was unavailable.)

So how did it happen?

Well, it began with the group releasing GIFs of its prototypes on Twitter. But after a few years and some encouragement from fans, they realized that they should actually be releasing the prototypes themselves. In 2018, they launched the subscription model, and five years later, they’re still going. With 100 game releases under their belt, though, they’re ready to make some changes.

When their Patreon first launched, subscribers could sign up for $3 per month and would receive a small game every other week. The games were also available on indie storefront itch.io for the same price. Their earliest works are small, lasting maybe 15 minutes, exploring an idea or concept that could be created quickly to keep up with the pace of delivery. They’re often small spaces to wander around in, with descriptions like “go on an antventure” or “explore the swamp.”

After its first year, the collective spoke to The Verge about its first 26 games, finding a footing on Patreon, and figuring out how to make the endeavor sustainable. The biggest change since then, they say, was adding games to Steam. Koning says it lent them a sense of legitimacy. Tio, in part, agrees, although he also mentions another piece of the puzzle. “On one hand, it made us feel like we started to matter a little bit more,” he says. “On the other hand, it also doubled our income.”

It was after adding Steam releases that they were each able to make minimum wage from their work as part of the collective, which splits all the money between the members. From about 2020, they no longer had to take on additional freelance work to make ends meet.

But around the same time, the games they were making were growing. “The standard has raised a bunch,” says Naus. He mentions save states and title screens as two big examples of features that only appear in later Sokpop games; Tio and Koning add tutorials and settings options. They slowed down their output so that games were released monthly, making way for them to become a little more involved. Recently, they’ve been able to put out a word puzzler, an action RPG, and a festival to celebrate the big 100.

Their ambitions have continued to expand — along with their desire to remain sustainable. After hitting 100 releases, they took the time to evaluate what it was that they wanted to do next. Their eventual decision: make another 100 games. But perhaps not as quickly.

“A few of us were really feeling overworked,” says Tio, who also just became a father and wants to take some time off to spend with his family. Naus notes that the deadlines sometimes became demoralizing, especially because it made it difficult to catch up if they ever fell behind schedule.

But as well as wanting to avoid burnout, the idea of more freedom is clearly an exciting one for Sokpop. Tio says that the short deadlines often meant that the games were limited in scope, which led to some repetition of ideas, whereas the collective is evidently looking forward to being able to work on bigger projects.

But sticking to experiments and manageable scopes remains important to them. “We’re still looking to make a lot of games,” says Koning. The four started the collective because they enjoyed participating in game jams, collaborating and working quickly to create smaller experiences, and always wanted that to be the focus of their work. And dropping the pace will allow them to return to that collaboration without feeling as though they’re putting pressure on one another.

“When we decided to drop the monthly schedule, we were like, ‘Is this the end?’ We felt very sad about it,” says Tio. The new goal, then, is a promise to continue and to focus on the most enjoyable parts of their system.

Fans and Patreon supporters seem not to be worried about a reduction in the number of games they’ll be receiving, either. “I think, at first, we were really worried about the change,” says Koning. “But I think the major feedback we got was just, ‘Okay, great, take your time.’”

The average download rate for Patreon supporters of each monthly game was about 50 percent. The collective theorizes that some people just want to support them without playing every game, while others aren’t actually able to keep up with the speed of releases. “Maybe that’s why they’re happy,” says Koning. “They’re like, ‘Oh, I finally have time to play them.’ Instead of ‘Please stop making games! There’s too many of them!’”

They also attribute their friendly community to the direct communication they have with them through videos about the games. That’s a development of the boy band veneer they wanted to put across in their earlier days. Now, they’re not entirely sure whether the label still fits.

“When do you stop being a boy band?” Koning asks, referring to the fact that they’re no longer in their early 20s. For a moment, he wonders if they’re a “man band” or even “washed up” before changing his mind: “I think we’re thriving.”

“Maybe just a normal band,” Naus suggests. “But a bit more tired. We should take more time off.”

Taking more time off, avoiding burnout, focusing on collaboration and slightly bigger games: it might take more than five years for Sokpop to make its next 100 games, but it’s clearly excited to get started.