I managed to make it to the last day of the Game Developer's Conference last week. Pretty cool just to see all the new stuff on display, but there wasn't a whole bunch I could do there. I got in with a student pass, and the only talks I could get in to were the student-specific ones. I know all that stuff already! Since all the money I have is already wrapped up in the company, I wasn't really in a position to do much wheeling and dealing, so talking to most of the companies on the floor was pretty pointless- I'm just not buying anything at the moment. So up until maybe 1-2PM or so, I was worried it was a big waste of time and money to go.
Then I noticed that the Hero Engine had a free version.
This little tidbit changed the whole conference for me. Chris had seen this last year, and I had seen it before while checking out game engines, and followed it a little bit. It is absolutely the perfect platform to do Midnight Oil on. Just perfect. However, as of last year, the cheapest they had licenced it for was something like $600,000 dollars. That's just a tiny bit over our price range. But now, they have the HeroCloud system- they host the game servers on cloud computing services (Amazon EC2 at the moment), take a cut of the revenue, and will give you the game engine to go nuts with for $5000 (for the pro version) or FREE for the non-pro version. Those are numbers that are doable, my friends.
I've been doing some research, and it is indeed the perfect platform for MO. We're going to do it- it's finally going to happen.