Rogers is a co-founder of
Action Button Entertainment, a four-person studio that consists of Rogers, Brent Porter, Michael Kerwin, and Nicholas Wasilewski, who together have built all of the studio's four games from
Ziggurat through
Videoball. Their games are consistently simple in their aesthetics and controls, following from Rogers's own video game aesthetic interests. His interest in minimalist
esports and simple games parlays into his design philosophy, which he compared to ''
Gordon Ramsay's Kitchen Nightmares'', a show in which Ramsay advises failing restaurants to improve by trimming their menus to a spartan few great dishes. Rogers also felt simple games were "less work". Rogers has said that he aspires for Action Button Entertainment to make games that share his preferred gaming styles and his hobbies. In finding that the common link between his top 25 video games (including
Panzer Dragoon,
Cave Story,
Canabalt, and his favorite,
Out of This World) was minimalist aesthetics with no overt story to tell other than through game mechanics, Rogers wanted
Ziggurat and future games to live up to those expectations and used his gut to fine-tune design decisions. The games also reflect aspects of Rogers's personality, such as in the "scream sound effect" on
Ziggurat made and distorted from his guitar and based on sounds made by eccentric Japanese musicians whose records he owned. He also called
Ziggurat a descendant of his hobbies: the video game
Ibara: Black Label and the
Rubik's Cube. Rogers also became known for producing promotional "
infomercial-style trailers".
Ziggurat Ziggurat is a retro-style
arcade shooter video game where the player fights off incoming aliens as the world's last human from atop a ziggurat. The player uses simple touch controls to charge and shoot the enemies away, and dies if hit by an enemy. The game has 16-bit graphics style and an 8-bit
chiptune soundtrack. Rogers co-founded Action Button Entertainment while working on
Ziggurat, which began with an idea Rogers had while playing
Angry Birds about pushing back a swarm of bats by shooting projectiles at them. He decided that he could not make the game alone. Rogers put out a call for artists on Twitter with a submissions request of "fan art of the Japanese box art of
Phantasy Star II", and Action Button artist Brent Porter replied in under an hour with an entry Rogers called "incredible". In mid 2011, Rogers decided to work on an iPhone game for a few weeks as a break from a larger project. Rogers said the team was convinced by his design documentthis game would become
Ziggurat. Rogers contacted an Internet acquaintance who had previously mocked up a design idea from Rogers's
Kotaku column, programmer Michael Kerwin, who came through with a rough draft within a week. Andrew Toups converted a soundtrack created by Rogers's rock band into an 8-bit soundtrack. After six months of hiatus and working at a social games company, Rogers rekindled development and the team finished the
Ziggurat, which was released in February 2012 for iOS platforms.
Edge related the "unexpectedly poignant" red screen and sound effect that flashes upon the player's death to Rogers's personal interest in
noise rock. They called it a "beguiling personal signature".
TNNS TNNS, pronounced "tennis", is a brick-breaking
action game where players use a paddle along the screen's left side to bounce a ball towards breakable objects on the right side of the screen, and to avoid getting the ball in their goal. It was released with little advanced notice in November 2012 for
iOS as a universal app playable on
iPhones,
iPads, and
iPods. Danny Cowan of IndieGames.com compared it with Sidhe Interactive's
Shatter and
VG247 called it a rendition of
Breakout.
Pocket Gamer likened it to both and further compared it with
Alleyway,
Arkanoid, and
Super Hexagon with a "telekinetic power" to alter the ball's direction apart from the panel (as in
Shatter).
10×8 Ten by Eight, stylized as
10×8, is a
puzzle video game where players match tiles. Players align similarly colored blocks and trace the path they create when aligned. Star blocks act as
power-ups that extend combos. Rogers produced an "
infomercial-style trailer" for the game, which
VG247 called one of his signature moves and that IndieGames.com called "glorious". It was released on July 31, 2013, in North America for
PlayStation Mobilethe
PlayStation Vita and compatible devices. Around the same time, Rogers presented at the
GDC 2013 Indie Soapbox, where he told the story of how he "went indie".
Videoball In
Videoball, players use solely one
analog stick and one button to control triangles that shoot projectiles to knock a circular ball into the opposing team's endzone. The triangle shoots a projectile, which charges the longer the button is held, such that a charged "slam" shot can sail across the full screen. Rogers, the game's designer, describes the game as "an abstract minimalist electronic sport". Its development began as a dare from
QWOP developer
Bennett Foddy, Rogers's friend, to make a "one-button
StarCraft". Rogers compared the game's design process to ''
Gordon Ramsay's Kitchen Nightmares, where Ramsay convinces failing restaurants to provide fewer menu options and to make those dishes well. Rogers acknowledged the role of noted basketball-like strategy in its playtests, and the difficulty in crafting a minimalist game with a high importance on nuanced detail. He livestreamed prerelease sessions of Videoball'' via
Twitch and broadcast gameplay from Twitch's booth at
PAX East 2014 with indie publisher Midnight City. The game released in 2016. == Personal life ==