UNSW Quest

Inspiration

There are plenty of corners and other rooms, that are undiscovered and underused.We built a game to connect people and explore these places together in a fun way.With geocaching features and photo integrations.

What it does

UNSW Quest is a mobile web based scavenger hunt for the UNSW Kensington campus. A host shows a kickoff QR; players scan it with their phone camera, type a name, and they're in.

From there they race through a sequence of puzzles tied to real places: unscramble an anagram, solve a riddle that points to a specific building, walk there, find a physical geocache code (QR or printed), punch it in, and move on. Optional selfie steps let players build memories of the run.

Everyone in the game sees a live leader board, so the room watches names climb as people finish.

How we built it

Frontend: Next.js 16 App Router + React 19, Tailwind, shadcn/ui.
Backend: Supabase Postgres for the data model (hunts, puzzles, games, players, puzzle_progress), Edge Functions for puzzle validation, Storage for selfie uploads, and Realtime for the live leaderboard channel.
Identity: Kahoot-style. A proxy.ts middleware drops a quest_device_id UUID cookie on first visit. RPCs take p_user_id directly.
QR + camera: in-page QR scanner for geocache codes plus getUserMedia for the selfie step.

Challenges we ran into

Killing auth. The repo started with Supabase magic-link auth and a team model from PRD v1. Mid hackathon, we realised it was too much friction for a demo and user experience
Playing and getting user feedback User feedback said our clues where too difficult and didn't really encourage collaboration
Building the map of unsw. The map feature and caroling the using 4 squares and devsoc endpoints.

What's next for UNSW Quest

Dynamic game creation — a host UI so any society can spin up their own hunt without us hardcoding a game ID.
Fog-of-war campus map — opt-in navigator.geolocation that reveals UNSW like a Zelda map as you walk it; persistent per player, so "how much of UNSW have I uncovered?"
More content. The seed riddles cover the obvious landmarks; we want the to explain to more niche locations
Society creator tools — let UNSW clubs build, brand, and run their own hunts for recruitment week.