Asher Vollmer

Asher Vollmer (born September 14, 1989) is an American indie video game developer.

[3] Puzzlejuice is a combination of Tetris, tile-matching, and Boggle: players rearrange falling tetromino blocks into rows of similar colors, which turn into letters that are cleared from the board by forming words.

[4][8] Vollmer started as thatgamecompany's "feel engineer" in August 2012,[9] but left in April 2013 to "go indie" and work on his own projects.

Vollmer challenged himself to make a game that only used the arrow keys, and prototyped what would become Threes in ten hours overnight.

[14] In fact, Vollmer and Wohlwend felt that the game needed to appear more complex so as to interest players.

[17] Reviewers found the game "charming"[18][19][20] and "addictive",[15][19][20][21][22][23] and compared it to Drop7 (2009),[22] Triple Town (2010),[18][22][24] and Stickets (2013).

[32] Vollmer explained that the game's name is from castles built too close to one another, starting a mutually assured destruction scenario.

While Vollmer traditionally worked on multiple games at once, Close Castles was his only project when it was in production.

[31] The next month, Vollmer released Royals, a pay what you want simulation game for OS X and Windows.

In February 2016, Sirvo Studios announced Guildlings, a fantasy adventure game, which was later released in November 2019.

[37] In September 2022, Vodeo Games, which employees' Communications Workers of America affiliated union was noted for being in the process of bargaining, closed after "running out of funds".

Vollmer (right) with Puzzlejuice artist Wohlwend at the 2012 PAX 10
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Threes gameplay