In Brief:
- Nexpace published interviews on July 30 with the creators of the five top-winning games from Season 1 of MapleStory Vibe Camp. None of them has worked in the game industry.
- The three-week jam produced 693 games, 435 of them now live, built with Verse8’s AI tools inside MSU Space using official MapleStory assets.
- 230 games cleared the quality bar and shared $59,580 in NXPC. The five Campfire winners took the equivalent of $3,000 apiece.
Nexpace published interviews on July 30 with the creators of the five games that won the top category of MapleStory Vibe Camp, and not one of them has worked in the game industry.
The Campfire winners were Alphabet Defense, Helena Survivor, Night Lord Survivors, REVENANCE and Say Cheese, Yeti! Each creator received the equivalent of $3,000 in NXPC.
They didn't come with game dev experience. They came with 23+ years of MapleStory memories.
One built during her baby's nap times. Another built his whole game around the mechanics every Mapler knows.
Here's what five players did with it.
Three of the five live in South Korea. The others are in Malaysia and Germany.
None of them picked a genre close to the source material. The five entries cover tower defense, survival shooters, dark fantasy action and casual time attack.
Who built them
The creator of Alphabet Defense had no formal training in programming or design and took the idea from drawing cards in a TCG.
Helena Survivor was its creator’s first game. The builder behind Night Lord Survivors works in web3 media and was on a second project. REVENANCE came from a backend developer who had never touched game code.
Say Cheese, Yeti! was made by a former QA tester during childcare, in time carved out of her child’s naps and her own sleep.
Two of the winners described designing around what the asset library gave them. The REVENANCE creator said the monsters arrived complete with animations and attack and death motions, which pushed them to treat monsters as gameplay resources rather than obstacles. The game is built around an enemy possession concept.
Night Lord Survivors took a different hook. Its creator built the game around the moment of equipment destruction in Star Force enhancement.
Nexpace’s internal survey found 37% of Season 1 participants had never written a line of code before signing up.
The numbers
Vibe Camp ran June 8 to June 29, co-hosted by Nexpace and Verse8. Builders described games in plain language inside MSU Space, and the AI implemented them from a library of MapleStory characters, monsters, backgrounds and music.
Verse8 counted 693 submissions across the three weeks, an average of 33 a day. Of those, 435 passed review and went live.
Nexpace said 341,253 unique official MSU assets were pulled into projects, generating 1.4 million asset-to-project connections, or an average of 434 assets per project.
Some 29,015 people from 114 countries played the games 88,037 times. Re-visit rates on the top-performing entries ran from 35% to 70%.
How the winners were picked
Scoring was split evenly between an internal evaluation on originality, fun and quality, and a community vote. Voting ran July 8 to 17. Final results came on the 22nd.
The advertised prize pool was $60,000 in NXPC, roughly 90 million won. In the end, 230 games cleared the quality threshold and shared $59,580 across several categories.
Fifty games took Top Traffic prizes of $500 each based on logged play counts. All 230 qualifying games drew rewards of varying size under the True Camper program, and recipients have to complete identity verification to claim them.
The three headline categories were mutually exclusive. A single submission could win Campfire, Base Camp or Summoner, but not more than one.
What the winners get beyond tokens
Nexpace attached a support package it calls the Winner’s Stack, covering game design consulting, business model design and engineering mentorship.
It also includes publishing management for App Store, Google Play and Steam launches, plus joint marketing through MapleStory channels.
Background
The jam opened alongside MSU Space as part of MSU 2.0, Nexpace’s push to turn MapleStory Universe from a single game into a platform. Nexpace is Nexon’s blockchain subsidiary.
Building continued after the deadline. Nexpace counts 1,250 active builders working on 2,998 projects, with free Verse8 credits handed out through its MSU Builder program.
The Say Cheese, Yeti! creator credited making the deadline at all to one decision: cutting the scope down to what was realistically achievable.
