MrMarvel

A few corrections;

[ QUOTE ]
lacks straight damage powers like Spectral Wounds and Propel

[/ QUOTE ]

Levitation?

[ QUOTE ]
one single target total control that stacks with one of the area controls.

[/ QUOTE ]

Mind has TWO single-target controls that stack with area controls; Mesmerize stacks with Mass Hypnosis (both are Sleeps) and Dominate stacks with Total Domination (both are Holds).

ugh.

I was looking forward to this, but it sounds like a jumbled mess - and way too close to the PC version, to boot.

Guess I'll be sticking with MURPG and M&M with Paragon City as a converted setting.

[ QUOTE ]
Speaking as someone in the industry, this is, sadly, a common misconception. I say sadly, because I wish that it were true The fact is that development teams depend upon publishers, and with development costs spiraling, finding a publisher has never been harder. Publishers look for proven teams with multiple shipped titles; a cool game idea doesn't just isn't enough anymore. Look at how few finalists from the Independant Games Festival (IGF) get published for evidence of this. And these are very good games.

[/ QUOTE ]

Brooz is right. I attempted to found my own game development company a few years ago and even in the mobile (cell phone) market the startup costs were pretty substantial. If you can't fund a multimillion-dollar project on the scale of Half-Life 2 or Knights of the Old Republic you won't even get noticed because the bar's been raised so high. It takes years to make a quality title nowadays, and a substantial investment in staff, money, and time up-front.

Plus, as was mentioned, you need a publisher and it's very hard to get your foot in the door with anyone established. All of the publishers my old company were able to get were third-rate fly-by-nights who didn't have the clout to get my titles the exposure they needed to really hit it big.

The days of two guys who love games writing one in their garage are long over...

As a programmer in the industry I'd like to talk about languages. Cuppa mentioned C++, but a lot of industry titles are still written in C and in some cases (the mobile market), Java. It's impossible to have too much math, programming, and problem-solving in your educational and work-experience background when it comes to coding games. You never know WHAT you'll need to pore over and understand for the next big thing.

Also, prior to looking for a job, work with as many mod kits, SDKs, and game construction utilities as you can. Stuff like UnrealEd, Bioware's Aurora toolset, Quake engine mapping utilities, that sort of thing. They give you a better idea of how every piece of the puzzle fits together and how things are implemented. You learn a lot just tinkering with them.

Programmers also need to know how the artists and musicians work their magic, as we're the ones who have to put their assets to code. Being able to understand your musician when he starts telling you about octaves and beats or being able to tell the difference between a spline and a mesh in a 3D model will be invaluable, especially if you plan on doing any engine programming.

I don't recommend going to game-specific schools, to be honest. A good, solid university computer-science background and some textbooks (Prima press has some excellent books) are enough to get you started. Worked for me, anyway.

Good luck! And may the Force be with you.

Without Paragon City, Vigilante Six would have nowhere to kill skuls.

Happy Annual Versity!

I can never let one of these gaming system threads go by without mentioning that I thought QED's Marvel Universe RPG was the bestest, flexible-ist, easiest, scalable-ist, superhero RPG ever.

The entire set of game mechanics could be boiled down to "I spend X stones from power A against resistance B." No dice, no charts, and it could handle any kind of hero you could think of.

One of these days, I'll finish my CoH converstion.

That said, my butt is still buying a copy of the CoH RPG, just for the reading material.

I've tossed around this idea for the Marvel Universe RPG - I've got stats for the Circle of Thorns, 5th Column, Lost, and Hellions since I sent my players to Paragon City on a mission a while back. Main reason I didn't was I didn't want to get in trouble if I put up a web page with this information on it, but I am probably going to be doing a full writeup in the near future since once I get my MURPG group up and running again, I'm going to use Paragon City as the campaign setting instead of the standard MU.

Any takers? Seattle area...