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It’s a subculture turned into a business – gamers developing games as their day job – and it’s taking form right here in Central Iowa.

“We’re just four guys in a small office somewhere making games we love,” said Greg Wohlwend, director of pixel synergy for Intuition Games LLC, a Web-based game developer located in Ames, with operations in Des Moines.

Intuition Games is based at the CyberInnovation Institute at Iowa State University, a space that was designed by James Oliver, director of the university’s Virtual Reality Applications Center. The space was created to support information technology specialists who wanted to do business alongside other IT professionals, as well as provide an infrastructure where techies could share resources and work together to solve problems.

Wohlwend said the institute serves as an “incubator for tech businesses,” and that everyone feeds off of each other’s specialties, noting the “infectious relationship” among the techies who work under one roof.

“This place is really kind of the game development hub from an academic side,” said Josh Larson, chairman of markerboard doodling for Intuition Games.

Making it official

Larson and Wohlwend act as the main artists at Intuition, while the other two partners, Mike Boxleiter and Joe Bergeron, act as the programmers. The four ISU graduates came together in April 2007 in anticipation of creating their own business, but didn’t officially form it as a limited liability company until October 2007, when one of their pitches was picked up by an online game Web site, Kongregate.

Larson explained that he had met the CEO of Kongregate at a gaming conference in San Francisco, and when the four of them were looking for a place to pitch game ideas, Kongregate was one of their top picks.

“We pitched the game to them, but at the time we had pitched the game, they hadn’t even announced that they would be funding any games,” Larson said. “So we just pitched it to them and said, ‘Hey what do you think?’ expecting that it probably wouldn’t work out. But they ended up saying, ‘Actually we are going to announce this program in a couple of months that we are going to be funding larger-scale games, and this game would fit in with that. So why don’t you wait; we are going to hire a director.’ So we ended up being one of the first games to be green-lighted into that program, which was good timing.”

Once Kongregate accepted Intuition’s pitch, Larson said, Intuition received “milestone payments,” which meant every time Intuition reached a milestone, whether it was completing character concepts or different levels of programming, Kongregate would pay the company for the services it completed.

“Kongregate certainly kicked it off for us,” Wohlwend said. “(Before), we were just kind of kicking around ideas and we didn’t have any kind of LLC formed; we just wanted to do it. And it wasn’t until (we secured Kongregate’s contract) that we could be a business, and have a paper signed and something to stand on. The investment was all about sweat and eating ramen.”

The concept Intuition pitched to Kongregate was an online Flash game it had developed called Dinowaurs, a real-time, multi-player combat game with character customization components. As part of the deal, once Dinowaurs is complete – which should be next month – Kongregate will be able to post the game on its Web site for users to play for free.

Larson said developing games for the Internet generally takes less time than developing games for consoles, which can take up to five years; creating a two-dimensional online Flash game can take just a few weeks.

“It’s certainly our business strategy right now (to solely develop Web games),” Wohlwend said. “We don’t want console games, because we can do what we want on the Web and everyone can play it; we can just develop one game, and everyone can play it on a browser. It gives us a lot more numbers and eyes on our games, which is the most important right now.”

Midwest isolation

Another part of Intuition’s business strategy is to work together with the few developers in the state to create a gaming hub in Iowa. Larson said most U.S. gaming hubs are in the coastal areas, especially in California.

“I think part of it has to do with the tech industries,” Larson said. “When gaming started out, I think it was more closely linked to the tech industry, and obviously that is more developed on the coasts, so developers just started to gather around those hot spots.”

But Larson believes small game developers like Intuition will still be able to thrive.

“The landscape is changing, where you have a lot more smaller shops,” he said, “especially with Flash games, where it only costs you a couple thousand dollars to get a computer and to get some software.

“You spend a couple of months developing a game, and you can get your company started just that way. I think because of that, (the industry) is starting to spread out more, a lot of little developers sprinkled all over, but there are still definitely major hubs.”

However, Intuition’s Midwest isolation comes with one perk – not a lot of competition in the Central Iowa market. “That’s the one good thing,” Larson said.

Intuition plans to stay in Ames, with Larson continuing to work out of Impromptu Studio in Des Moines, but he said the group has considered moving out of state just to get to the point of “sustainability.”

“We kind of joke sometimes how much we love Iowa, but she doesn’t really love us back,” Larson said.