The process has been a learning experience for everyone, including Perry. "I really didn't know how horribly unclear my statements are," he says. "When you get a lot of people reading them, you soon find out that just about everything you write is ambiguous. ... We had to restart some stages, as people would always test the limit. So if I said, 'I need the image in 640x480 pixels, [and] we will choose the best one,' then someone would send an entire video in a 640x480 GIF file, to try to give their idea an edge over the static ones. ... To solve [that problem] we post [our statements] to the moderators' area and let them take a read, spot the gaps and then we go live."
After five months work, where does the project stand? A glance through the official wiki reveals the details: Players will race fantastical creatures as "mounts," the graphical style is designed to resemble anime, different racetracks will be ordered into "towns" in a pseudo-RPG manner, and there are plans to build interactive, destructible environments. In a first pass, it's an ambitious racing take on the Pokémon concept. Look a bit deeper, though, and you'll spot some totally new mechanics. Perry's favorite is "the idea of having commentators in real-time. ... You can choose to watch a race and comment out aloud, so we all hear you, like you're on television. ... It's exactly the kind of idea we would never normally come up with ... but that's the point."
Perry's big idea has taken some serious organization to even get that far. With hundreds of threads and ideas being generated, the forum created a mass of information. "The big risk (which plenty of people assumed would be the case) [was] that by having non-professional designers involved in the game [it] would make it rubbish. So far we've found it to be the exact opposite; we are literally turning ideas away as there's so many of them." The next stage planned is to prototype the game and then offer it to the community for feedback.
The cynical part of me reads the design document and sees a generic, over-complicated idea, a mess of everyone's favorite otaku-ish concepts with no restraint, realism or unified vision. But my inner child can't help but be excited at the promise of a sprawling, exciting fantasy world where only your skill and trusty mount stand between death and glory. "It's going to have a pretty immediate audience," says Perry, "as it's based on breeding, racing [and] fighting the mounts you would see in games like World of Warcraft."
Whether the game itself finds an audience is next to irrelevant. What matters here is Perry has tapped into people's pent-up desire to be involved in what they play. As spiraling budgets push price tags upward of $60, there is definitely merit in the idea of a developer who has the guts to step back, let the players help build the game and give it to them for free. This may be the first community-driven game, but if the enthusiastic response is anything to go by, it won't be the last.
Stuart Young is a freelance contributor to The Escapist.
