Windstorm's Dusty Monk Interview - Part Two

15 Apr 2010 at 14:02:20 by Tim McDonald

Yesterday, we posted up the first half of our interview with ex-Ensemble man and current Windstorm Studios founder and president Dusty Monk, in which we covered everything from getting into the industry, through Titan - the Halo MMO - and the death of Ensemble.

This concluding part of our interview contains what Monk has to say about the experiences of forming his own studio, the design tenets these games will be built on, and what we can expect from the forthcoming single-player RPG and the eventual MMO.

IncGamers: Moving on from Ensemble, why did you decide to form your own studio rather than joining one of the others that sprang up after the Ensemble closure?

Dusty Monk (right): as reamly the drbóe elosu e?e/wteam job. When they killed Titan, I started looking at what Ensemble was probably going to be working on next. I'd already been saving up some money on my own, thinking about starting up a studio, and I decided then that now was the time. It's never easy to jump ship and go off and do things on your own – you never know how it's going to do. It's especially hard if you're married and you have children and you're looking at the difference between a secure job, with benefits and with a paycheck, versus a completely and totally unsecure job creating a company that's building the most expensive kind of game you can build, in an industry hit by the hardest recession that it's ever experienced! So, yeah, it wasn't a great time from an economic standpoint, but from a personal standpoint it was the right time for me. I'd just decided that with the severance money from Microsoft combined with my own savings, I had enough money to be able to float myself for a couple of years. I knew the games that I wanted to build, so I decided now was the time to go forward with that.

You mentioned that, considering the financial climate, creating a company in mind of building an MMO wasn't the safest or, uh, most obviously sane option...?

You're right on target, there! [Laughs]

So with that in mind, how has it been going? Are there problems?

So far, so good. Things have gone just about as expected. Not as well as I'd hoped, perhaps, but certainly not in an unexpected fashion. One of the things that I can't speak highly enough in terms of the importance of trying to get a new studio started is the importance of social media. I'd already had my MMO blog going - I post armchair MMO design discussions there about twice a month or so. I'm not a real regular blogger but I tend to write long stuff when I blog.

So I started that and got it going a little more regularly, and then I started using Twitter and posting not just personal stuff but engaging the game development community as much as possible. When I launched the website for Windstorm Studios I just put together this small site that said “Hey, here's my company, here's my presence. We're going to be building some really cool things.” And then I put it out over Twitter and immediately the press picked up on it, and it was ripped all across the gaming press in a much, much greater response than I had anticipated.

Our business plan was to first build an MMO prototype because we knew that studios aren't going to lend you a lot of credence and credibility if you have just a good idea, no matter how good that idea is, especially at this point in time. But I thought that if I could put together an actual playable prototype of the game, then I'd have a better chance of finding publishing and success. If I didn't have success in that way, then the money, time, and effort spent on the prototype could go towards a smaller game that we could go ahead and get out the door.

For the first eight months of the company's lifetime, we were working on our prototype. We finished that around September and the prototype has been largely received with great enthusiasm. From about September through January I shopped the prototype to a number of different publishers, both international and within the States, and all of them have without exception, said “We love the idea, love the project, but we're just not ready to go forward yet - and part of the problem is that we're just not sure there's enough of a real company here.” And I get that; I can sort of relate to that.

So the plan of attack right now is to go forward with a smaller single-player game, and get that out there for people to start playing. This will serve as a sort of introduction to the world that we want to build. So from that standpoint, we're still doing really well. We haven't got our project funded by an MMO developer yet, we're not going forward with the MMO, but we are going forward with the smaller project. I have every anticipation of having enough funds to finish the small project. We'll get it out there, and then we'll see how it goes from there. If the project is really well received, and people like the world and they like the game, then that will hopefully provide enough credence for the company that a publisher will come and go “Hey, this company has some legs, we feel like it's a real legitimate endeavour. We love this idea and people are really responding well to this idea, so let's go forward with that.” And if it doesn't? Well, then we gave it a hell of a go.

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