PixDart – a treasure hunt in the real world
An outdoor camera game: find things out in the world, photograph them, convince the Judge and build your own clay town.
What is PixDart?
PixDart is a game Vestra designed, built and released on the App Store and Google Play in August 2026. It turns the real world into a treasure hunt: somewhere out there is a red door, a sleeping cat or a street lamp glowing in the dark. Your job is to find it, photograph it and convince the Judge. Two hundred things are waiting, from a flower on your windowsill to northern lights in a winter sky, arranged in twenty tiers from everyday to legendary: a puffin, a seal, a whale, an erupting geyser, glowing lava. Every single one must be photographed by you, out in the world. No tapping, no spawning, no shortcuts. Some finds only appear at night, in rain or in the golden hour, so the weather report becomes part of your strategy.
The Judge
Every photo goes before the Judge, a stern old chameleon with a monocle, a gavel and no patience for stock photos. Behind him is a vision model that decides whether the photo genuinely shows the subject, gives a confidence score and delivers a one-line verdict. Approvals come with ceremony, rejections come with a reason and a second chance. Camera only: no screenshots and no copied photos. Image hashing catches near-identical photos across users, a second vision model runs in shadow mode to compare verdicts, and the game is experimenting with an on-device model that recognises things in real time.
A clay album and your town
Each find is sculpted in clay and added to your album. The clay art for the entire collection, every single item, is produced with an image model in the same handcrafted claymation look. You complete themed sets, upgrade your best finds by re-photographing them in rarer conditions and keep a field journal of everywhere the hunt has taken you. Finds are building materials too: a swan unlocks the pond, a boat grows the harbour, and a whale, well, you will see. Six districts to build, a funfair that fires fireworks at night, a lighthouse that sweeps its beam after dark, snowfall, drifting clouds and a fox that only shows itself to the patient. Clay and golden clay are earned exclusively through real play outdoors; the town spends, it never produces.
Hunting together
Every day you are paired with a similarly ranked rival in a duel that goes live at a surprise moment, and the first approved photo wins the trophies. Weekly leagues put twelve hunters in a race for the same finds, a team tournament has squads of up to four chasing the same drop set twice a week, and party mode is a living-room game with three-minute rounds. Add clans, streaks with freezes so one busy day never ruins your run, monthly Shoot Days, passport stamps for hunting at sunrise and on holidays, Pix's morning chest, themed weekly adventures and city packs with landmarks in Reykjavík, London, Amsterdam, Copenhagen and more. A Hunt Pass subscription unlocks an exclusive find each week.
The technology
The app is written in React Native with Expo for iOS and Android. Convex is the real-time backend: database, server functions, file storage and scheduled jobs for leagues, verdicts and the daily duels. Sign-in runs through Clerk with Apple and Google, subscriptions and clay packs through RevenueCat, and everything lives in one Turborepo codebase alongside a Next.js website. The Judge is an OpenAI vision model, the comparison model is a CLIP service in Python, and the clay art is produced with an automated image-generation pipeline Vestra built.
Get PixDart on the App Store or on Google Play.