Under Her Black Flag
An original illustrated interactive map trail and immersive story experience through the historical city of York following rogue pirate Bonny...
Overview
In 2024 we had the great honour of being awarded the Creative Catalyst research and development grant to bring our original story-based experience Under Her Black Flag to life - from story concept all the way to mobile app prototype. Comprising original music, dramatic narration and hundreds of illustrations, this is an enchanting and visually stunning immersive experience that celebrates story, place, character and the magic of old-school storybook style illustrations. It captures our mission at Lást and receiving the award is testament to the world's love and need for fun, hand-drawn, people focussed stories that engage directly with our environment and stories embedded within the place...
UHBF is a story based trail based in the historic city of York, taking people on a journey to uncover hidden city stories, and discover lesser known histories. With challenges at various locations across the trail, the balance in this ambitious project at every junction was creating something that felt authentic and old, whilst innovatively housed on a mobile app. How could we make people feel like they were reading a story book whilst walking through the city holding their phones? This meant functions that ran smoothly, but graphics that were weathered, imperfect and gritty, just like the experience of our main character, the rogue pirate Bonny
Project Scope
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Prototype Mobile App
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Interactive Trail Map
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Story & Brand Illustrations
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Visual Identity
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Brand Strategy
Team
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Lást Maps
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BetaJester (developers)
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Charlotte Luxford (actor)
After first winning a pitch for initial R&D funding from The University of York and XR Stories who fell in love with our original story and trail idea, we were able to explore narrative and create stories based on famous heritage locations in York, as well as create a visual pitch-deck for further funding.
Winning the Creative Catalyst grant was a huge opportunity. We were at the helm of this monumental project, directing and managing the wider team (hired games developers, music composers, actress) whilst producing the all of the story, scripts, graphics and visual identity. Following extensive concept refinement, Angel (of Lást) wrote the character driven story narrative, and produced detailed development scripts for the development team, alongside the composer and voice actors. The trail sees our main character, escaped rogue Bonny, on her journey out of the city. The user's goal is to follow her footsteps and join her pirate crew.
Lást painstakingly hand drew a wide suite of over 100 illustrations to accompany the story that unfolds across the city in our signature heritage ink style, perfect for a fictional story set in 1700. Engraving style line work built this world out, with strong cross line textures and a story-book quality to them.
The illustrated map for the trail was drafted traditionally, before being rendered for digital use. Game developers took the analogue creation and brought it to life in the prototype with functions like GPS tracking and structured game play. The wanted poster features the main character in the trail, escaped rogue Bonny, which was a crucial part of the prototypes prologue where we had a lot of fun setting up the story-world and the game world that players were diving into.
The unique point to explore in the R&D project was how to design a map that can go beyond simple navigation, but house the entire story and experience. Having drafted the map in house, the development team at BetaJester rendered it into Unity, developing the map as the beating heart of the app. With the ability to track the user around the city, users could follow the trail, or go off track to uncover bonus stories through out York.
We explored how to bring more than the history of the city to users, developing the outlines for challenges and riddles that must be completed at each location on the trail, as our intention is always to bring people into communication with their environment and to engage with the uniqueness of each site/location. We successfully created a game play structure that could be built out in the second phase of development.
We brought our original story to life with hand drawn illustrations. The prototype is a tribute to a period in time, full of traditional craft and mystery. The aim was to research the limits of illustration, and how we might make the experience feel more interactive without the resources to explore immersive technology. To overcome this, we opted to produce two and three stage illustrations in. a slowed animation style sequence.
This project was the most ambitious the studio has ever embarked on, pushing our story telling expertise to new heights, and our illustration skills to their limits. User testing on the app prototype was insightful, and has formed part of our detailed strategy to take the prototype to the next level in wider testing, and eventually to bring it to market.
The trail prototype celebrated the use of traditional crafts accessed through mobile. For the first time in our design careers, it highlighted the opportunity that immersive technology could bring to our practice. Budget and time didn't allow exploration of these exciting technologies, and how they might be used, pushing Lást to explore them to understand their place in the future of interactive story telling.
