2006-2007 Collaboration Game Overview from a Host’s Point of View
A feature by TwinHamster
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I can remember browsing through the hilariously excellent threads found in the Walrus Land forums when I stumbled upon a few Roulette comics. The idea was that a host would draw a single comic panel and pass it onto two teams. Team members would only be able to view the immediately preceding panel to base their own on, and when each team finished all of its panels, a damn good comic was born. I thought about this process for a while and wondered…if this same idea were to be applied to game making, would a damn good game be produced? This was the birth of the Collaboration Game.

Step 1: Attracting collaborators
In order for this to succeed, I would need a handful of people to participate in this. So I created a basic little list of rules and was off to CastleParadox. I almost immediately ran into a few problems.
In an attempt not to scare anybody off, I needed to comply with everybody’s wishes: Longer time limits, how to set up the chapters, how many new graphics were needed per chapter, and such. After a day of debating, the rules were set. After a week, seven collaborators were signed up and we were ready to go.

Step 2: Starting the series
Truthfully, I wanted to take advantage of making the first chapter of the series, so I pretended to tweak the rules for a month while I was actually just extending my own time in working on a chapter. And when I finished, I had created the most generic introduction possible:

Martin, brown-haired son of a shopkeeper, wishes to learn magic, so he begins an epic quest which will possibly result in his saving the world. Superb!

By the time I informed the collaborators that the project had begun, half of the collaborators had forgotten all about it. After a few turn trades, I figured we would be able to begin.

Step 3: It’s up to God now
First up to continue the series was OnlyOneInAll. After a week, OnlyOneInAll informed me that he needed a slight time extension, because he had a tough time working and attending college classes, so I cut him some slack. After another week, he told me that his chapter was done, but really short. Refusing to shame himself in releasing a pathetic version of a potentially great chapter, OOIA decided to simply give the next collaborator and I a short summary of the chapter:

Martin was transported to a realm of darkness after falling into a wormhole in the previous chapter. In this evil realm, he meets up with his five-eyed arch-nemesis, Pentima, and becomes all emo as he loses all hope in life.

Well, OOIA confused me a little bit with his reply, so I confronted Rimudora about what the hell just happened. Apparently, Rimudora didn’t get anything but a blurb either, so I decided to bend the rules a little by giving him a copy of chapter one to get to know the basics of the main character. I was getting pretty disappointed in the progress of the series, but my spirits were lifted as Rimudora sent me a copy of Chapter 3:

Martin falls through another wormhole and finally reaches Haravan’s School of Magic, except in the future. Here, Martin gains the companionship of two allies that stick with him throughout the rest of his adventure: Sidney and Nika. Martin then discovers that his future self is a complete dick head who is nothing more than a toady of…It was either Hyklos or Septima…Well, both of them had over five eyes and were evil. After discovering that Haravan has been destroyed, Martin decides that it is his destiny to fix everything.

With high hopes of being able to create this game on schedule, I sent the game straight to JSH.

After going on a vacation and forgetting all about this project for two or three weeks, I checked in on JSH. Apparently, he did a little bit of work, but was too disappointed in it to consider it a chapter. Even worse, he told me that he decided to quit his OHRing career. (This happened right before his little “Ban-Me” Desperation move.) To this day, I still think that it was somehow my fault that JSH decided to permanently leave OHR land. Well, another one bit the dust…fortunately, just around this time; two new members decided that they also wanted to join. We now had RedMaverickZero and The_Dude to add to the roster. Meanwhile, chapter 4 was now in the hands of PHC.

At last, a chapter that came out flawlessly. There were the scheduled two weeks of work, and then an extra week to polish it up. In the end, PHC created the masterpiece known as Chapter 4:

Completely deserting his dream of becoming a magician, Martin dons some sort of gun and decides that justice must be brought to the surface of the world by shooting all of the bad guys that Hyklos controls.

More than any other chapters, including my own, Rimudora’s and PHC’s chapters clearly paved the way for the rest of the project.

Hoping to get the project back on a hot streak, I PM-ed the file to Moogle and waited for his renowned genius to spit something out.

After two weeks of waiting, I asked Moogle about the condition of his chapter. He reported that it was fine, but he was waiting on RedMaverickZero to finish up the graphics for the game. I found this a little amusing, because the thought of actual collaboration between people had never occurred to me. I would like to encourage this aspect of the project for a future version, although I fear that it might get a bit messy. After a time extension, I was presented with a spiffy little side-scroller:

After jumping and shooting some bad mofos, Martin’s crew manages to penetrate the bad guys’ base.

This project was indeed on a hot streak. Nearing the project’s conclusion, The_Dude was next in line.

From what I read from The_Dude’s PM responses, he didn’t read anything from the introductory thread except that this was a team effort. I had to explain to him that he was supposed to make his chapter as a separate .RPG file, sent him the previous chapter and its scripts, and told him that he was allowed to make his chapter in any fashion that he wanted. Although a tad bit annoying, The_Dude managed to come through for the project, so I sighed in relief.

In this chapter, Martin and friends leave the base to go through some woods and decide that they have to find a key to enter a maze. Now, there is apparently already a resistance against Hyklos that Martin simply joined instead of led, so it seems that the primary objective of the mission was actually to get the key to save the leader of the resistance, Stoll. Then some mysterious force tells Martin that he has to go back to the base.

At last, it was time to make the final chapter of the game.

Now, after a brief exchange of words ala AIM, I allowed RMZ to play every chapter to make as good as a finale as possible, including every bit of plot that was skipped over in the next chapter. I also agreed to give RMZ an entire month to work on his chapter. When I finally checked in on him, he had alerted me that another week was needed and that his game’s content already added up to 2-3 hours. I was speechlessly amazed. In a month of work, the length of the entire series had doubled. After a few more days of waiting, RMZ released chapter seven, and the series was complete:

Martin ventures back into the base to find the leader, but an entirely new story ensues…

Step 4: Twiddling our thumbs
By the time RMZ had finished his chapter, I looked back at the rest of the chapters and realized that they were all a bit on the rough side. I decided to give every collaborator a month to polish his respective chapter. After two days of waiting, I simply compiled everything together and released the first draft of the Collaboration Game. As of this moment, I am still waiting for the collaborators to send me the final versions of their chapters so that I can release a final version of the project.

All in all, I considered this to be a success. We were able to do something that previous members of the community failed to do. We were able to work together and make…something. Do I consider this to be a damn good game? Hell, yeah. The plot twists, the evolution of the main character, the differing/clashing game-making styles all make this game something great.

I would enjoy another session of this collaboration, but certainly not as a host. It was way too nerve wracking for my liking. And from what I heard from the other collaborators, they didn’t exactly want to collaborate again anytime soon either. Perhaps during the summer, when everybody’s bored, a new collaboration project will be born.