Greg Wohlwend is an American self-employed video game creator and artist who designed games such as Threes! and Ridiculous Fishing. In 2007, he started a company called Intuition Games with a classmate from Iowa State University named Mike Boxleiter. Together, they worked on games like Dinowaurs and other small Adobe Flash games. As an artist, Wohlwend focused on creating the game graphics. Under the name Mikengreg, they released Solipskier in 2010 for iOS devices. The success of this game allowed them to try new ideas with another game called Gasketball, which was less successful. At the same time, Wohlwend worked with Asher Vollmer to create Puzzlejuice and with Adam Saltsman to make Hundreds, which was inspired by Wohlwend’s first game design. In 2014, he released Threes! with Vollmer, which received high praise from critics. Later games, TouchTone and TumbleSeed, were also created through collaborations. Wohlwend was named in Forbes’ 2014 "30 under 30" list in the games industry.

Career

Wohlwend studied graphic design at Iowa State University and graduated in 2008. He describes his style as "simple and elegant." He says he is not skilled at designing characters and prefers using vector formats in Adobe Illustrator because they work well at any size. Wohlwend believes creativity is a skill that can be developed over time. He has been influenced by his lifelong interest in video games, and his favorite game is Baldur's Gate II: Shadows of Amn. His writing about the lifestyle needed for independent game development has been noticed by game journalists. In 2014, Wohlwend was named in Forbes' "30 under 30" list for the games industry.

Wohlwend met Mike Boxleiter in an experimental game development class at Iowa State University. Wohlwend tried to help Boxleiter with a project but left after drawing a few aliens. They later became coworkers at the university's Virtual Reality Application Center during Boxleiter's final year of college. After discovering shared interests, they began working on an Adobe Flash game called Dinowaurs while finishing their degrees. To earn money while making the game, they started a company called Intuition Games at the university's Research Park in May 2007. They stayed in Ames, Iowa, because it was financially practical and had local connections, though two other team members lived farther away. They saw Flash games as a way to start working full-time on their own projects, but planned to eventually create games for platforms like WiiWare.

During development, Boxleiter and Wohlwend shared ideas and worked on each other's suggestions, but sometimes set aside ideas they found unexciting. Wohlwend said they often disagreed about game details, which he considered normal. Their roles were divided: Wohlwend handled the art, and Boxleiter handled the programming, based on their skills at the time. They described their partnership as "left-brain right-brain" and saw most of their joint work as "editing." They appreciated the creative freedom of working independently but faced challenges like isolation, low pay, and unstable jobs. Wohlwend disagreed with the popular "cinematic action games" of the time and wanted to create more meaningful ideas for the industry. They viewed themselves as artists and saw their work as experimental. They worked long hours on Flash games, which they found exciting but unsustainable. At Intuition Games, they created games like Dinowaurs, Gray, Fig. 8, and Lifecraft, and participated in six game jams. By April 2010, they had made 10 games together.

Intuition Games' first game, Dinowaurs, is a Flash-based strategy and action game where two players compete as dinosaurs to capture the most caveman settlements, upgrade their abilities, and defeat the other dinosaur. It includes online matchmaking. The idea came from one of Boxleiter's unfinished projects and a drawing of a stegosaurus with a jetpack by another team member. Kongregate, a new Flash site, funded the game in November 2007 as one of the first five games on its platform. It took two years to complete and was released in 2009. Reviews of the game were mixed.

Later games took only a few months to make. After Dinowaurs, they stopped using detailed design documents and instead focused on refining and experimenting during development. In April 2009, they released Effing Hail and Gray. In Effing Hail, players control hail and wind to destroy buildings and objects within a time limit. The game was published by Kongregate. In Gray, players control a character to end a riot by influencing others in a crowd. The game was shown at IndieCade in 2009. For Fig. 8, Wohlwend based the idea on a college art project where he followed a snowy bike trail, symbolizing the challenges of a relationship, and created an art installation with a black bike and red and blue tracks on the floor. The concept was unused for four months until Boxleiter added game mechanics. In Liferaft, the player controls a young woman escaping a post-apocalyptic test chamber using a grappling hook. Wohlwend used a 16-bit graphics style. They tried to fund the project through Kickstarter but later paused it in October 2009.

In March 2010, under the name Mikengreg, Boxleiter and Wohlwend's game 4fourths was chosen for Kokoromi's Gamma IV showcase. Based on the "one button game" theme, four players control two spaceships using one button each to destroy enemy ships. The game was praised by Michael Rose of IndieGame.com and shown at the 2010 Game Developers Conference and Brandon Boyer's 2011 Wild Rumpus event.

In November 2010, Mikengreg announced Liferaft: Zero and Solipskier. Liferaft: Zero is a "prequel teaser" to Liferaft, featuring challenges with wall-jumping and grappling as clones try to reach a bell. Wohlwend and Boxleiter made a shorter version to manage the project's scope. Solipskier is a game where players draw the ground for a skier to navigate through gates, tunnels, and walls. The idea came from brainstorming about parallax scrolling, a technique that creates depth in games. Wohlwend saved the skier's character design for last because he felt it was his weakest area. Mikengreg decided to develop for iOS in addition to Flash and released both versions at the same time. Solipskier was released on Kongregate (Flash) and iOS on August 29, 2010. The iOS version earned about $70,000 in its first two months, compared to $15,000 from the Flash version, giving them stability to explore other platforms.

Using the income from Solipskier, Mikengreg continued to pay themselves the same salary but now had resources to try new ideas. Wohlwend estimated they discarded about six polished game prototypes during the development of Gasketball. They lived on $20–25,000 a year each in Iowa for two years while working on the game. Wohlwend earned extra income from collaborations, like Puzzlejuice with Asher Vollmer, but shared his earnings with Boxleiter. Even though Solipskier was successful, they did not have a large following like other indie developers, so their pressure came from within. Wohlwend worked 100-hour weeks without weekends or vacations while relying on Solipskier funds. While making Gasketball, Boxleiter and Wohlwend felt their game quality improved, but they faced challenges in the development process.