Once Upon a Journey

Once Upon a Journey is more than a fairy-tale game. It turns storytelling into a shared social deduction experience, where players uncover secrets, debate their choices, and shape the adventure together.

What Inspired Us

Our project was inspired by the goal of fostering meaningful human connections through both social deduction gameplay and anonymous reflection.

Sometimes, people hesitate to express their real opinions because they worry about how others might react. This hesitation can create distance between people and prevent them from truly understanding one another. We wanted to help reduce these concerns and make people more comfortable sharing what they really think.

We also wanted to combine a familiar fairy-tale adventure with social deduction. Instead of simply asking players to read a story or solve a puzzle, we were inspired to create an interactive experience. We wanted players to become active participants who influence how the story unfolds through their discussions, judgments, and votes.

How We Built Our Project

Our project goes beyond a concept or static website by bringing together multiple interactive features to create a complete user experience.

We built a structured gameplay flow involving player setup, role assignment, private clues, discussion, voting, story progression, and the final reveal. We also incorporated additional interactive features, including optional camera-based gesture recognition, which allows players to interact with the experience in a different way.

To facilitate meaningful discussion, we utilized API integration and AI centrality to build the Anonymous Reflections and Discussion feature. We structured the process in specific stages:

Four participants each submit one anonymous reflection.
At the same time, AI generates six discussion prompts from different perspectives, resulting in ten initial posts in total.
Once all submissions and AI-generated prompts are ready, all ten initial posts are published simultaneously without displaying author identities.

This simultaneous publication reduces speculation about authorship and minimizes the influence of submission order. Participants can then voluntarily respond to posts that interest them, with their responses remaining hidden from other participants until the response period ends.

Challenges We Faced

One of the main challenges was rethinking how people share and discuss experiences, rather than simply adding AI to a social platform. We had to focus on how to create an environment where people feel more comfortable sharing their thoughts and encountering perspectives different from their own.

We faced the challenge of implementing Privacy by Design. Anonymous expression and staged publication had to be built into the core interaction process rather than offered as optional extras.

During gameplay, we also had to carefully balance hidden identities and asymmetric information to create suspense and surprise. Players do not know who the hidden Villain is, and they cannot be certain whether other players' information and claims are trustworthy. We had to ensure that the group's decisions could lead to unexpected or unfavorable outcomes, forcing players to reconsider their previous assumptions and strategies.

What We Learned

We learned that a complete experience is more than a collection of individual features. Each component serves a purpose within a larger interaction flow.

We discovered that AI can do much more than just generate content as it supports multiple stages of the anonymous discussion process. AI does not aim to replace genuine human expression. Instead, AI-generated responses can make it harder for participants to infer who originally wrote a particular comment, helping protect anonymity and reduce the social pressure associated with expressing personal opinions. When human responses are insufficient, AI can provide supplementary responses to encourage further discussion.

Through the gameplay mechanics, we learned that the game's entertainment value comes directly from social interaction and uncertainty. Players must communicate, reason together, and collaborate to advance the story rather than completing tasks independently. By making players active participants in both the story and the social deduction process, the game creates highly replayable experiences driven by meaningful conversations, trust, deception, and collaborative decision-making.