Thank You! (#2)

Robert "BobMc" McNamee, 3D Artist

Woot!

Level up!!!!!

We made it!

...and All of YOU all made it happen!

I salute you, and will do my best to help make a game we can all be proud of, a game that rewards fun, and friendships, and variety!

Onward and upward Titans!

Thank you!

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xjUYDeQxJmU

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Kevin "AngelWolf" Soucy 3D Environmental Artist

Wahooo! We made it in record time and it's all thanks to our backers. To quote Fozzie Bear: Thank you thank you thank you thank you and THANK YOU! We are going to make an amazing world for everyone to play in!

You folks are the greatest!

Ayooooah!

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John "Rocket Cat" Barrett, 2D concept artist

I'm so humbled by the outpouring of support for our project! Your comments and the stories you're writing from @global names I've seen on the CoH forums remind me that our community is still alive, haven't gone away, and are coming back together to help build our new home. As I keep reaching out to my former league-mates, I really hope to see RP Congress out there. I was @Daggerjack and I miss you guys!

I'm really honored I was given the chance to be a part of this project! The assignments have helped me learn new tools and the other artists have given me a better perspective on design and anatomy. In February, I got the courage to apply to MWM, and I want to keep doing everything I can behind the scenes to give our 3D teams stuff they can use.

I've gotten to work with really talented artists here and I hope I can double my efforts now that you've shown us that you believe in City of Titans. It makes me feel like a hero again and that we can get this done together!

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Doctor Tyche

There are not words to describe the sheer magnitude of awesomeness for all of you. I am deeply humbled by your support.

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Voltknuckle, 3D Artist

I couldn't (bother to) find anything to quote about ordinary citizens being extraordinary, so I'll make on instead.

Very few superhero related comics and stories don't portray the ordinary citizen, as such as they're just as integral to any story as the super

Very typically superheroes need to save the citizens, and on the rare occasion, the opposite happens- where the superhero needs to be saved by the citizens.

But with the kickstarter, what we got is a recursive situation- in order for us to help you, we needed your help, and we got it! and we're still getting it.

Thank you, you ordinary citizens, for helping us so we can help you become heroes (and villains) again!

Announcing the $500,000 Stretch Goal

Announcing the $500,000 Stretch Goal:

If we reach this stretch goal, we’re going to add some things we know you’ll love. To start with, Auras! No true comic book game could be without – *Kirby Krackle* in all its infinite glory!

We’ll also add the following travel powers: Swinging; an Acrobatic Leaping suite; and, Sky Surfing – all with several mount options (ride a cloud, magic carpet, boulder, manhole cover, etc…).

We’re also going to add a few fun emotes, such as the CueZach Boombox.

-Zombie Man, Online Community Manager

So, Why Android, iOS, and Mac?

Hi, all, Zombie Man, here to address a question that keeps popping up, namely, why are the first three stretch goals so… shall we say… *other platform*… specific?

Well, let’s first start with the first two: porting the Avatar Builder (i.e., the character creator) to Android and iOS portables: So, remember, significantly before the game goes ‘Live’, we will be releasing a standalone module of the Avatar Builder. This will be a Windows app, and thus, available on Windows tablets. But you know, more people have Android or iOS tablets and handhelds than Windows devices. And so, in the interim between the release of the Avatar Builder and the full game, we anticipate that you, our eager fans, will be asking for the Avatar Builder to be available on their little pocket computer so that they can play with it all day long. We anticipate this because that’s what we want to do!

And that’s why we have the stretch goal of porting the Avatar Builder to the two most popular hand held platforms while we’re waiting for the full game to go Live.

So why don’t we put the money towards making the game go Live faster? It’s unlikely that more money is going to speed up the development process among volunteers, at least, not at this level of funding. We’d need millions, not just tens of thousands of dollars to speed up game production by hiring full time staffers. If that kind of funding came in, who knows, we might go for it. But for now, we plan to make the Avatar Builder as accessible as possible while waiting for the next stages of game development.

The next platform-specific stretch goal is a Mac version of City of Titans. Remember, our spiritual ancestor, City of Heroes, had a Mac version. Before we start adding stretch goals for game content, we need to stretch the number of players who can access the game. We don’t want to leave that community behind. Very few MMOs reach out to the Mac community, and doing so is what made City of Heroes so beloved, and hopefully will generate the same goodwill and dedicated fans for City of Titans.

-zm

Thank You! (#1)

Warcabbit, Project Manager

I've said it before, I'll say it again, I love you guys.

We've been working so hard to keep ahead of you and you keep pushing faster than I can believe. I've got something really great coming up for you, but you pushed us over before we could even get it done.

We're going to start rolling out the things we put aside so the gameplay video could get done, shortly. Lore and art and... well, you'll see.

Here's a hint.

I want to believe

Beyond that, though, we've got to keep working on the game, we've got to earn the trust you've put in us.

And we're going to do that.

Torches high, everyone.

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Timothy "Kitsune9tails" Ross

You are the best people in the entire world. Thank you for fulfilling my dream of being able to spread my particular flavor of madness on to you. Seriously, I have loved comic books and supers all my life and this is a goal of decades for me. You have made an old man proud and happy. I will do my best to live up to the faith you have shown.

Time to put on my butt kickin' boots...

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tkeLAqIjp-E

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Jennifer "Petalstorm" Bolack - Art Director

I am completely overwhelmed and excited and extremely happy to have such wonderful fans backing us. This project means a lot to me personally and you guys have had me balling my eyes out all week with how supportive and how much faith you have put into us and this project. I will never be able to express how thankful I am to y'all for being here and backing us. Thank you.

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Lauren "Rae" O'Neill - PR Lead and generally-gushing-on-Facebook-chick

It's crazy to think that it was less than a week ago that I was dragged out of my bed so I could stand shoulder to shoulder with my TPP colleagues and our community for the launch of our Kickstarter. I'll never, even forget listening to VDG counting down the minutes, my stomach twisting and turning and my hands shaking.

And then a split second of silence as the 'launch' button was pressed.

It was a matter of /seconds/ before the pledges started rolling in. As late night became early morning for my colleages, sleep-deprived, I sat with the Kickstarter in one window and Facebook in the other, uploading 'milestone' graphics as quickly as our art team could create them, as we smashed through one barrier, after another, after another.

Every time we hit a milestone, I said I had no words.

I still don't have any words. Seriously. I'm talking in vowel sounds right now. I think I might even have made up a few of the vowels.

I never dared to hope we'd actually reach our target, because I knew it would break my heart if we didn't. To reach it so quickly is beyond anything I'd ever imagined.

Being a part of this has been an absolute honour. Sleeping with my phone under my pillow so I can check the updates, waking in the night to watch the figure rising, my phone exploding with emails, tweets and text messages whenever we hit something amazing.

THAT made me feel super. Gawd only knows what I'll actually feel like when I actually get to strap on some virtual spandex once again.

Thank you so much for letting us play such a huge part in your adventure. It means more than you can ever know.

I keep saying thank you, but it doesn't seem enough, somehow. That's just words, and there aren't enough words for how much thanking of you I want to do to you. I really, really, really mean it.

Thank you, three hundred and twenty-thousand times. Thank you.

Love you guys,
Lauren

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Brian "Terlin" McVey, Contract Writer

Wow, we made it!

Thank you so much for your incredible support. All of us here at MWM are grateful for your contributions and well wishes.

I have always been impressed with the community spirit that drives us forward. Many in the kickstarter have commented on the community they are seeing reawakened during this funding effort. We are planning a robust game with features I'm sure you will like, but most important to me, we are creating the place where the community that was can be again.

That is the element that drives me the most: creating the place where friends and family can dream together, where we can meet great people, and where we can be more than just a superhero-MMO.

Thanks again, everyone!

It's Official: Soon is Now

A little over a year ago, a community came together in a show of support for a studio and a game that had brought them together.  They gathered by the thousands in an online plaza to show that, even with the game distributor’s lack of responsiveness to various pleas and attempts to bargain, they were not beaten, and they were not broken.

That community had many plans to ensure that they would not remain homeless indefinitely.  If all else failed, there was Plan Z: make a new game to continue the spirit of the game that was lost.  That plan produced a group known as the Phoenix Project.

Now, it is time to come together once again in the name of heroism and adventure.  Plan Z spawned the Phoenix Project, and we've come along well. We are now a budding game studio called Missing Worlds Media.  We have our plans and much of the groundwork laid out, and now we need you.  But first, some information about why we feel we are worthy of your support.

 MWM is registered as a business in Washington State, but the people working here are paying with their time, effort, and every spare dollar they have to get the project this far. Game designers, writers, coders, artists, support staff, skilled workers of all kinds have put in thousands of hours of work in service to the community they love, and to the hope that the new world we are creating will serve not just as well but even better, as improvement was always the example set by the game that initially set us in motion.

Our group includes a wide range of skilled personnel, in fields related to both actual game production and making sure we earn enough with that game to keep the lights on indefinitely. We have published novelists, coders with decades of experience, so many experienced pen-and-paper designers that almost every department has at least one or two, artists in a variety of specialties, copyeditors, historians, process specialists, marketers… all spending their otherwise free time working on this project, with so much dedication that I had to make a rule requiring everyone to take some downtime periodically so that people wouldn’t burn themselves out by working every waking moment.

The community that served as our base deserves a game that continues to grow and improve, and it deserves not to be treated as a niche- we are not just making this game for the people who played before, we are building it for all the people who dream about being heroes and villains.

There is a greater audience now, thanks to the movies, than there has ever been before, and we will reach them.   We want our game to continue the tradition of being welcoming to “non-standard” MMO players, people who do not consider themselves gamers, who don’t have time to dedicate hours of scheduled time to a game, but who nonetheless feel the pull of adventure and the urge to don a cape and either save or menace a richly deserving metropolis.

We have the drive and the skills, now we need to be able to fully focus our efforts on creating that game.  We have used volunteer contributions to cover our costs thus far, but that will not carry us to launch, and we are not willing to make deals with traditional venture capitalists for funding; making the game only for it to be in peril of ending the same way our predecessor did would show a distinct lack of respect for history.

Thus, we are relying heavily on this Kickstarter for two things- the basic funds to do what we need to do in the short term, and the credibility to be of interest to non-traditional sources of funding, investors who will support us in being a community-focused studio, rather than being all about the dollar signs.

If we can demonstrate that our community really does support us with more than just moral support, if we can show that this really is a viable market that the previous distributor disregarded, if we can show that a fan initiative can truly become a competitive MMO, we have won much more than we lost.

We will prove that a well-developed community is a force to be reckoned with, something that can outlast even the loss of the game that fostered it, and that there is value there beyond what the companies can control.  That the community itself is a living entity that it does not pay to ignore.

We’re not looking for money to buy luxuries. Unless we have an insanely successful Kickstarter, we’re not even looking to start having payroll yet.  We are looking for money to make sure our developers have the hardware and software to do their work as efficiently as possible, to pay for licenses so that we can legally release what we’re making, to pay for legal advice so that we avoid making a great game but losing it all to an avoidable legal pothole a year later, to cover server costs for our growing forums and eventual live testing; in general to pay for the things that people working for free simply cannot provide.

So, now you know what we intend to do with your support, monetary and otherwise.  Even if you do nothing whatsoever with regard to this Kickstarter, thank you for your support so far. We could not have gotten anywhere near here without you.  If you want to do something, remember- every contribution to the Kickstarter, no matter how small, proves the numbers in our community.

If you have the money for a larger contribution, we have done our best to come up with worthwhile and valuable rewards at every level. If you cannot contribute money, help us get out the word. Our PR ninja is working hard to reach everyone, but I know that the community extends further than we could ever hope to reach directly.  Let people know who we are, what we are trying to do, and what we are asking.  That alone is invaluable.

We will be having a Livestream event with one of our 2D artists, RocketCat, at 8pm Eastern on Friday night (October 4th) and many of our volunteers will be present for at least part of that event. Myself, I will be doing my best to be present for all of it.  I hope to see many of you there.

We have done what was promised - there has been no giving up.  All efforts to save our home were for naught.  We are undaunted - we will build a new home, and better.  Join us now, in striking a blow against insensitive corporate mentality, and for community.  Help us build a new gameverse worthy of the loyalty and spirit of this community and all those who will come forth in the future and become part of it.  Help us bring stories of heroism and villainy straight out of the four-color pages to the internet once more.  Help us prove that a sufficiently determined community can truly save a world.

We’re heroes. It’s what we do.

Sara 'Firefairy' Quinn

President, Missing Worlds Media

http://tinyurl.com/cityoftitans

Kickstarter update: September 29, 2013

Fanterview: Christopher

Name: Christopher, my friends call me pumpkin (from this orange car i have, long story) and in a few online games I go by Luscious, haha.

What do you do for work in real life?
I work in a hospital as a Registered Respiratory Therapist - Neonatal & Pediatric Specialist

What is your favorite food?
I love really well made Chinese food, not the expensive name brand places like PF Chang, but a mom and pop restaurant.

Favorite movies?
Even though I was born late in the 1980’s (88 to be exact) I love the cult classics; The Breakfast Club, Ferris Buellers Day Off, The Goonies, Caddyshack, Spaceballs and Short Circuit

Any big events in your life this year you want to give a shout out about?
Coming up later this year I will be taking steps to be a first time home buyer, going to be a big event for me.

How did you first hear about Missing Worlds Media (MWM) and their first MMO project?
I honestly don't remember 100%, but I was looking for something COH related on facebook and ended up on your facebook page. And I've been on an awesome adventure with a few people on the forums since then.

What boundaries do you think MWM can push with their first MMO project?
I think they will expand on some of the amazing ideas that COH had, but fix the parts that were out dated with a more new age approach.

Why do you think people should support the Kickstarter campaign for MWM’s first MMO project?
As we have seen over the past few years Indie games made by small publishers have been more successful than mainstream games with large budgets from

What is it that attracts you to the Superhero genre?
I'd have to say its the ability to do things we can't do on any ordinary day. To make more of a difference than ever thought possible.

What is your favorite super power and why?
Empathy - my favorite healing powered person was a character named Shawn on a show called “The 4400”. He could heal people, but it temporarily fatigued him to do so.

What do you think defines a hero (or a villain?)
Villian - They are impulsive, they have no restraint.

Hero - That ability to do what it right and good, no matter how it will affect you personally.

If you had them, do you think having super powers would be a blessing or a burden?
If I had the empath power, it would probably turn out much like it did for shawn on The 4400; it would begin as a blessing then slowly turn into a burden as more and more people discovered my ability.

What kind of content engages you in video games?
I can get engaged in almost any game to some kind of extent. The thing that has kept me so charged in the COH/TPP field is the aspect of the SuperGroups. Its why when I joined the forum I made it a mission of mine to promote the SuperGroup culture that COH had within this new community.

How do you like stories to progress in a game (i.e. cutscenes, battles, mission text, etc.) and why?
If over time a game doesn't grow even for the highest level of player, the game eventually just turns into a game of see how fast you can make it to the highest level, then you get bored again. It causes drop off of your subscription.

What sort of missions in games do you enjoy the most?
I love the missions in COH where we ran a few missions running all over the zones, to end in a final mission where the last boss was a mega creature, with obstacles we had over come as we worked to wittle away at his life points.

What is your favorite quote and why?
I am not going to sit on my *** as the events that affect me unfold to determine the course of my life. I'm going to take a stand. I'm going to defend it. Right or wrong, I'm going to defend it. - Cameron (in Ferris Buellers Day Off)