Children today relate less than ever to nature. However, in order to meet the challenges of the future, Migros - Switzerland's largest retail company - asked us to get children excited about nature again as part of a national scrapbook promotion. Accompanying this, we had to develop a complementary app that depicts Swiss nature as faithfully as possible while providing real added value for the target group through playful as well as educational elements.

We wanted to open kids' eyes to the wonders of Swiss nature. Therefore we developed an engaging and educational storytelling experience where kids could become real nature detectives. With the help of 2 experienced nature detectives and a funny little avatar, they had to solve 8 cases related to the 8 main habitats of Switzerland. And in order to solve the cases, the kids had to explore the habitats, look for clues, engage in quizzes and play minigames. So with every case solved, they learned a little bit more about the nature surrounding them in a playful way.

In addition to the educational approach we placed much emphasis on biological accuracy. We teamed up with biologists to create detailed and unique 3D environments complemented by atmospheric audio landscapes for all of the 8 habitats. Especially the game audio, providing users with an individual, spatial and immersive gaming experience.

The Nature Detectives App was created as part of the "Nature Detectives Mania". A large-scale promotion based initially around the idea of a scrapbook with 8 different habitats which featured matching animal and plant stickers. In the complementary app, we aimed to depict Swiss nature as faithfully as possible and to create a 3D world that is as detailed, exciting and beautiful to discover as nature itself.

For this, we developed exciting cases and riddles together with a children's book author. For instance, about animals that can be discovered in their habitats and what traces they leave behind. We also rewarded the progress with over 50 unique badges to collect.

With the Nature Detectives app, we send children on a virtual journey through Switzerland's most important habitats to become true nature detectives. For this, we developed an ultra-realistic 3D world. Based on photos, videos and with the help of nature experts, we created 8 characteristic habitats - from farms to mountains. Each world contains around 1 trillion polygons, hundreds of 4/8K textures, can be explored from at least 7 camera perspectives, and is brought to life with over 1,000 specially developed and recorded sounds.

The story has been embedded in an ultra-realistic 3D world for a maximum immersive gaming experience. To graphically represent the structure of the levels and fine-tune element by element, we developed an extension to the Unity editor. This allowed us to precisely define the accessible area of the players or the interactive game elements.

The Nature Detectives app quickly took first place in the Education, Kids, Family and Games categories of the Swiss Appstore charts. Up to 100.000 swiss users played Nature Detectives Mania and provided an average dwell time of over 11 minutes. And the accompanying scrapbook promotion was also a big success, with a total of 3.4 million scans of the scrapbook images that accompanied the target group directly into the app.