Gucci Town
Experience — Roblox
Visits
40m+
Team
6
Role
Lead Game Designer
Ancora
Ancora Campaign
2
Brief
"Create an experience to showcase our Ancora Fashion Show"
"Mind-bending Puzzles with our clothes in the forefront"
-Gucci
Concept
A Gallery You Can Climb Into
A fashion show is something you watch, so we made one that needed the player. The show can't start until the mannequins are dressed, and the clothes are inside the paintings. Players step through, opening a new world, and solve what's on the other side, come back with an article and dress the lobby. Finish the set and the limited UGC items unlock.
Client
A Design That Moved
The brief shifted more than once during production. That's normal on brand work, and the answer was to keep making — a shift only hurts a team with one idea, and we had a pile of them already discussed and costed. A change of direction meant reaching into it rather than starting over.
The experience shipped as part of the Ancora campaign, which went on to win 2 Webby's in 2024.
Puzzles
What Shipped And What Didn't
Every puzzle had to be solvable by one player alone, at just enough difficulty — earned, but never stranding anyone.
The Icon Hunt cleared that bar: find the right icons across the map (showing an icon and a number) and submit them on the correct obelisks
*which turned into clocktowers.
Bending Light didn't: The player was tasked with bending light off of mirrors to illuminate crystals. This was tested and proven to take way too long for what was asked and overshot the difficulty for this type of experience.
The Room (or VC)
Pride At The Door
Designers, artists and engineers in one room, throwing out anything that sounded fun and building whatever sounded best out loud. Plenty went on the cutting room floor. Everyone left their pride at the door, which is the only way a room like that works — and it's how you end up with things nobody would have proposed alone.
We also built far more puzzles than this needed. A puzzle game was lined up right after, so anything good that didn't fit Ancora wasn't wasted + we could add teammates to these designs— so any good multiplayer puzzle idea was mocked up for the future
Lessons & Learns
What Gucci Ancora Taught Me
Scarcity Didn't Make Players Selfish
The UGC items were limited, which usually turns a reward into a race, then a swap account and do it again while hoarding the answer. The opposite happened. Players finished the puzzles and then stayed to walk other people through them.
Where You Put The "Real Limit"
The item was limited, but that wasn't the limit players actually ran into. The real one was knowing how to solve the puzzle — and knowledge is the only thing you can hand over without losing your own. Helping cost nothing and made you the expert in the room, so the scarcity produced generosity instead of hoarding.