Nexpace and Verse8 are celebrating the successful conclusion of their first three-week MapleStory Vibe Camp, which resulted in;
- 693 games submitted,
- 435 games screened for content standards and brand safety and now playable,
- 29,015 players,
- 88,037 play sessions, and
- 213,818 AI prompts submitted to Verse8.
The scale of the project is something Nexpace highlights, also pointing out that this wasn’t a normal hackathon but one in which builders created their games using official MapleStory IP.
It says 341,253 unique official MSU assets were used, generating a total of 1.4 million uses (what it calls asset-to-project connections), with an average of 434 assets per project.
“These were not generic games with a MapleStory logo attached. They were assembled from the IP’s own monsters, skills, maps, NPCs, and sound, in combinations the original game never shipped,” its Medium post says.
“This is where the IP provides a moat no generic license library can replicate. Each of these builders spent years inside this world before they ever opened a build tool.
“The camp’s output reflected that deep experience: submissions reached into real-time strategy, trading card games, visual novels, collection RPGs, auto-battlers, idle RPGs, dungeon crawlers, tycoon sims, and story-driven adventures. Several of these are genres MapleStory has never officially entered in 23 years.
“When the people who hold the memories get the means of production, the IP grows in directions its owner would not have planned, and that is exactly the point of opening our ecosystem.”
As part of Nexpace’s MapleStory Universe concept, called MSU 2.0, users can still build new games even though the official hackathon period is over with 1,250 active builders post-Vibe Camp, working on 2,998 projects.
The games are available to play at MSU Space, and community voting is open.