Sol Mates' developer talks space roguelites, Overcooked chaos, and creating the perfect bean

As a fan of chaotic co-op games, Sol Mates immediately piques my interest. Sol Mates is a top-down space adventure title on PC that tasks the players with keeping up with the demands of a long galactic journey: topping up fuel, putting out fires, maneuvering the shields, shooting down enemy ships, and occasionally having a sweet volleyball game. 

Sol Mates is designed for couch co-op above all, but the game is extremely playable with distant friends as long as everyone hops in a Discord call. It’s a ridiculous, cartoony take on space strategy games like FTL: Faster Than Light, complete with branching paths and random events. Rogue had the opportunity to speak with the co-founder of Daruma Games, Loren Weng, about co-op priorities, silly beans, and beach balls.

This interview has been lightly edited for length and clarity.

Rogue: This is a game that’s trying to bring back that couch co-op feeling. Was that an initial starting point, or something you stumbled into over the course of development?

Loren Weng: I pitched this game to Simon, my co-founder, around eight years ago at this point. This was when Overcooked 2 was still top-of-mind for a lot of people, and at that point, we were working at the same company. I approached him and I was like, ‘Hey, there's another indie game I really love called FTL: Faster Than Light. Someone should really make that combination of FTL meets Overcooked.

Because FTL — as much as it is a single player game — is one of the, I think, best fantasy fulfillments of what it’s like to pilot a ship together with a crew. There are lots of Star Trek-esque games out there where you have people that fill specific roles like bridge captain and comms officer, and then you sit there and do your thing, and everyone works together.

But when it comes to free form, everyone goes everywhere — like, oh, this person got knocked out, or ejected out of the airlock, someone needs to fill their role. Having that kind of freedom, like aboard the Millennium Falcon or Guardians of the Galaxy-esque gameplay, I didn’t think there was a game that fulfilled that fantasy. I waited for a couple of years saying, ‘Somebody’s going to make that game.’ Then, after COVID, I was like...nobody’s made this game, I don’t think anyone’s working on this game, so let’s make the game ourselves.

Speaking to the couch co-op part, the base inspiration was always coming from something like Overcooked, the yelling-at-your-friends type of game. I wanted to focus the gameplay around having a shared screen. 

I know right now we're in this amazing co-op boom, and I love these games, your Peaks, your proximity chat type games, but those games are all rooted in not having a shared screen and having those amazing moments of hearing someone scream and then never hearing them again. But, for our game, I wanted to make sure that you could see what everyone else is doing so you could flex to help people.

You can see, ‘Oh, someone's not doing this. Let me go fill this role while they're down.’ You can yell at them, or encourage them, depending on you and how your friend group’s dynamic works. It’s been the core conceit of the game since we started talking about it.