Hello from Slop Factory

Hello, and welcome.

We’re Slop Factory, a small studio in Korea that makes games for the web. This is our first post, so we’ll do what people do when they meet: say who we are, explain the name, and tell you what we care about.

About the name

Yes, we know. “Slop” is the word for the endless, mass-produced, nobody-really-made-this content that fills feeds, app stores and game portals. Naming a studio after it is a joke, and we’re comfortable with the joke.

But the joke has a point. A factory that makes slop is the thing we’re trying not to be. The name is a reminder we put on our own front door: every time we ship something, it has to earn the right not to be called that. If a game of ours ever feels like filler, the name will be there to embarrass us. We think that’s healthy.

What we make

Web games. You open a link and you’re playing. There’s nothing to install, no account wall before the first minute, and no app store between you and the game.

We like the web as a place to make games because it’s immediate. It’s also unforgiving: people can close the tab in two seconds, and they will if the game doesn’t respect them. We find that pressure useful. It keeps us honest about what a game has to do in its first few moments.

What we believe

We don’t have a long manifesto. We have a handful of rules we try to hold ourselves to.

Your time is the real price. Most of our games will be free to open, but your attention isn’t free, and we try not to spend it carelessly. If something in a game exists only to pad out the clock, we cut it.

Small and finished beats big and vague. We would rather ship a compact game where every piece has been thought about than a sprawling one where half the pieces were added because we could. Scope is a design decision, not just a schedule problem.

Someone should have decided that. This is the test we use most. Every mechanic, sound, animation, and line of text should be there because a person chose it for a reason. “The tool generated it and it was good enough” is not a reason. That doesn’t mean we avoid every new tool. It means a tool never gets to make the decision for us, and nothing leaves the building unless we’d stand behind it.

Polish is respect. The small things, like how a button responds, how fast a restart is, or how a game sounds when you do something right, are what tell a player whether anyone cared. We sweat those details on purpose.

Show the work. We’d rather be specific than impressive, so you’ll see how things get made, including the parts that don’t go well.

What to expect here

This blog is where we’ll keep that last promise. Over time you’ll find dev logs with screenshots, short videos of things being built, and eventually trailers. We’ll write about design problems we got stuck on, decisions we reversed, and why we made the choices we did. We’ll try to keep it plain and skip the marketing voice.

We’ll publish in both English and Korean. The Korean versions are written to read naturally in Korean, not translated word for word, and they are reviewed separately before they go up. We care about both audiences getting the real thing.

We’re at the beginning, and we’d rather say so than pretend otherwise. There’s no big announcement in this post. It’s just a hello, and a statement of what we’re aiming at, so that when we miss, you can point to it and tell us.

Thanks for stopping by. More soon.

— The Slop Factory team