other

Augmented reality sound game

Download on iOS

A reality-bending game, theatre, album and journey, played through sound and space in the streets of a real city.

You take out your phone.
Load the app.
Location access granted.
Headphones on.

A voice tells you where you are and where to go.
The tour begins.

It’s a bit mundane.
The voice describes local buildings, historical facts here and there.
It knows where you are.

You go where you’re told. You’re new here. You’re curious. You are a good player.
Until something begins to interfere. Static breaks up the signal. Other sounds start tuning in.

You begin to hear the city.

Other stories. Other histories. Other spaces. Other voices.

Telling you to be careful.

Your phone rings.

Download on iOS

other is an award-winning AR sound game made in collaboration with National Theatre Scotland. The game was made as part of a city-wide transmedia project to celebrate the production of Let The Right One In.

I led on the concept for the game as well as design, visuals and sound as part of the wonderfully talented development team at Studio Quartic Llama.

The game is made in Unity and uses mobile phone GPS to track the players’ location and movements, mapping their journey through the city to an evolving, location-based soundscape, narrative and puzzles. These synchronised experiences in conjunction with the players journey through the city augment and slowly change their perception of where they are.

Blending the language of video games, theatre, and spatial audio, other deeply immerses the player in their real world surroundings, and transforms those same spaces into something strange and alive, blurring the boundary between the everyday world and poetic fiction.

The City as a stage/ level/ gateway

Other is the city you know and the city you dont.

At its heart is the idea that the city is not just made with stone and wood, it’s made of stories. The lives, experiences, and memories of everyone who has ever lived there and embedded in every building, street, alley, doorway or sculpture are traces of the past. But nobody knows about it. Nobody really knows where they are.

This was used as a foundation for connecting players to their surroundings. The experience began with true, often surprising facts about Dundee’s past, gradually blending them into fiction until the boundary between the two begins to dissolve..

We were privileged to have the support of the National Theatre Scotland behind the project. With their help we were able to extend the fictional transformation into the real world- subtly altering parts of the city itself. Set design, signage, convincing local businesses to take part in the game and even a painted wall for players to leave their mark become part of the game, creating a continuous experience where the city and the story were inseparable.

Is the city a stage for the game, or a character in it? Both I think.

The audience as a player/ actor

In Other, the player doesn’t just move through the city, they take part in it. They enter, touch, listen, and leave their own traces behind.

At the heart of the game is the idea that a city is built from stories, and the player is made aware that they are contributing to that story while uncovering the hidden or lost stories of others.

While taking part, the fourth wall of the game is continuously challenged. The game rings their phone, give them instructions to go into bars where they have to interact with real people who are also taking part, solve puzzles and invited to leave their mark on a wall…

Soon the player will wonder who else is part of the game- who is acting and what is real…

Sound as space. Space as sound.

Sound is the medium through which other is conceived, made and experienced. Everything n other comes from an origin in sound, especially as it pertains to space.

Sound is a temporal medium but is also a spatial one. It not only defines moments but transitions between them. It describes and contextualises spaces and is a thread that can keep audiences immersed by connecting spaces together.

It seemed the perfect way to make an experience that covers real time and real space.

Composing with space meant treating the city itself as a composition. Architectural features and distances between landmarks became the rhythm and phrasing of the score. Narrative and musical beats were tied to physical locations, creating moments where movement, story, and sound aligned- a powerful synchronisation that made each step part of the composition.

The sound design aimed to gently distort reality. Layers of music, ambience, and voice shifted as the player moved, blurring what was real and what was imagined. The result was a living soundtrack, one that still lingers in memory. Even now, walking through Dundee, I still hear echoes of those sounds in certain streets and corners.

All the sound was recorded and made in Dundee. I collected field recordings throughout the city, ran community noise-making sessions, and worked with local musicians to create the game’s ambiences and musical textures. Every sound in Other was drawn from the city itself, its buildings, people, and atmosphere.

Using sound and music as the core medium of the game allows players to be present in their environment physically and visually, and used right it actually deepens connection with their surroundings in surprising ways. Every area or location in the game has its own distinct sound or piece of music, creating a soundtrack that moves and changes with the player. We can draw players attention to details they might otherwise overlook or immerse them in an emotional space that transforms meaning.