Niantic (video game/AR platform company responsible for IP such as Pokemon Go, Pikmin Bloom, and Ingress) partnered with the world's leading immersive theatre company Punchdrunk (Sleep No More, The Burnt City) to create a cutting edge new mobile game designed to blur the lines between reality and fiction through immersive storytelling, on-the-street interactivity, and social storytelling.

I joined the project to design the digital ecosystem for the community, to connect gameplay, worldbuilding, and community through compelling online content and experiences.

See below.

From the beginning, the digital extension of the game was designed to be experiential, exploratory, and provide insight into the history, lore, and theology of the game's central entity, The Trust.

Early concepts included an unearthed website from the 1990s for players to explore as well as an Instagram account of a tarot reader who used the game's core mechanic — cards — to expose more about the organization and the fate of new initiates. Once players "proved themselves" to the tarot reader, they were granted access into a secret Discord channel featuring a hangman game which, once decoded, was another message for the players.

Further iterations on these experiences elaborated on the web puzzles, secret social accounts, and Discord games with a more cohesive and connective storytelling encapsulated in an Alternate Reality Game titled The Depot.

The Depot was an Alternate Reality Game (ARG) that leveraged social community platforms (Discord/Niantic Social), social profiles, websites, and object-based storytelling.

The concept for the Depot was a sub-group within the secret society that could receive objects from The Lowlands (underworld) with messages from unsettled shade spirits. Players, with these messages, had to finish the unfinished business of the spirits to put them to rest and establish peace in the Lowlands.

To access The Depot, players had to play an "I spy" game and then perform missions to receive a specialized object.