Welcome to the official Waking Dream Studios blog!

Waking Dream Studios was founded in 2008 by a group of game fans with a shared vision for the industry: get better games into everyone's hands and leverage new technology to make the gaming world a better place.

To do this, we've pulled our heads together and come up with a few major points we are going to adhere to:

• Every game we produce will be $5 -- we want everyone to be able to buy our games


• Every game will have an extensive demo -- we will do everything in our power to ensure that you get a true taste of the real game before you give us your hard-earned dollars


• Every game will be available without DRM -- you're a paying customer, not a criminal; every game will be available from at least one distributor with no copy protection


• Every game will have a publicly available prototype -- we want to establish a real relationship with our customer base and allow them to see inside, and thus we plan to release at least one prototype/alpha version of every one of our games


• Our bugtracking system will be open to the public -- you deserve to see what bugs are in the software you purchase and you deserve to be heard when you run into an issue

We think these things are important and we think you'll agree. For too long, customers have been ignored and we feel that needs to change. In accordance with that, we strongly back The Gamers Bill of Rights proposed by Stardock. If everyone were to follow these principles, we would have higher quality games, a healthier industry, and most importantly, much more satisfied customers.

With all of that said, I'm proud to release our first prototype, currently codenamed 'Summer Skin'. Summer Skin is a multiplayer maze race game to be released this holiday season for Windows and the Xbox 360. Although much of the planned functionality of the full version -- power-ups and traps, multiple maze appearances, online multiplayer, additional game modes, customizability, etc -- are not yet in place, we feel that what we have so far is quite fun and a good sign of things to come. You can download it here, and the XNA redistributable (required) here.

To play, use the arrow keys to control your player (the dot you'll find in the upper-left corner of the maze) to the star in the center. Each move you make deducts one point from your score (displayed in the titlebar) so make sure you watch where you're going! The first player to reach the goal gets 400 points, the second gets 300. Once the players have hit the goal, a new maze is generated and play begins again.

We'll keep you posted with development status and we look forward to your comments and questions -- all feedback is welcome! We should have the bug tracking system up soon and we'll let you know when that happens.

Game on,
- Cody Brocious