Mikengreg is an independent video game development team of Mike Boxleiter and Greg Wohlwend. Their games include Solipskier, Gasketball, and TouchTone. The two met in a game development class at Iowa State University and later began to collaborate on the Adobe Flash game Dinowaurs. When the project was funded, they founded Intuition Games with other college friends in Ames, Iowa, where they worked on small Flash games such as Gray, Liferaft, and Fig. 8 for Flash game sites such as Kongregate. Dinowaurs was one of the first games signed for the Kongregate platform. Their other games involved controlling the weather, influencing individuals in a riot, and riding a bicycle. Boxleiter and Wohlwend worked on several additional games that were put on hiatus.
They later became Mikengreg in 2010 and released Solipskier in August for both Flash and iOS later that year. Its success let them take a more experimental approach towards their next game, the free-to-playGasketball. Mikengreg ran out of money during the game's development and the two lived on friends' couches. The game was reviewed favorably upon its August 2012 launch, but did not earn near the developers' estimates. Their next game, TouchTone (2015), spent two years in development.
Intuition Games
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-brainright-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]
Dinowaurs
Intuition's first game, Dinowaurs, is a strategy and action game where two players compete as dinosaurs to seize the most cavemen settlements on a single screen. Captured settlements provide resources for upgrades to the players' dinosaurs. The object of this arms race is to kill the other dinosaur.[1] It features online matchmaking.[6] The game was built from an unfinished Flash-based multiplayer strategy game started by Boxleiter and an image of a stegosaurus with a jetpack drawn by Martens.[lower-alpha 1] The team combined the concepts for a strategy game about dinosaurs fighting for food. They struggled with long-distance communication, but used a project management website and Skype to stay in touch. When looking for a platform, Intuition originally pitched the game with a clay dinosaur to Adult Swim—who was funding Flash games—but was declined for not being "edgy enough".[4] In June, they then tried then-new Flash site Kongregate via a connection Larson had made with its CEO Jim Greer at the 2007 Game Developers Conference. He asked the team to wait for their new Director of Games to be hired, who ended up being Intuition's contact at Adult Swim. The contact had liked the idea and thought the game worked better for Kongregate than did for Adult Swim,[4] and so funded the game by November 2007 as one of the first five for the Kongregate platform. The package was a one-year browser exclusivity agreement that let Intuition keep the intellectual property.[7]
Dinowaurs was finished in two years for a 2009 release. Their later games would only take a few months apiece in comparison.[3] They abandoned the use of design documents after Dinowaurs, and instead chose to refine and experiment in process.[2]IndieGames.com reported mixed reviews from players and recommended the game as "good solid fun" for newcomers and veterans.[6]The Escapist described the game as similar to Scorched Earth and "surprisingly complex" with its need for three tutorials.[8] He complimented its "faux-retro" soundtrack and aesthetics, which he felt outweighed the learning curve's difficulty.[8]
Other games
Intuition released Effing Hail and Gray around April 2009.[9][10] Players in action game Effing Hail control hail and wind to destroy the most buildings and midair objects within a time limit. The hail grows in size when the wind is used to suspend it in air. The game was published through Kongregate.[9] As an example of their more experimental games, Intuition built Gray—a game about "political consciousness"—as a result of their frustrations during the 2008 U.S. presidential election.[3] Players control a single character and try to end a riot by influencing other individuals in the crowd.[10] The game was featured at IndieCade in 2009.[3]
Fig. 8. is based on one of Wohlwend's college art projects.[lower-alpha 2] It went unused on their whiteboard for four months until they needed an idea, whereupon Boxleiter added game mechanics to the visuals. It took about ten hours to prototype the controls, and they tested a ten-wheel bike before deciding on two. The scrolling camera was inspired by a game Boxleiter had been playing called String Theory, and they added the soundtrack last.[2]Fig. 8 was funded by a sponsor.[11] Boxleiter considers Gray and Fig. 8 to be "small games".[12] As projects, he considered them "more like vacations ... than actual work".[12]
Gray
Fig. 8
4Fourths
Liferaft: Zero
From left, clockwise: Screenshots of Gray, Fig. 8, Liferaft: Zero, and 4Fourths.
Intuition attempted to fund their next game, Liferaft, via crowdfunding site Kickstarter. The game is set in a single day within an "abandoned testing facility ... in a post-apocalyptic sci-fi" world.[11] The player-character is a young woman named Goss who had been surviving off of lichen until a giant squid crashes into the room and allows her escape. Liferaft was built for release in three episodes: her escape, "revelation", and "resolution".[11] The core gameplay revolves around a "Bionic Commando-style grappling hook".[11] Intuition released a two-level Flash demo where the game had 16-bit era graphics and music composed by Danny Baranowsky of Canabalt and Fathom. They expected development to take six months between November 2009 and February 2010.[11] They canceled the Kickstarter and put the project on hiatus in October 2009 for two small Flash games and an intern's Unity project.[12]
In March 2010 and under the moniker Mikengreg, Boxleiter and Wohlwend's 4fourths was chosen among six games out of more than 150 submissions for inclusion in Kokoromi's Gamma IV showcase. Submissions were based on the theme of "one button games".[13] The four-player game is played with two teams each controlling spaceships on each side of the screen. One player on each team controls the ship's vertical height and the other fires the guns, which aim towards the center of the screen. Since every player only has one button, the vertical height controls boost the ship vertically when the button is pressed and leaves the ship to slowly descend when unpressed. The teams work together to shoot at and destroy enemy boss ships that travel through the center of the screen. Teams can also shoot each other's ships as friendly fire is activated.[14] The game was displayed at Gamma IV in San Francisco and at the 2010 Game Developers Conference.[13]4fourths was Michael Rose of IndieGame.com's favorite game of the Gamma IV selections.[14] It was later chosen for Brandon Boyer's Wild Rumpus London event in September 2011.[15]
Mikengreg announced Liferaft: Zero and Solipskier in November 2010. The former is a "prequel teaser" to the Flash platform gameLiferaft that they had announced the previous year, a game of trial-based challenges with wall-jumping and grappling[16] wherein girl clones attempt to swing and jump around test chambers to reach and ring a bell.[17] Wohlwend and Boxleiter made the shorter version to limit the scope creep of the overall project.[16]IndieGames.com named the Flash game their third best browser platformer of the year.[18] Their other game, 4fourths, was put on hiatus for lack of resources.[16] They were interested in making games outside the Flash market.[5]
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]
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 aggregatorMetacritic characterized its reviews as generally favorable.[28]
↑ In the project, Wohlwend followed a bike trail in the snow, metaphorically related it to the tribulations of romantic relationship, and made an art installation involving a bike spray-painted black with two errant red and blue tracks painted on the floor.[2]
↑ They were hopeful for 2% of five million downloads to purchase the game (a 2% conversion rate), but in practice, the rate was closer to 0.67%.[19]
Kongregate is an American web gaming portal and video game publisher. Its website features over 124,000 online games and 30+ mobile games available to the public. The company also publishes games for PC, mobile, and home consoles. It was purchased by GameStop Corporation in 2010 before being acquired by Modern Times Group MT AB in 2017.
VVVVVV is a 2010 puzzle-platform game created by Terry Cavanagh. In the game, the player controls Captain Viridian, who must rescue their spacecrew after a teleporter malfunction caused them to be separated in Dimension VVVVVV. The gameplay is characterized by the inability of the player to jump, instead opting on controlling the direction of gravity, causing the player to fall upwards or downwards. The game consists of more than 400 individual rooms, and also supports the creation of user-created levels.
In video gaming, an achievement is a meta-goal defined outside a game's parameters, a digital reward that signifies a player’s mastery of a specific task or challenge within a video game. Unlike the in-game systems of quests, tasks, and/or levels that usually define the goals of a video game and have a direct effect on further gameplay, the management of achievements usually takes place outside the confines of the game environment and architecture. Meeting the fulfillment conditions, and receiving recognition of fulfillment by the game, is referred to as unlocking the achievement.
Transformice is an online independent multiplayer free-to-play platform video game, created by French game designers, known by their aliases Melibellule and Tigrounette. Melibellule produces the game's artwork and graphics, while Tigrounette programs the game's functions and mechanics. Transformice was released as a browser game on May 1, 2010, and on Steam as a free-to-play game on January 30, 2015. Transformice requires either a web browser running Adobe Flash Player 9.0+, Adobe AIR to run the official standalone or Steam to play the game. As of 2012, the game has 10 million accounts created, 60 million as of 2015, 70 million as of 2017, and 100 million as of 2019.
Kingdom Rush is a tower defense game developed by Ironhide Game Studio and published by Armor Games. It was released on July 28, 2011, as a browser game, followed by ports for iOS in December 2011, Android on May 13, 2013, and Windows and macOS on January 6, 2014. In the game's medieval fantasy setting, players take control of a general serving under King Denas of Linirea, who must defend the land from an onslaught of evil monsters. Each level is composed of a number of pre-set roads, which the player can place defensive towers around to fight off the approaching monsters. Slaying enemies gives the player gold, which they can use to buy new towers or upgrade existing ones to improve their capabilities.
Canabalt is a one-button endless runner designed by Adam Saltsman for the Experimental Gameplay Project in 2009. The 2D side-scrolling video game was originally written for Adobe Flash, then ported to iOS, Android, PlayStation Portable, and Ouya. An authorized version for the Commodore 64 was released on cartridge. Canabalt has been credited with popularizing the endless runner subgenre.
Thomas Was Alone is a puzzle-platform game created by Mike Bithell, originally released as a Flash-based browser game in October 2010. The game was expanded and released for Microsoft Windows and OS X in July 2012. It has subsequently been released for Linux, PlayStation 3, PlayStation 4, PlayStation Vita, Xbox One, Wii U, iOS, Android and Nintendo Switch. In the game, the player controls one or more simple rectangles representing several out-of-control artificial intelligence entities, working with the shapes to get each to their individual end points on each level. Each shape is characterized by a unique name and personality, including the eponymous Thomas, which is conveyed to the player through the use of a narrator voiced by Danny Wallace, whose performance earned the game a BAFTA Games Award.
Michael Bithell is a British video game designer, developer, and podcaster best known for his work on Thomas Was Alone and Volume. He is a regular host of the Play, Watch, Listen podcast, along with Alanah Pearce, Troy Baker, and Austin Wintory. He also co-hosts an evolving pop culture podcast with long time friend, British YouTuber and comedic author Daniel Hardcastle, talking about shows and movies like Star Trek, Fast and Furious, Mission Impossible and various others.
Ridiculous Fishing is a fishing video game where players use motion and touch controls to catch fish and subsequently shoot them out of the sky for cash. The game was developed and published by Vlambeer—Rami Ismail and Jan Willem Nijman—and released for iOS on March 13, 2013, then later that year for Android.
Threes is a puzzle video game by Sirvo, an independent development team consisting of game designer Asher Vollmer, illustrator Greg Wohlwend, and composer Jimmy Hinson. The game was released on February 6, 2014, for iOS devices and later ported to Android, Xbox One, and Windows Phone. In Threes, the player slides numbered tiles on a grid to combine addends and multiples of three. The game ends when there are no moves left on the grid and the tiles are counted for a final score.
Adam Saltsman, also known as Adam Atomic, is an American indie video game designer best known for creating the endless runner Canabalt. He is a founder of Semi Secret Software and Finji video game studios.
Gasketball is a basketball-themed puzzle video game for the iPad by Mikengreg, an independent development team of Michael Boxleiter and Greg Wohlwend. Players flick basketballs through 2D physics puzzles into the hoop in single-player, local multiplayer, and asynchronous HORSE-style online multiplayer modes. The game is free-to-play with in-app purchases. Development began in mid 2011 following Mikengreg's successful Solipskier. They were able to live from the earnings for Gasketball's two year development at their previous salary, which afforded them the stability to try new avenues and reject prototypes, though they worked 100-hour weeks. Towards the end of their development, they ran out of money and lived on the couches of friends. It was released on August 9, 2012, and the game did not reach their desired conversion rate at the time of launch.
Greg Wohlwend is an American independent video game developer and artist whose games include Threes! and Ridiculous Fishing. He originally formed Intuition Games with Iowa State University classmate Mike Boxleiter in 2007 where they worked on Dinowaurs and other small Adobe Flash games. Trained as an artist, Wohlwend worked mainly on the visual assets. As Mikengreg, they released Solipskier, whose success let the two take a more experimental approach with Gasketball, which did not fare as well. At the same time, Wohlwend collaborated with Asher Vollmer to make Puzzlejuice, and with Adam Saltsman to make Hundreds based on Wohlwend's first game design. He later released Threes! with Vollmer in 2014 to critical acclaim. His later games TouchTone and TumbleSeed were also the products of collaborations. Wohlwend was named among Forbes' 2014 "30 under 30" in the games industry.
Solipskier is a sports video game for Adobe Flash, iOS, and Android developed and published by Mikengreg, the two-person team of Michael Boxleiter and Greg Wohlwend. In Solipskier, the player draws the snowy slope for an on-screen skier to pass through slalom gates and tunnels. The character accelerates with downhill sections and can launch into the air to perform tricks and earn a higher score. The idea came from a brainstorming session about parallax scrolling with speedy action in the foreground and the ability for the player to "paint" the terrain. It was Boxleiter and Wohlwend's first game to receive public appreciation. It was released August 29, 2010 to generally favorable reviews and was a runner-up in the 2011 Game Developers Conference Independent Games Festival's Best Mobile Game category.
Hundreds is a puzzle video game where players touch circles to make them grow without overlapping. In the game's 100 levels, the player interacts with different types of circles to bring a counter to the number 100. The game was developed and published by Semi Secret Software in collaboration with Greg Wohlwend and was released for iOS on January 7, 2013, and on Android later that year.
Asher Vollmer is an American indie video game developer. He created Puzzlejuice and Threes. Vollmer also worked on Guildlings and Beast Breaker.
TouchTone is a 2015 puzzle video game for iOS devices by Mikengreg, a two-person indie game development team made up of Mike Boxleiter and Greg Wohlwend. The player monitors phone calls as part of a government surveillance program to find public threats. The player unlocks chains of emails by completing a series of puzzles wherein a beam is reflected around a room to a set destination. TouchTone's core concept grew from a two-day game jam immediately following their 2012 release of Gasketball, but only found its hacker theme following the mid-2013 Edward Snowden global surveillance disclosures. The tone of TouchTone's story grew from satirical to serious over the course of the game's development.
Secret Hitler is a hidden identity social deduction party game developed by Goat, Wolf, & Cabbage LLC, manufactured by Breaking Games and distributed by Blackbox. The board game was designed by Max Temkin, Mike Boxleiter and Tommy Maranges, with artwork created by Mackenzie Schubert, and first released on August 25, 2016. In Secret Hitler, players assume the roles of liberals and fascists in the Reichstag of the Weimar Republic, with one player becoming Hitler. To win the game, both parties are set to competitively enact liberal and fascist policies respectively, or complete a secondary objective directly related to the Hitler role.
TumbleSeed is an indie action video game, created by developer Benedict Fritz and designer Greg Wohlwend, in which the player balances a rolling seed on an ascending, horizontally slanted vine past procedurally generated obstacles to reach the top of a mountain. It is based on the mechanical arcade game Ice Cold Beer and built partially through the Cards Against Humanity game incubation program. TumbleSeed was released in May 2017 to generally favorable reviews on MacOS, Nintendo Switch, PlayStation 4, and Windows platforms. Critics, in particular, appreciated their haptic sense of the rolling seed from the Nintendo Switch's sensitive HD Rumble. Many reviewers noted TumbleSeed's intense and sometimes uneven difficulty, which the developers hoped to address in a post-release update. They credited this stigma and a tepid critical reception for the game's slow sales, but were proud of their work.
Gamma Bros is a 2006 Flash shoot 'em up game developed by American game indie game studio PixelJAM Games, released as a free online title. It was nominated for "Best Web Browser Game" at the 2007 Independent Games Festival. It was the studio's first game after the mini-game Ratmaze. The game was also released as a smartphone game in 2016.
This page is based on this Wikipedia article Text is available under the CC BY-SA 4.0 license; additional terms may apply. Images, videos and audio are available under their respective licenses.
