Clapham Digital · iPhone
Wisp
Your phone is an instrument, and it’s reading a world you can’t see.
What it is
A walking game for iPhone, played on your own streets. Something is draining the light out of the world. The people who noticed built an instrument to track it, and lost. You found it.
Take it for a real walk. It picks up thin spots in the dark, and you work toward one by reading bearings off the glass, listening, and dodging the light thrown back at you. Arrive with enough in the tank and fight whatever is sitting there. Win, and that place stays lit on your map for good.
At home, the chart, the fights and the transmissions left by earlier holders play from the couch.
Nothing drawn on top of the street
Wisp is not AR and never uses the camera. It draws nothing over the street, because the thing you hunt has no look to draw. You read an instrument with eyes, ears and thumb, while watching where you are going — the screen asks for glances, not attention.
The instrument reads in green phosphor: a scope, a bearing dial, a sonar sweep. That is what you watch on the walk. Then you arrive, and the fight resolves into full colour.
How it's built
- Native, on your phone.Swift, SwiftUI and SpriteKit. iPhone, portrait, iOS 17 or later.
- No ads. No accounts.No sign-up, no analytics, no tracking.
- Your streets, from our own map.The street map is a tile set we build from OpenStreetMap and serve ourselves. It downloads when you have signal and currently covers North America; elsewhere the map says there is no data and the game still plays.
- The database is published.The tiles are ODbL data, and the database and the code that builds it are at claphamdigital.com/wisp/data.
- Your position stays yours.Your exact coordinates never leave the phone. To draw streets the app asks our host for the map squares around you, which shows roughly which area you are in and nothing finer. The full account is on the privacy page.
- One developer.Built by one person at Clapham Digital.
The same fight, on its own
Wisp’s boss fights turned out to be the part you can understand in ten seconds with the sound off, so they became their own game. Shatterbeat is a rhythm game set in the world of Wisp, by the same developer. More about Shatterbeat →