A Guide to Getting Lost

Title screen
Ping's opening line: Ping, the AI guide on your phone, suggests a ticket page.
Compare sources: Searching the ticket site's address shows it was registered three days ago, and it isn't the ferry company's site.
Page source: Viewing the restaurant's page source reveals a hidden note telling AI assistants the market is closed.
Town map: Search results show up on the map. The free Wi-Fi Ping suggested isn't at any of the city's hotspots.
Debrief: The ending shows each thing Ping told you, what you did, and the records that proved what was true.

Inspiration

We’ve seen firsthand how people can make everyday decisions based on confident but false AI answers, with consequences for their time, money, or privacy. We’ve also seen that cybersecurity is a group effort: people can help each other by noticing problems and sharing evidence. We wanted to bring those experiences together with our love of cozy indie games. Lantern Bay gives players a town to explore and a community of sources to learn from as they decide whether to trust Ping.

What it does

In A Guide to Getting Lost, players have one night to get dinner, see a concert, and catch the last ferry home. Ping, their AI guide, makes suggestions along the way. Two lead toward cybersecurity risks, while one is accurate. Players search a town archive, compare sources, dates, and addresses, and make decisions before time runs out. Their choices affect the ending and a final evidence recap.

How we built it

We built the game with React, TypeScript, Vite, and CSS. Scenes and archive records are written in JSON, and a game engine tracks time, choices, and outcomes. Typesense powers the archive search, including filters, highlighted matches, and results placed on the town map. The web app is hosted on Vultr, and we built a custom domain with GoDaddy.

Challenges we ran into

We had to make clues readable in a pixel-art game without telling players which source to trust. We also had to balance the clock: searching needed to matter, but players still needed enough time to investigate. Keeping the story, search results, and different endings consistent took several revisions.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

We completed a playable route with a phishing page, a manipulated restaurant listing, a fake Wi-Fi network, and one true claim from Ping. The archive is part of gameplay rather than a separate information page, and the recap connects each decision to the evidence behind it.

What we learned

We learned how hard it is to make an educational game that is both engaging and useful. We had to balance the story, time pressure, difficulty, and accuracy of each security lesson. When a clue was too obvious, there was no mystery; when it was too subtle, players had no reason to investigate. We revised the scenes and evidence together to make learning part of the decisions players make.

What's next for A Guide to Getting Lost

We want to add more clickable clues and animation, let players recover from mistakes such as buying a fake ticket, and expand Lantern Bay with more routes. Longer term, we’d like Ping to respond to the evidence players find and give educators a way to create their own scenarios.