02 / An engine for team and city quests
LookUP.
A way to build games in which teams explore a city, solve tasks and progress through codes, hints and time.
Why I started it
LookUP grew from my interest in city quests: a familiar street suddenly becomes a game board. But every new game needs a route, tasks, hints, codes and rules. I want to separate the story of a particular quest from the engine that moves teams through it.
A team gets a starting point, works through levels, finds answers in the real world and enters codes. If they get stuck, they can take a hint with a time penalty. The organiser needs a place to prepare levels, watch progress and understand what happened in each session.
What the engine does
The local prototype uses Flask and SQLite. It has foundations for teams, roles, levels and an admin view. I am building it for small live games: the organiser’s and players’ experience needs to make sense before a broader platform does.
Game rules are separate from the text of an individual quest. Code validation, level progression, hints, penalties and a progress log should work across different stories. The design also accounts for multiple open devices within a team so that concurrent sessions do not corrupt game state.
- A route consists of sequential levels
- Codes confirm completed tasks
- Hints can add time penalties
- The organiser can inspect progress and statistics
Current state and next experiment
A local MVP runs and its basic scenarios can be explored on a computer. It is not yet a public service: creating a new game easily, multi-user reliability and hosting need more work.
What comes next
Make level editing simple enough to build a new quest without manual setup, run a real game with several teams and then prepare deployment. A live playtest matters more than a long admin feature list.
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