Mikeware 3.0

Published 10/11/2024

Mikeware is entering its third era now in 2024 and beyond with the introduction of our third major logo:

We've been working toward a new logo for the last 8 years. Our upcoming, soon to be announced, project inspired this new 3D perspective on our logo.

Looking Back

Below, you can see a few of the iterations we tried to get towards this latest version. It's been quite the ride to find the right balance of what we were looking to represent our next body of work.

There was definitely a balance we wanted to strike in how we moved forward from our classic original letter logo:

Ultimately, the new logo is a step forward in our evolution, looking forward and modernized, while paying homage to both our letter roots above and the logo of our 2nd era, the Mikeware Seal:

The Mikeware Seal was initially created 20 years ago in 2004, and was finalized using POV-Ray in 2005. It made its debut on our first major website revamp on May 23rd, 2006.

The Early Years (1995-2006)

The first era of Mikeware stems from its creation around a school lunch table circa 1995-1996. What started as just an idea and some tinkering turned into a passion for game development. The "Mikeware" stylized text was created early on in this initial period in 1997/1998:

Around August 1999, our mascot "MikeMan" was born and starred in his own video game, rescuing dogs from skyscraper rooftops while avoiding clouds. Along with the text, he rolled into the Mikeware "Door" logo created, as part of an entrepreneurship class, on November 2nd, 1999, in preparation for the year 2000:

Later, in 2005 and 2007, the logo was animated for PaddleSpace with the door opening sound and flashing light. It also had a brief stint in 2003 with a strange triangular symbol, as if three paperclips overlapped.

In 2006, MikeMan got a makeover! He also flipped directions flying to the right, as he did in his original game, and out of the "door":

This logo stopped being used around 2008 when the Mikeware Seal took over as our main branding.

These early years were a time of exploration and nascency in creating entertainment. It was an evolution in technology from basic principles in QBasic, to using Visual Basic, and moving to Python. It's capped by the release of our first larger-scale project, Mine Trooper, and the forever-postponed, still unreleased, PaddleSpace (maybe one day... we did get it to run on a SteamDeck in December 2022).

The 2nd Era (2009-2020)

This era kicks off as the Mikeware Seal is introduced, accelerating with the 2nd revamp of our website (more on our websites coming soon), and moving towards using more C# over Python. Mikeware has its first big hit, with the free award-winning puzzle game, Suitor, for Windows Mobile. It had over 175,000 downloads worldwide. It was followed up by a sequel for Windows Phone.

The notion of XGR, "eXperimental Game Research", with an uptick in prototyping began. Some of these experiments were unsuccessful, like our YouTube series for Game Design and Minecraft. As well as backing the Ouya console; however, we are proud to have a release title there with Gamius Type IV. And then with others, we had great success.

One of this era's pinnacles was the genesis of the Space Battle Arena programming game, used in high schools across the United States. We also expanded our exploration of tabletop game design with Playtest NW, culminating in the successful Kickstart of Cogs in a Machine which was part of the inaugural PAX South Tabletop Indie Showcase, the Boston Festival of Indie Games, and the Indie Megabooth at PAX Prime.

The 3rd Era (2024-)

And here we are now! You may have noticed there's been a gap. We've been spinning our wheels a bit the last few years after Covid. We have done numerous prototypes of both tabletop and digital games in that period, primarily card games and video games with Godot.

With in-person play testing more difficult during this time initially, and the rising cost of manufacturing for tabletop games, we've put a pin in our tabletop development for the moment. We're currently focused on our new upcoming digital project! Stay tuned for the announcement trailer.

More is coming in our 3rd era! We'll soon be launching our new website, also its 3rd major revamp! And, as mentioned, we have a big announcement to make soon about our next digital project, which will be available on Steam. Stay tuned!

Thank you for your continual support!

- Michael A. Hawker