Well, when playing Sentinels for a while, with the same heroes, and the same villains, some folks feel a bit burned out on doing the same thing. And with the 2nd expansion soon in hand, we'll be able to get our energy back. While in the mean time, me and my friends have been developing Video game-themed decks. As the usual DM, I'm in the mest of creating a Villain Deck, from scratch, with it's own playstyle, that goes along with the Villain, who's based off of a popular videogame character. My friends are each creating their own Hero deck, from different generes, again, with their own playstyles and powers. I'm just about half way done with the concept and developing, all there is left is to playtest with my friends, and will soon showcase our efforts in the future. It's fan-made, so not trying to claim original characters, just using them as themes. Hopefully, it works out great, and will give folks something interesting to try if they want.
Cool. There are a bunch of fan-made heroes and villains on the SotM Boardgame Geek page too, if you're looking for something new. Seems like most of them get posted before playtesting rather than after, though, so your mileage may vary.
Your timing is good, Irish Bear. The upcoming "Create A Villain Contest" could be just what you're looking for.
http://sentinelsofthemultiverse.com/blog/2012/08/create-villain-contest
Well, judging by their current nemesis pairs, the villains will be the nemeses for Visionary, Unity, Absolute Zero, and Bunker...
The remaining heroes will be nemeses for Plague Rat (Chrono-Ranger) and Omnitron.
Unless, of course, they release another promo hero and villain.
So you probably shouldn't take that into consideration, but you might.
Also, are we just designing the character itself, or are we coming up with its general playstyle and gameplay too?
Well each villain has his own rules, so for sure it is worth throwing in your gameplay ideas.
I have one or two I might submit and if I had the time I would so some alternates for the main characters...
Hopefully the upcoming expansion will have several alternate versions of the heroes and villains, it is the best expansion for past, future and "elseworld" verisons of the heroes.
I would guess that the most important things to nail down for your villain would be their overall style and feeling, how they fit into the existing SotM lore, and maybe most importantly, what their flip mechanic will be. Remember, it's very important to Christopher that every villain have a unique and fun flip mechanic.
And if you haven't checked out my templates you probably should, especially if you have Adobe Illustrator. A great way to make the cards look official or to make them still fit in while playtesting.
http://sentinelsofthemultiverse.com/forum/topic/custom-card-templates
It's kind of the point to post them before or during early playtesting, to get feedback on them so they can get balanced out, I know it helped my first hero a lot, but some do seem to be less thought out than others. Plus I tend to post update files so that when I do change mine it's easy to print off the changed cards.
That's a good point. Maybe I should post up my custom environments on BGG to get some more eyeballs on them.