Try it live Description
NestLinker: Play the City Before You Go turns real neighborhoods into playable journeys. Instead of reading long travel guides or scrolling through endless recommendations, you explore a neighborhood by moving through a game world, discovering real places, making choices and living with the consequences.
The world is built on real locations, shops, streets and neighborhood experiences. You decide where to go next while managing limited time, energy and budget. A place is not just a recommendation card; it becomes part of the journey. You can step inside, discover information, react to situations and decide whether a place is actually worth visiting. The current version focuses on Seoul, turning real neighborhoods into small playable worlds where every decision can lead to a different route, discovery or experience.
It is a gift for people arriving in an unfamiliar city for the first time. Travel often begins with uncertainty: too many places, too many reviews and very little sense of how a neighborhood actually feels. The team wanted to turn that uncertainty into exploration. By combining real-world travel information with game mechanics, environmental storytelling and player choice, the goal is not to replace the real journey but to make the city understandable before and during the visit. Instead of telling people where to go, NestLinker lets them play through the decision.
Before the hackathon, NestLinker was an early web prototype with basic place data, an experimental pixel neighborhood map, simple movement and navigation, and early interaction prototypes. During the event the team turned it into a structured playable journey: meaningful route decisions, distinct interactions for each place, time, energy and budget systems, an active scout companion, exploration progress and consequences, better movement and world presentation, and a Tripo workflow that turns real-world references into stylized assets for the pixel world. It plays in the browser.
How Tripo was used
Tripo bridges real Seoul and the pixel game.
- From photos to pixels: the team turns reference photos of neighborhood objects into 3D assets with Tripo, then renders and stylizes them into the pixel sprites used in NestLinker.
- One workflow: real place → Tripo 3D reconstruction → stylized game asset → interactive scene. Tripo acts as a world-building bridge, keeping the identity of real places while holding a coherent pixel-art style.
