Asher Vollmer (born September 14, 1989) is an American indie video game developer. He created Puzzlejuice and Threes. Vollmer also worked on Guildlings and Beast Breaker.
While a student at USC Interactive Media & Games Division, he developed 2012 iOS game Puzzlejuice with Greg Wohlwend. The pair's next game, the 2014 iOS puzzle game Threes, received numerous awards and was later ported to multiple platforms. Among other projects, Vollmer subsequently worked on Close Castles, a real-time strategy game later put on hiatus, and Royals, a simulation game for OS X and Windows.
Career
Vollmer is a graduate of the USC Interactive Media & Games Division program. As a student, he began work on Puzzlejuice, a puzzle video game. He reached out to artist Greg Wohlwend for aesthetic advice, which led to a collaboration between the two. 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. The iOS game was released on January 19, 2012, to what review aggregator Metacritic described as "generally favorable" reviews. Multiple reviewers mentioned the difficulty in mentally balancing the various components of the game.
Vollmer started as thatgamecompany's "feel engineer" in August 2012, but left in April 2013 to "go indie" and work on his own projects. On his blog, he said he thought the studio's current project would be groundbreaking, though he was unhappy working there. Vollmer tried to write a short story in an attempt to take a break from games. Before long, he began to play with his computer keyboard. Vollmer challenged himself to make a game that only used the arrow keys, and prototyped what would become Threes in ten hours overnight. He proceeded to iterate on the idea with Wohlwend over the game's 14-month development. In Threes, the player slides numbered tiles on a four-by-four grid to combine addends and multiples of three. Vollmer cited Drop7 as an inspiration for the game, having played it for two years beforehand.
Threes had no original inclination towards minimalism. In fact, Vollmer and Wohlwend felt that the game needed to appear more complex so as to interest players. They returned to the original idea and added character personalities to the tiles. The iOS game was released on February 6, 2014, to what Metacritic characterized as "universal acclaim". Reviewers found the game "charming" and "addictive", and compared it to Drop7 (2009), Triple Town (2010), and Stickets (2013). Eurogamer and TouchArcade awarded the game perfect scores, with the latter calling Threes "about as close as it gets to a perfect mobile game". Other developers released similar games and clones within weeks of the game's launch. Apple named Threes its best iPhone game of 2014. The game was later ported to Android, Xbox One, and Windows Phone platforms. Polygon included Vollmer in their "50 admirable gaming people of 2014" for his work on Threes.
Vollmer thought he would work on a new game a month after releasing Threes, but was kept busy by obligations to fix and update the game, to port it to other platforms, and to promote game through press and events. He was convinced that he would never make a game "as clean and tight as Threes ever again". Vollmer's next game was Close Castles, a real-time strategy game.