Mikengreg
Mikengreg is an independent video game development team of Mike Boxleiter and Greg Wohlwend.
Boxleiter and Wohlwend met in an experimental video game development class at Iowa State University.
Upon discovering their close interests, they began to work on an Adobe Flash game named Dinowaurs while they completed college.
[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.
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.
[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.
[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] Boxleiter and Wohlwend worked long hours when making the Flash games, which they found exciting and unsustainable.
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.
[2] IndieGames.com reported mixed reviews from players and recommended the game as "good solid fun" for newcomers and veterans.
[b] It went unused on their whiteboard for four months until they needed an idea, whereupon Boxleiter added game mechanics to the visuals.
The scrolling camera was inspired by a game Boxleiter had been playing called String Theory, and they added the soundtrack last.
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.
[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.
[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.
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.
[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.
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.
[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.
[19] After Gasketball's release, Boxleiter and Wohlwend planned a celebratory road trip to a game jam in Victoria, British Columbia.
[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.
[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] 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.
