On the 30th, NEXPACE, a blockchain subsidiary of Nexon, released interviews with the creators of the five top-winning games from Season 1 of 'MapleStory Vaiv Camp,' a game development competition that opened the MapleStory intellectual property (IP) to the public. All five winners were MapleStory players with no professional game industry experience, and three of them were from South Korea.

In the interviews, NEXPACE introduced the five winners of the top 'The Campfire' category: 'Alphabet Defense,' 'Helena Survivor,' 'Night Lord Survivors,' 'REVENANCE,' and 'Say Cheese, Yeti.'

The creators, residing in Malaysia, Germany, and South Korea, chose genres distinct from the original game, including tower defense, survival shooters, dark fantasy action, and casual time-attack games. NEXPACE explained that the winners were selected through a combination of internal qualitative evaluation and community voting. The community vote took place from July 8 to 17, and the final results were announced on the 22nd.

The winners' backgrounds were far from professional development. △The creator of 'Alphabet Defense' had no formal training in programming or design and drew inspiration from drawing cards in a TCG. △'Helena Survivor' was the creator's first-ever game. △The creator of 'Night Lord Survivors' works in Web3 media and was on their second project. △The creator of 'REVENANCE' was a backend developer but had never worked with game code. △The creator of 'Say Cheese, Yeti!' is a former QA tester who developed the game during childcare, using time saved from their own sleep and the child's nap time; they credited their ability to meet the deadline to narrowing the scope to what was realistically achievable.

NEXPACE revealed that according to their internal survey, 37% of Season one participants had never written a single line of code before joining the camp.

Vaiv Camp was the first large-scale external event for 'MSU 2,' an expansion plan unveiled by NEXPACE on the first anniversary of the MapleStory Universe (MSU) official service. It was held for three weeks from June 8 to 29 on 'MSU Space,' a builder hub built in collaboration with the AI game development platform Verse8. Participants created games by combining official assets—such as MapleStory characters, monsters, items, backgrounds, and sounds—using natural language prompts. The prize pool was set at $60k worth of the virtual asset NXPC.

Over the three weeks, 693 games were created, averaging 33 per day, with 435 of them passing review to go live. According to NEXPACE, 29015 people from 114 countries played these games 88037 times, with top-tier games seeing re-visit rates ranging from 35% to as high as 70%. Builders integrated over 340k official assets into their projects and issued more than 213k cumulative build instructions to the generative AI.

The games spanned over 15 genres, including casual, arcade, RPG, strategy, and puzzle, and even included genres that MapleStory has not officially covered in its 23-year history, such as real-time strategy (RTS), TCG, idle RPG, and tycoon simulation. NEXPACE stated that even after the prize distribution, 1250 builders were working on a cumulative total of approximately 3k projects as of early July.

A common theme among the winning entries was the creative adaptation of the original game's experience. △The creator of 'REVENANCE' noted that seeing the asset library fully stocked with monsters complete with animations and attack/death motions led them to treat monsters as gameplay resources rather than mere obstacles. △The creator of 'Night Lord Survivors' borrowed the moment of equipment destruction from Star Force enhancement failures, implementing a mechanic where broken equipment leaves behind shards that can be collected to provide protection. △'Say Cheese, Yeti!' incorporated the setting from a 10th-anniversary quest where Pepe rides on Yeti's head for guidance; the creator mentioned that they had to manually fuse the assets themselves as they could not find an official asset of that specific combination.

NEXPACE stated that it is exploring ways to promote the Season 1 winning entries to a wider audience beyond its own channels and added that Season 2 will be announced in the near future.