TouchTone (video game)

The player rearranges items to redirect a beam of light to its destination. Puzzles unlock emails which tell a about government surveillance (right).

As part of a government surveillance program, the player monitors phone calls to find public threats. Apart from infrequent interaction with their handler, the player is left to solve puzzles in pursuit of one such lead. The puzzles are based on the "reflection puzzle" popularized by role-playing video games wherein the player moves mirrors to reflect a beam of light about a room. In TouchTone, the player swipes the screen to move pieces that redirect incoming beams, symbolic of phone signals, into specific locations. The waveform beams are displayed in different solid colors and must be matched with the destination "node" of the same color by passing through moveable pieces that reflect and split the beam.^[2] The pieces do not move individually but as rows and columns in cardinal directions.^[3]

The levels are displayed in an overworld with a branching, tree structure. The player must pursue multiple branches to further the story. Optional, side-story branches do not advance the main plot but have the hardest puzzles.^[2] The story is told through chains of emails, which are unlocked by completing puzzles. The player assumes the role of an American Muslim National Security Agency agent who determines whether the hacked emails are pertinent to national security. The ethics of government surveillance are a core theme of the game.^[4]

Mike Boxleiter and Greg Wohlwend

Mikengreg, an indie game developer duo of Mike Boxleiter and Greg Wohlwend, released the 2010 Solipskier and 2012 Gasketball together before TouchTone in 2015.^[2] After Gasketball's release, Boxleiter and Wohlwend planned a celebratory road trip to a game jam in Victoria, British Columbia. Gasketball turned out to be a "financial flop", and so Boxleiter wanted to use the jam to create "something new, ... something really small and perfect".^[5] 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.^[5] During this time, the two also worked separately, and Wohlwend released the well-received Threes with Asher Vollmer in 2014.^[2] Wohlwend tried to fit audio signal elements into TouchTone's nascent theme of light, lasers, and prisms.^[5] They felt this direction was unsuccessful, like a "boring Flash game", and that the game too closely mimicked "a hacking minigame from a bigger AAA game like BioShock or System Shock".^[5]

TouchTone found its theme following the Edward Snowden global surveillance disclosures in mid 2013, as Mikengreg felt they could provide satirical commentary through the "hacking" element of the game.^[5] The story shed its jocular tone as it and its political content grew deeper and more serious.^[5] Boxleiter wrote most of the script, which totaled over 20,000 words in length. It was his first effort at professional writing, and it took him five months. He and Wohlwend would conference after each chapter for coherency. Boxleiter wanted the story to explore the "questions ... floating around the national consciousness" rather than be "heavy-handed" and prescriptive.^[5] Despite this work, Boxleiter felt that the story and the gameplay "don't necessarily interact with each other", with the story serving to drive those less interested in puzzles through the rest of the game.^[3] They playtested the game in public at the theater in Logan Square, Chicago, though they acknowledged difficulty in playtesting the story's private experience.^[5] 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. They attribute this game design philosophy to Derek Yu of Spelunky.^[3]

TouchTone was released as an iOS universal app for both iPhone and iPad on March 19, 2015.^[6] It received a front page feature on the iOS App Store upon its release.^[5]