Who are we... and where did we come from?

Aside from the obvious answers: we are humans and we come from the planet earth... well... some of us at least. Who exactly is Demergo Studios? Where did we come from? And why are we here?

It started a long time ago in a galaxy far, far away... on a little known planet called earth, in a little known city called Greenville, SC, where a number of ambitious young college students collided and formed Demergo.

Before Demergo, many of us had worked on smaller personal game projects. We all loved games, and we all loved making games, but individually we were limited on the size and scope of the games we could make. We realized that together we could make a game much bigger than any of us individually. Demergo originally started off with Dan, Zak, and I sitting down, and discussing what we wanted our futures to look like. After a while we all kind of came to the realization that we wanted to make games. One of the best ways to get into the game industry is to actually make a game and sell it. The game industry as a whole is much more experience and knowledge focused rather than degree focused, so starting a company and make games is a great way to break into the industry.

But looking at the three of us there is clearly no art talent among us... none whatsoever! Yeah we are definitely artistically challenged. So we set out to find some artists for Demergo. We found a number of artists that we added on, we also added on some good friends of ours from our programming classes, and we also picked up a few cinema production majors. By the end of our first project, Norwall, our team totaled around 14 people. Thats a lot for a start up.

Well, most of you are probably wondering, "why haven't I heard of Norwall yet?"; well thats because it never really saw the light of day. It was an ambitious project, and very fun to work on, but we made too many mistakes on that project to really recover it. One of the primary mistakes was not requiring work hours. We are all college students and as college students we have no time, so very little progress was every really made on the game. But we learned a lot. We made a bunch of mistakes that we were able to learn from and take those lessons and bring them over to Fixbot.

For Fixbot we required set work hours which immediately eliminated a bunch of people. After that we sat down and re-evaluated our situation. We were down to 8 people (much more manageable of a size), but we were running out of time. Many of us will be graduating in May so we had only a few months to really get something out. We decided to set a deadline, and limit the scope of the game to something we could produce in 3 months.

One month later, here we are, starting to get the word out about Demergo Studios and our current project, Fixbot.

That takes care of the where, but how about the who and the why?
Well, simply put, we are a bunch of college students who want to make video games. We are passionate about making high quality, co-op games with great stories. We are hugh fans of Naughty Dog and how they tell amazing stories through video games. We are also huge fans of Gears of War and Halo with their co-operative play. So, we desire to mesh the two and create games with awesome stories, together with fun co-operative play. Unfortunately, we are not as big as Naughty Dog, but they were not that big early on either. We look forward to the journey that lies ahead of us and we hope that you will join us on this journey as we post about how we do things and various problems that we run into and overcome as we continue this journey of starting an indie game company.

Devbot Todd Shutting Down...

Reposted from Fixbot Blog: http://demergostudios.com/fixbot/