It’s A Frog’s Life: Aska Studios Aim To Make A Splash

“Why frogs? That’s easy,” says Halldór Heiðberg, smiling broadly. “I lived in Sweden as a kid, and I used to collect frogs from the backyard and bring them into the house. My mom would be so mad. I’ve loved frogs ever since. I think they’re a pop culture animal that hasn’t had enough love in video games.”

Halldór is the CEO of Aska Games, one of many video game startups to hop onto the scene in recent years. Their first game is an ambitious multiplayer shooter called Gang of Frogs that’s in the thick of development in their bustling downtown studio. In the main room, five game developers are hard at work, some chatting and laughing, others in deep concentration with headphones clamped firmly over their ears. On one screen, I spot a giant 3D mushroom mid-design, coiled with knotty vines; on another, someone tweaks the positions of finished objects in the game’s digital world. Across the room, programmer and CTO Friðrik Snær Tómasson is working on what looks like a complex flowchart, wiring together the cause-and-effect logic that makes the game tick.

“Aska was founded as a group of friends,” says Halldór. “Me, Friðrik and Jóhannes have been friends since primary school. Games were a big part of that, especially multiplayer games. Then we all took different paths in life — I went into art, Friðrik went into programming, and Jóhannes went into audio. Then, in 2022, we decided that we would get together and use all those skills to make a video game.”

Crustacean inspiration

Gang of Frogs is a game in which four players cooperate to clear waves of enemies, before heading home with their loot to power up their character and do it all over again. Online multiplayer games have been popular in recent years, spawning many subgenres, often with inscrutable acronyms like PvP MMORPG [player-vs-player massively multiplayer online role playing game]. So where does Gang of Frogs fit in?

“You can play as one player, with two, or four,” says Halldór. “But our primary target is to make a four-player game. To get that jargon straightened out — it’s a PvE [player-vs-enemy] co-op third person shooter. The general idea is to cooperate with friends to get through the levels. The key to winning is scaling faster than your enemy. So you want to become stronger than your enemy throughout your play session each time.”

The enemies in question are chitinous insects, big and small, that swarm the player as they move through each level. “They’re bugs with alien features,” says Halldór. “We’re drawing inspiration from a lot of maritime animals — crustaceans, fish and all sorts — while our protagonists are amphibious land-based creatures.”

Historical cyberpunk

The game’s environments are also eye-catching in their design. The player’s base is a wooden ship that floats in the sky, boasting technologies that seem both retro and futuristic. It all gives the game a certain timelessness, which Halldór says is all part of the plan.

“We’ve been coining the term ‘historical cyberpunk,’” says Halldór. “Gang of Frogs is set in an 18th century sci-fi universe. So we are leaning heavily into occult symbols and arcane elements — but it’s still science-driven. All of us grew up watching adventure movies and I feel like we’re carrying that spirit into this. There’s a little bit of nostalgia there. We draw a lot of inspiration from Treasure Planet, a Disney movie from back in the day. And League of Legends has inspired a lot of culture with its style.”
“It’s an alternate history that feels like it happened, but didn’t — and this one has frogs in it.”

Somewhat unusually for sci-fi, this also means the environments the player moves through have more carved flagstones than gleaming metal tunnels. The level depicted in the trailer looks like a kind of lost temple better suited to Indiana Jones than Luke Skywalker.

“We have this idea of the game being set in a lost age,” explains Halldór. “That’s the feeling we want you to get when you play. You don’t know what time or place this is, but it feels familiar. And that’s a feeling that very few games or media have captured. Ours is like an alternate history that feels like it happened, but didn’t — and this one has frogs in it.”

Immeasurable success

One interesting bellwether for the potential success of Gang of Frogs is another co-op shooter that saw vast success in 2024: the Sony-published behemoth Helldivers II.

“Seeing that happen last year was like: okay, wow, that’s an immeasurable success,” says Halldór. “That game has sold so many copies, I don’t even know where to begin. It’s grossed something like an estimated 700 million USD, and it’s not even a year old.”

“The co-op genre is still one of the most underserved genres of games,” Halldór continues. “I was actually blown away hearing that only six percent of games released on Steam are co-op, whereas 36% of the games sold are co-op. So the supply and demand don’t really match there. I’m really happy that we’re not making a player-vs-player game — it brings me joy to be doing something else.”

Given the fully playable and polished state of the game, it comes as something of a surprise that the team have only been working on it in earnest for a year. With funding in place to get the game to alpha — plus some media buzz starting to pick up off the back of the game’s enticing first trailer — Halldór is excited for what comes next.

“It’s been a rush,” he says. “The entire team is super on it. Everyone is just really looking forward to making this game happen. We want to be agile, and move quickly — like, if something isn’t working, then we kill it and move on. And I think that is why we’re succeeding in our development.”

You can check out the trailer for Aska Games’ for Gang of Frogs here and wishlist the game on Steam here.