Wisp World - Interactive AR RPG for Spectacles

Wisp World is an interactive RPG that transforms your real environment into a magical story space using Snap Spectacles. Players discover three lost wisps scattered throughout their home and help reunite them by solving conversation and object-finding challenges. The entire narrative unfolds in AR, blending digital characters with physical spaces to create an entirely new form of storytelling.

I designed the personalities and conversation systems for three distinct wisp characters using Parabrain. Starting with research into character dynamics and narrative tropes, I initially developed four characters before narrowing to the optimal trio. Each wisp required extensive character profiling - background lore, sample dialogue, thought processes, and personality quirks.

The iterative process was intense: Tictac became the charming guide, Grindle the grumpy one wary of humans, and Gliss the hyperactive optimist. Conversation design proved especially challenging since most AI defaults to servile, flowery language. I had to build intuition for prompt engineering - testing different LLMs (Gemini vs ChatGPT) for specific tasks and discovering that a single misplaced word could break an entire character's personality. Each character went through dozens of prompt iterations to achieve authentic, consistent voices.

I built complex state management systems that tracked player progress through conversation and object interactions. Each wisp had multiple conversation states with specific triggers - for example, Tictac couldn't reveal their backstory until players proved they weren't harmful. This required mapping dozens of game states and defining what elements were active/inactive at each stage.

Since most users had never tried AR experiences, I designed minimal onboarding that taught through play rather than lengthy tutorials. User testing revealed critical issues - like gesture recognition failing when fingers were too close together - that required iterating on both the technical systems and instructional design. The final experience guides users naturally through Tictac's dialogue rather than overwhelming them with upfront instruction.