Hey folks!

So, we’ve made this big todo about the WARMACHINE game and I know that you all have tons of questions. Maybe it’s time we coughed up some info about who we are and what it is exactly we’re doing So, here comes a loooong post.

Scott, Kevin, Norvell and myself started WhiteMoon Dreams back in the lavish year of 2006, when most of the world was peering curiously at the strange mortgage situation that was about to topple and saying “hrm… that doesn’t look so great – ah well, hand me another beer”.  Scott and I had initially put together some designs, artwork and prototypes to get publishers interested in our work and we brought Kevin on because he was a badass designer with a head for business and Norry because he was a badass marketing guy with experience in making this kind of starting-a-company-thing go. We assembled our dream-team of developers and began working away at our first product from an up-and-coming publisher who we aren’t allowed to name.

Unfortunately econopocalypse (as Kevin likes to call it) hit, and we were hit just like everyone else. The project we were working on was cancelled, our publishing partners (who were very supportive of us and liked our project immensely) were thrown into disarray and disappeared. As you can expect, we had to do some incredibly fast thinking.

The thing you can always bet on with game developers is that most of them have their hearts solidly placed in their dreams and when you join a startup crew, you can bet every single person in that crew shares in the dream of the company. Through the madness, the staff stayed on to figure out how to keep everything moving smoothly.

We managed to score some contract work to keep things barely alive and began rebuilding our tech. By February of 2009, we had enough to build a small sample of a game (that was somewhat reminiscent of the game we were previously building with a full team). 5-6 of us crammed for a month (to make it to March GDC 09) and built the demo for the game Aftermath that you see on our website. The team consisted of a couple of people who rolled on and off the project as they could – two artists, two designers scripting, and two programmers.

Aftermath is a game that we have a lot of passion for still. We plan for it to be an XBLA/PSN downloadable title that is essentially Diablo 2 with guns (because we’re all nuts about D2). Get together a bunch of friends on/offline, grab some alcohol (or whatever floats your boat), grow your player, collect tons of items and lay complete waste to some baddies with a myriad of weapons. You can’t really argue with that.

Meanwhile, we were still alive. We took Aftermath as far as we wanted to in order to demonstrate the ability of the team so we then decided to push the boundaries of our technology in order to further show the versatility of the tech and the team. We iterated on a couple of ideas while continuing to handle small contracts and one day, we got to talking about how badass WARMACHINE was. See, Kevin and Scott had been regularly hitting our nearby gaming watering hole – Game Empire  - and had gotten us all into playing some delicious DnD. The entire company had now taken to playing board games and DnD on the weekend – everything from Arkham Horror to Bang to Kill Doctor Lucky. Gaming started to get more serious and we turned our attention to something that some of us had been fans of for quite some time – WARMACHINE.

Emergent, who we work very collaboratively with, had recently done a tech demo using the WARMACHINE property and had ties to Privateer Press. They graciously gave us the introduction to Matt Wilson of Privateer and furious copulation of Warjacks began.

So hopefully, from all that backstory you’ve learned about the passion that we have not only to keep WhiteMoon Dreams going, but you can see how we’ll channel that into making WARMACHINEsomething that you guys are going to love. We are not a shop that has been slapped with a project that they have to do – we have chosen this project to do on our own and we work hand-in-hand with Matt and his crew in order to make sure that we stay true to their vision of this world.

So now, a group of us has decided to go head down in development and do nothing but eat, sleep and dream WARMACHINE and it is paying off. The little rag-tag team is still growing –  still under-financed, but burning with the furious coal-fires of this incredible dream project. We will continue to fuel ourselves however we can, but our vision and execution for WARMACHINE is clear and continues every single day through the efforts of each individual at the studio; this project is farther along than people might think.

GDC next year is going to be awesome

Love,

Jay K. and the rest of WhiteMoon Dreams