TMono

The AR game that sends kids out to find things.

TMONO is a mobile AR game for kids aged 10 to 12, set in T-City, a Brooklyn-flavored neighborhood run by a macaque called Teo. His apartment is empty and he needs stuff. Players scan real objects around the house with their phone camera, and whatever they find lands in Teo's place. A banana, a couch, a set of keys. The game runs on-device object detection, so nothing leaves the phone.

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Every AR game asks kids to look at the world. TMONO asks them to go find things in it.

Missions come as short shopping lists from Teo. Find three things, bring them back, fill the apartment. Phil, a gorilla with something to prove, races the player against his own ghost time, and Coco the raccoon runs a thrift shop where scanned objects get traded and upgraded. Each mission earns base XP with a speed bonus on top, and there's no fail state, so younger players keep moving without frustration.

The world is built around three characters with their own voices and their own agenda. Teo talks the player through every hint, Phil taunts, Coco deadpans. The writing does a lot of the work, and it was written to sound like a friend, not a tutorial.

[Images: gameplay / T-City / characters]

Object recognition runs entirely on the device using an 80-class COCO detection model. There's no server call and no camera data sent anywhere, which makes TMONO COPPA-compliant by design rather than by policy. Detection reliability shaped the game design directly: missions favor objects the model finds consistently, and hints are tiered so players are never stuck.

We built T-City in Blender with a locked palette of electric blue, sunset orange, brick and cream, then optimized every asset for mobile. Teo's apartment, Coco's shop and the surrounding blocks are all real 3D spaces the player moves through in AR, with the scanned objects appearing inside them.

The interface follows the same street aesthetic: wooden rings, glass domes, die-cut sticker icons, and a sticker-slap animation every time a scan lands. Every button has a physical press feel, tuned for small hands and fast taps.

TMONO started as an internal project and has grown into a full demo with six missions, a beta program, and a publishing package. The tech is ours, the characters are ours, and the idea is simple: get kids off the couch and looking at the world around them, because there's a monkey who needs a lamp.

Technologies: AR, Mobile, Games, Unity3D, ARKit, ARCore, Computer Vision, Blender