Urban Legend Hunters

Join the 'Urban Legend Hunters' and start the location-based investistigation for urban legends in your own cities!

Comment

Inspiration

We are inspired by great popular indie games on mobile, such as 'Replica', 'Simulacra', and 'Sara is Missing'. And we want to push it to a more experimental edge of gaming with immersive tech, i.e. Google Maps, Google Lens, to connect the digital game world with the real world.

What it does

Urban Legend Hunters is an immersive adventure game where you investigate urban legends in your own city.

“Have you heard of the urban legend called the double?”

If you meet someone that looks exactly like you, one of you will be entirely replaced by the other. Your “double” will inherit all of your memories and live your life without anyone else noticing… But the world is so wide—how do you know that you’re not actually someone else’s double? Are you really… you?

Key Features • Cutscenes with real actors paired with virtual landscapes combine the real and unreal to transport you to a mysterious and unsettling alternate dimension. • Text messages and voice calls that create an immersive game experience. • Unique exploration mechanics that make you feel you’re really there in the alternate dimensions.

How we built it

Firstly, we are inspired and played around with the location-based service with the writters of urban legends. Writters are very creative and can be thinking outside of the box (yes, they think and we code). But that creative thinking really helps us to shape the core play of how we integrate with immersive and LBS. After a few iterations with actual gamers in the game shows, we found that they actually like it a lot and, luckily, we met our publishing partner of Japan and they love the creation and want to bring it to the world!

Challenges we ran into

We didn't think of for location-based games, the definition of "nearby" can be so different in the beginning. Because our team is based in Taiwan, so places are close by, and it's easier for players to explore from places to places. For example, our first mission is to ask players to visit their nearby library. BUT we got reports from players living in California, UK, Malaysia that they need to drive for at least 40 mins to their closest library. So we have to adjust and improve the gameplay experience based on the size of the countries.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

  1. Selected by NVIDIA Inception Program (USA, 2025)
  2. Selected by Microsoft Xbox ID Program (USA, 2025)
  3. Winner of “AMD Special Award” of the Asia XR Golden Award 2023 (Tokyo, Japan 2023)
  4. Winner of “静鉄賞 (Shizuoka Railway Award)” of StartingXI (しずおか未来共創プログラム) (Shizuoka, Japan, 2021)
  5. “Taiwanese New Media delegation” for “New Images Festival” (Paris, French, 2023)
  6. “Best Innovation Award” nomination by Taipei Game Show 2022 (Taipei, Taiwan, 2022)
  7. “Google Hatcher” semi-finalist (Taiwan, 2023)
  8. Paid Game Ranked No. 1 for both App Store & Google Play Taiwan (2023)
  9. Editor’s Featured Selection for both App Store & Google Play Taiwan (2023)
  10. Game IP licensed to Japanese Comic Publisher for global releasing.

What we learned

Immersive and location-based game can be potential and as long as it's a good content, people will be willing to pay for it. Still, there're so many possibilities of new gameplay with the new tech with mobile, i.e. we observed that our players love to play around with the Google Lens (in the game, it's called 'Heaven Eye') to scan everything possible to bring it to the gaming world. So we'd like to keep exploring more possibilities of the immersive gameplay of the future.

What's next for Urban Legend Hunters

We are working the on sequel of the 'Urban Legend Hunters' series, and will be working with our Japanese partner as well as Taiwanese telecom partner to keep our experiment, and push the immersive location-based gameplay to another limit.

Built With

Share this project:

Updates