Mikengreg

Boxleiter and Wohlwend met in an experimental video game development class at Iowa State University.[1][2] Wohlwend had attempted to help Boxleiter with a project, but quit after drawing a few aliens.[2] Boxleiter said he "didn't like [Wohlwend] much after that".[3] They met again as coworkers at the university's Virtual Reality Application Center during Boxleiter's final year of college (Wohlwend's penultimate year). Upon discovering their close interests, they began to work on an Adobe Flash game named Dinowaurs while they completed college. Boxleiter graduated in 2007 with a degree in computer science, and Wohlwend a year later with a degree in graphic design. They concluded that they needed a company to make money while they worked on the game with collaborators,[3] and around May 2007,[4] founded Intuition Games at the university's Research Park.[1] They decided to stay in Ames, Iowa due to its financial feasibility and local connections,[3] but two other members of the team, Josh Larson and Ted Martens, lived in Des Moines and Chicago, respectively.[4] The team met as students at Iowa State through work and game development circles. They saw Flash games as an easy entry point into full-time self-employment, but planned to eventually work on console platforms such as WiiWare. Before Dinowaurs, the team made a game about a destructive porpoise, which was abandoned when Dinowaurs received funding.[4]

In their development process, Boxleiter and Wohlwend both proposed and worked on each other's ideas, and would drop the ideas they found unexciting. The two also built games from keywords and brainstorming, and would flesh out the game mechanics through "heated" argument.[3] Their labor as a team was divided in that Wohlwend always did the art and Boxleiter the programming, as reflective of their skills at the time. The pair agreed to an assessment of their partnership as "left-brain right-brain", and agreed that "editing"—the process of iterating through revisions—was central to their joint work.[2] As they worked, they always retained their prototypes.[2] They both appreciated the "creative freedom" of being self-employed, though they struggled with the business aspects, relative workplace "isolation", low salaries, and lack of job stability.[3] Both were motivated to do their own work instead of contracted tasks. They thought of themselves as artists and of their work as experimental.[3] Boxleiter and Wohlwend worked long hours when making the Flash games, which they found exciting and unsustainable.[5] At Intuition, they worked on games such as Dinowaurs, Gray, Fig. 8, and Liferaft and participated in at least six game jams.[2] As of April 2010, they had created 10 games together.[3]

Solipskier gameplay

Their first game as Mikengreg was Solipskier,[19] where the player's finger draws the ground for the on-screen skier to pass through a level filled with gates, tunnels, and walls.[20] It was designed as a Flash game, which set the limitations for its mechanics. The game concept came from a brainstorming session about parallax scrolling, and was revised in fits of creativity. They paired the parallax scrolling with speed and began to prototype.[5] Boxleiter first understood its potential when publishers fought for the bid to the game. They then decided to develop for iOS in addition to Flash, and to release both versions simultaneously.[5] It was released on August 29, 2010[20] and became their first game to receive public appreciation. Solipskier for iOS made around $70,000 in its first two months (as compared to $15,000 from the Flash release), which gave them enough stability to branch out into non-Flash platforms.[5]

Boxleiter spoke at the 2012 Game Developers Conference Indie Soapbox on how indie stars were made from hard work and not from the Independent Games Festival. He added that winning an award at the festival for Solipskier was an insignificant aspect of his career.[21]

Gasketball gameplay

Riding the earnings from Solipskier, Mikengreg continued to pay themselves their same salary but now had the means to try new ideas.[5] Wohlwend estimated that they discarded about six "fairly polished prototypes" over the development of their next game, Gasketball.[5] They were able to live on $20–25,000 a year each in Iowa for the next two years while working on the new game.[19] Wohlwend made somewhat more income due to other collaborations, such as Puzzlejuice with Asher Vollmer, but shared his income with Boxleiter.[19] Even though Solipskier was successful, the duo did not have a following comparable to indie developers like Team Meat and thus felt like their external pressure was low. Instead, their pressure was internal.[5] Wohlwend said he worked 100-hour weeks with no weekends or vacations while living off of the Solipskier funds.[19] In making Gasketball, Boxleiter and Wohlwend felt that their game quality had improved continually, but found the idea of a million-person audience "daunting" and Wohlwend questioned whether he could even recreate Solipskier's success.[5] When they ran out of money, Boxleiter borrowed money from his parents, and eventually they both went homeless, living off of the couches of friends.[19]

Gasketball was released for iPad on August 9, 2012.[22] They had decided to release the game as what they deemed to be an ethically non-coercive free-to-play game, with a free base game and in-app purchases for the extended content. Not as many players paid for the content as expected.[19][lower-alpha 3] This was due, in part, to the players' difficulty in finding the purchase function.[19][23] The game had been downloaded 200,000 times in its August 2012 launch week and was briefly ranked near the top of an iTunes top downloads ranking, though it did not break the top 200 grossing chart.[19]

In TouchTone's puzzles (left), the player rearranges the items on screen to redirect a beam of light to its destination. The player is at the center of a story about government surveillance told through hacked emails (right), which are unlocked by completing puzzles.

After Gasketball's release, Boxleiter and Wohlwend planned a celebratory road trip to a game jam in Victoria, British Columbia. The game did not fare as expected, so Boxleiter wanted to use the jam to create "something new, ... something really small and perfect".[24] By the end of the two-day jam, the core mirror reflection mechanics of TouchTone were in place, though it would take two years of sporadic work to finalize the remainder of the game.[24] In TouchTone, the player monitors phone calls as part of a government surveillance program to find public threats. The story is told through a series of reflection puzzles wherein the player swipes the screen to reflect a beam around a room to its intended destination.[25]

Mikengreg felt that their first theme of light, prisms, and audio signal too closely mimicked "a hacking minigame from a bigger AAA game like BioShock or System Shock", but eventually paired the concept with a satirical Edward Snowden theme following the mid-2013 global surveillance disclosures.[24] Their original efforts were jocular, but their concept became more serious as the story and "political message" grew deeper.[24] Boxleiter wrote most of the script, which is over 20,000 words. It was his first effort at professional writing, and it took him five months. He and Wohlwend would conference after each chapter for coherency. Boxleiter wanted the story to explore the "questions ... floating around the national consciousness" rather than be "heavy-handed" and prescriptive.[24] They playtested the game in public at the theater in Logan Square, Chicago, though they acknowledged difficulty in playtesting the story's private experience.[24] Mikengreg decided against including an option to skip puzzles, which they felt would spoil the game and the player's capacity to adapt to increasing difficulty. They called this philosophy the "Derek Yu (of Spelunky) school of game design".[26] TouchTone was released on March 19, 2015 for iOS.[27] Review aggregator Metacritic characterized its reviews as generally favorable.[28]

Notes

References

• Official website
• Intuition Games