Turning Nine Independent Hereford Shops into a Playable City-Wide Quest

Project: LOOTROUTE
Location: Hereford, UK
Sector: Independent Retail / Place Marketing
Technology: React, Vite, TypeScript, Three.js, WebGL, WordPress, DigitalOcean, PWA

The Challenge

Hereford has a thriving collection of independent shops specialising in comics, collectibles, gaming, toys, models and enthusiast culture.

The problem is discovering them.

Independent retailers compete against an online shopping experience built around algorithms, next-day delivery and enormous advertising budgets. A conventional directory listing the shops and their addresses was unlikely to change anyone's behaviour.

We wanted to explore a different question:

What if discovering Hereford's independent shops became part of the entertainment?

LOOTROUTE was conceived as a city-wide quest connecting nine independent retailers through a shared brand, physical campaign and playable digital world.

The objective was to create something that could encourage people to explore Hereford, discover businesses they might otherwise walk past and make visiting the high street feel more like playing a game than following a directory.

At the same time, it gave The DM Lab an opportunity to demonstrate what can happen when brand, web, print, 3D development and AI-assisted workflows are treated as one connected project.

Our Approach

We didn't begin with the game.

We began with the experience.

LOOTROUTE needed to work across the physical and digital worlds. Someone might discover it through a flyer on a shop counter, explore the retailers through the website and then enter the playable map on their phone.

Each part therefore needed to feel like it belonged to the same world.

The project was developed across four connected areas:

• brand
• print
• web
• game

Rather than commissioning separate suppliers for each element, the complete experience was designed and developed by The DM Lab.

Services Delivered

Brand Identity
Creating the LOOTROUTE identity, visual language and illustrated map that established the playful character of the entire project

Print Design
Designing physical collateral that participating retailers could use in-store to introduce customers to the route

Website Design & Development
Building the campaign website with shop profiles, FAQs and information about the route

3D & Interactive Development
Transforming the illustrated concept into an explorable WebGL world with characters, collectibles, quests and mini-games

AI-Assisted Development
Creating a multi-agent workflow to transform real shop information into structured characters, relationships and quests before developer integration and testing

Building the LOOTROUTE Identity

The project needed to feel like a game before anyone had opened the game itself.

We created a bold rainbow LOOT ROUTE wordmark alongside a hand-illustrated, retro platform-game-inspired map of Hereford.

The map became the visual centrepiece of the project.

Rather than showing retailers as pins on a conventional street map, participating businesses became destinations within an illustrated world.

The identity then carried across:

• the website
• printed collateral
• retailer materials
• the interactive map
• character and quest design

This gave the campaign a recognisable visual language across every touchpoint.

Taking the Experience into the Shops

A project designed to encourage physical discovery could not exist solely online.

We created flyers and printed pull-outs that participating retailers could display and distribute from their counters.

This gave customers a physical route into the experience.

Someone visiting one shop could discover LOOTROUTE there and be encouraged to explore another participating business elsewhere in the city.

The print campaign therefore acts as a bridge between individual retailers and the wider city-wide experience.

A Website to Give the Campaign a Home

Alongside the physical campaign, we developed the LOOTROUTE website.

The site provides a central destination where visitors can:

• understand the concept
• discover participating shops
• view retailer profiles
• find answers to common questions
• access the route and interactive experience

WordPress provides the content-management foundation, allowing campaign information and retailer content to be managed without being tied directly to the more complex game layer.

This separation allowed us to choose the appropriate technology for each part of the experience rather than forcing everything into a single system.

That reflects our wider solutions architecture approach to connected digital platforms.

Turning a Flat Map into a Playable 3D World

The most ambitious part of LOOTROUTE was transforming the illustrated map into an interactive experience.

We rebuilt the world using React, TypeScript, Three.js and WebGL.

Visitors can move through a 3D interpretation of the LOOTROUTE world, encountering game-inspired elements including:

• a controllable character
• shopkeeper characters
• spinning-coin collectibles
• warp pipes
• mini-games
• quests
• sound
• a quest journal

The experience is also built as an installable Progressive Web App, allowing it to live on a user's device more like an application than a conventional webpage.

The result is not simply a map showing where the shops are.

It is a digital environment designed to make discovering them part of the game.

Nine Independent Retailers, One Experience

LOOTROUTE brings together nine Hereford independent businesses:

• Nerdvana
• Hereford Model Shop
• Motherfudgecrackers
• Collectible Things
• Area 1-51
• Carbonite Collectibles
• Hidden Frontier
• Q's Comics
• Autosports Models

Each retailer remains an individual business with its own character, products and audience.

The role of LOOTROUTE is not to make them identical.

It is to connect them.

That distinction became particularly important when we started building the game's shopkeepers and quests.

The Interesting Bit: Building the Quest Layer with AI Agents

One of the most experimental parts of the project was the workflow used to create the living game layer.

Rather than asking one AI model to "make some quests", we broke the problem into specialist roles.

Four AI agents worked in parallel, each responsible for a specific part of the process.

01 - Graph Architect

The first agent mapped relationships between the nine shops into a loot knowledge graph.

It looked at what each shop stocked and identified businesses that naturally complemented one another.

This created the underlying relationships needed to build journeys between retailers.

02 - Persona Writer

The second agent created a shopkeeper character for each retailer.

Using the real description of the shop as its source, it developed an appropriate voice and greeting while remaining grounded in the information available about that business.

The objective was to add character without inventing a completely different identity for the retailer.

03 - Quest Designer

The third agent used the shop relationships to create themed quests.

Instead of randomly sending a player from one location to another, quests could follow interests such as Pokémon or retro gaming and encourage players to discover relevant shops along the way.

04 - Integration Scout

The fourth agent focused on the software itself.

It analysed the existing codebase and produced an integration plan for adding the new game layer without disrupting the functionality that already worked.

From Shop Descriptions to a Quest System in Around 84 Seconds

The four-agent workflow transformed nine shop descriptions into a structured game layer in approximately 84 seconds of agent processing time.

That output included:

• nine shopkeeper personas
• relationships between retailers
• seven themed quests
• quest structure
• a quest journal layer
• integration guidance
• the foundations for optional live AI interaction

But that wasn't the end of the development process.

A developer then reviewed, integrated and tested the generated work.

That distinction is important.

The value of AI in this project wasn't replacing the development process.

It was accelerating a well-defined part of it.

AI generated structured material quickly. Human development turned it into a working product.

AI Shopkeepers

The architecture also provides the foundation for shopkeepers that do more than stand inside the game world.

Characters can:

• greet the player
• introduce their shop
• set quests
• point players towards other participating retailers
• support optional AI-driven interactions

This makes each shop part of the experience rather than simply a destination marker.

It also demonstrates how AI can be integrated into a digital product as a functional layer rather than added as a novelty afterwards.

One Studio, the Whole Stack

A significant part of the LOOTROUTE project is the range of disciplines involved.

The same project required:

Brand
Identity, visual language and illustrated map

Print
Physical campaign materials for participating retailers

Web
Campaign website and retailer content

Game
A playable 3D WebGL environment

AI
A multi-agent workflow for relationships, personas, quests and integration planning

Infrastructure
Hosting, deployment and Progressive Web App functionality

Bringing those disciplines together allowed the project to be designed as one experience rather than a collection of disconnected deliverables.

Built With

The digital experience combines:

• Vite
• React
• TypeScript
• Three.js
• WebGL
• WordPress
• DigitalOcean
• Progressive Web App technology
• offline functionality
• multi-agent AI workflows

The stack was selected around the requirements of each part of the experience rather than around a single preferred technology.

Results & Impact

LOOTROUTE has delivered the complete foundation for a new type of independent-retail discovery experience.

9 Independent Shops

Nine specialist Hereford retailers have been mapped into a single connected experience.

4 Connected Deliverables

Brand, print, web and game were designed as one campaign rather than separate pieces of work.

4 AI Agents

A specialist multi-agent workflow created the initial quest layer in parallel.

~84 Seconds

The initial AI-generated quest layer was produced in approximately 84 seconds of agent processing time before developer integration and testing.

7 Quests

The game layer includes seven themed quests designed to encourage discovery between participating retailers.

Most importantly, the project is now live and playable.

The next stage is measuring whether digital engagement translates into physical behaviour.

What We Measure Next

We have deliberately separated what the project has already delivered from what still needs to be measured.

The next phase will look at:

• footfall attributable to LOOTROUTE
• quest completions
• shops visited per session
• repeat plays
• returning users
• engagement with individual retailers
• evidence of increased discovery across the participating businesses

We won't claim that gamification has increased high-street footfall until the data demonstrates it.

The platform has been built to give the idea a genuine opportunity to do so.

What This Demonstrates

LOOTROUTE demonstrates The DM Lab's ability to combine:

• Brand Strategy
• Graphic Design
• Print Design
• Web Development
• Interactive 3D Development
• WebGL
• Progressive Web Apps
• AI-Assisted Development
• Multi-Agent AI Workflows
• Solutions Architecture
• Digital Product Development

into one connected experience.

It also demonstrates an important principle behind the way we approach emerging technology.

Start with the experience. Then decide where the technology can make it better.

Final Thought

LOOTROUTE started with a simple challenge:

How do you make discovering independent shops more interesting than looking at a directory?

Our answer was to turn the city into a quest.

Nine independent retailers became destinations in a shared world. A hand-illustrated map became an explorable 3D environment. Shop descriptions became characters and quests. Print sitting on a shop counter became the entrance to a digital experience.

And AI helped us build one of the most content-intensive parts of that experience in seconds rather than treating it as a replacement for the people designing and developing the product.

LOOTROUTE shows what can happen when brand, physical experience, software and emerging technology are designed together rather than in isolation.

Explore LOOTROUTE

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