never heard of it and no clue how would it turns out it would be interesting if it has a pme where you could make levels, story, units and bosses.
It would definitely not work at all without serious coordination. Balancing is hard for ONE person to get right let alone a huge group of people most of which let’s be honest consist of people who haven’t worked on a full scale hack before.
We’ve had telephone hacks before which is essentially what you’re laying down but with a much much smaller team and much much more coordination. Many telephone hacks have failed in the past due to a lack of one of these things.
All in all it would be a miracle if a full custom hack pme with everything being chosen by a large group of disconnected people would be seen to completion, let alone be actually fun and challenging to play.
5 Likes
The old community hacks sort of worked like a PME in that initial PCs and maybe some setting details were thrown in by random punters, but realistically if you’re going to design a game at all tightly then those initial designs have to eat shit at some point to a tighter group of designers. All but around eight people who contributed proper nouns to Do5 fucked off - and those submissions were treated as very much disposable - and as far as I understand it, Blazer was pretty much sole designer over TLP after that initial phase of character submission. I would also say that the community hack aspect was a factor that weakened both hacks. It’s an incentive to get a bunch of people to show up that might just have relevant skills, not really a basis for coherent game design.
3 Likes