Riot Games approached Jack Morton with the desire to make an event of theirs into an interactive experience across the entire city of Singapore. So I led a team to pitch/prototype, Mystery in Singapore. An ARG that centered it’s narrative around uncovering a cloak and dagger, somewhat goofy, travel agency called, Talaria Trips. 4,000 players would have daily quests to do as they explore the real life city while also solving digital riddles on their phones.

To design this game I led the team to craft the game around 5 player personas: The Completionist, The Narrative Lover, The Competitive Player, The Casual Player, and The Chaotic Player. These player types allowed us to create and prototype various digital puzzles, large scale interactive quests, and loose game loops which allowed players enter and exit at any time.

However, with these player types all playing the game at the same time over the course of 5 days, things were going to get messy. Players would be able to share information or feign interest to cheat, so we needed smart systems to work with/against cheating, reward committed players, and track player progress / offer quests to different kinds of players.

Game Loops

Pictured are some of the game loops from the designs we created. There is a main quest loop and a side quest loop. The main quest loop was very easy to find and navigate through, but the side quests we wanted to contain most of the fun juicy lore. So, as offshoots from the main quests there would be side quests which would deepen the lore and reward the player with more information about what was goin’ on with Talaria Trips. You can see in other systems pictured how the game rewards and encourages players interested in the narrative.

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Quest Loops

There were two main types of quest types designed for the game. These quest structures gave us a great foundational base to create and design quests easily and quickly knowing that they would be fun. This effectively solved part of our our scope problem for creating quests for all 4,000 players. Both of these quest types were tested and played extensively.

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Anti-Cheat System

Cheating was a massive concern as players could easily exchange information and codes for quests on channels, effectively ruining the experience. So, I came up with some solutions. These solutions wouldn’t SOLVE the problem but they would deter it. A huge design lesson was that I had to design knowing cheating would happen, so I focused on making the actual experience of exploring the narrative of the game and the city itself more rewarding and more fun than inputting the final code. (this can also be seen in our system for rewarding players who are very interested in the narrative)

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Player Interest / Reward System

This system was created to serve all players who were interested in the narrative in any capacity. The system also is designed to encourage more players to jump down the rabbit hole and get fully sucked into the “reality” of the game. This can also allow players who are typically not interested in the narrative to explore the deeper parts of the game, getting more enjoyment out of it.

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Cancellation

Due to covid issues in Singapore and creative struggles in Jack Morton leadership, our budget was reallocated and we moved onto another project. Even though we had several prototyped fun quests and a mobile build already working our work wasn’t used. This was certainly a bummer as even the folks at Riot were excited to work with us more, however it was an invaluable lesson that even if you do a great job consulting you can’t convince someone who has already made up their mind.