Unravel Quest | Inaugural Experience
How We Built Our First Unravel quest of a Love Story on a Wall
A local artist's mural. A robot love story. The first steps towards our vision for Unravel. Here is how our first experience came to life.
The Origin
Every Story Has a First Chapter
Unravel was an idea that evolved over the years, ultimately our goal for it was to bring people outdoors, start quests with friends or people around, play together and at the same time explore the city they were in!
The vision is huge, whether people would actually be keen on on-location Augmented Reality adventures, what kind of format would people prefer, there were many other questions we wanted answers to.
What better way than to build and put our work into the wild and let the players tell us.
We took our first step with an Augmented Reality platform we were already very familiar with and that we already had a sizeable following, TikTok.
We chose a beautiful mural along Punggol Waterway depicting a love story called "The Acccident", painted by local artist Sonny Liew, which stretched across a wall in a way that gave our interactive experience a natural stage.
Strategic Decisions
What We Wanted for our First Steps
We wanted our first location for the experience to already be an iconic contained space that naturally attracts attention. Somewhere that anyone could conveniently access. Something that we could bring to life and enhance the experience for visitors.
The "Accident" mural has been a local landmark and is well loved by Punggol's residents, anyone running along Punggol Waterway Park would definitely remember running past and pausing to admire this work! The simple yet relatable love story told about two of the robots is based on a lovely poem of the same name.
We thought it was the perfect piece of art to bring a touch of AR magic and unravel a brand new experience.
By using TikTok, we leveraged a platform people are familiar with that had potential of users sharing gameplay videos which in-turn could drive awareness to the the experience. The tradeoff was locking out non-users or people who could not physically travel to the mural, but for a first-run learning experience, a platform that we could swiftly prototype and bring our ideas to our players was key.
The Narrative Journey
Four Acts, One Confession
The experience was built as a sequential journey where players collected Hearts from various robotic characters to help the Blue robot with their confession of love. Each interaction is inspired and designed to fit naturally ontop of each robot.
Players see several rings on top of a robot's belly. On these rings are cryptic symbols representing a calendar. By dialing in the current date, the belly opens up giving a heart to the player.
A code breaking puzzle where the buttons on the robot's body acts as the keypad. Cracking the code (which is different for every playthrough) reveals the second Heart.
A mural-wide treasure hunt. Players must scan and frame specific symbols, rewarding close observation of the artwork. Finding all the symbols reveals the third heart.
The Blue Robot receives the three collected Hearts. A messaging-style text conversation reveals the answer to the confession of love.
The Puzzles
Making Art Interactive
The Time Turner required today's date. This prevented spoilers from spreading in group chats, as the answer was only valid for 24 hours.
Code Breaker used visual feedback (right/wrong indicators) to make the AR interaction feel physical and responsive to input.
Symbol Hunt forced players to move their feet and scan the mural, turning the entire wall into a digital playground.
Retrospective
What We Learned
The players who stayed the longest were families. The mix of augmented reality and puzzle solving made it especially engaging for families playing together. We also learned that some puzzles ran a bit difficult for non-gamers / younger audiences, and some level of faciliation was needed. We thought that this could have been solved by some in-game hints/tutorials. These insights we gathered from Robolove were invaluable, and we believe they will help us in our subsequent quests.