Inspiration
Growing up, we heard a lot of fairy tales in some form or the other. Either from grandparents telling us stories, or discovering them through comics and storybooks. As we grew and learned more about other cultures, something interesting stuck out to us: the many common elements in fairy tales across the world.
Cinderella, for example, isn't the only story about a girl who receives magical help and is recognized through a lost item. Similar stories exist in Korea, China, and other parts of the world, each with its own characters, traditions, and meaning.
That made us wonder: What if we could travel across the world through stories instead of countries?
We wanted to create something that made cultural discovery feel less like reading an article and more like an experience you could actually explore. More importantly, we wanted people to realize that even when we grow up thousands of miles apart, there are parts of our stories that connect us.
What it does
The Golden Thread is an interactive fairytale exploration game built around a 3D globe.
Players begin by opening an enchanted storybook that takes them into a world of traditional stories from different cultures. Each glowing location represents a fairytale, and selecting one opens an illustrated book where they can learn about it.
But instead of simply reading stories, players use shared narrative motifs, such as magical assistance, transformation, or recognition through an object, to travel between them.
In Solo Quest, players are given a destination and challenged to reach it by connecting stories in as few moves as possible.
In Shared Journey, two people can choose stories that are meaningful to them and explore the connections between them. The idea is to make storytelling a way for people to learn something about each other's cultures and experiences.
We also included a way to search for and discover stories beyond the playable collection, so the experience doesn't have to end when the game does.
How we built it
Challenges we ran into
One of our biggest challenges was figuring out how to turn a simple idea into an actual game.
Initially, we just wanted people to click on a country and discover similar fairytales. But as we worked on it, we realized that while it was interesting, there wasn't much reason for someone to keep exploring.
That's when we started experimenting with the idea of traveling between stories through shared motifs. It gave players a goal, but it also introduced new challenges, especially making sure the connections were meaningful and that players could actually reach their destinations.
Another challenge was getting the visual experience right. We wanted the book to feel like a real enchanted object and the globe to feel immersive, but our early versions looked flatter and less polished than we imagined. We spent a lot of time adjusting animations, layout, typography, and the way the storybooks opened.
We also had to be careful about cultural accuracy. Just because two stories share a theme doesn't mean they're the same story or that one came from the other. Finding a way to show both their similarities and their differences became an important part of our design.
And, of course, trying to build and refine a 3D interactive experience within a hackathon deadline meant constantly deciding what was essential and what we needed to save for later.
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