Sidequest

Side Quest

Getting outside shouldn't need a destination.

Side Quest is a location-based walking experience built around a simple idea: sometimes you don't need somewhere to go. You just need a reason to go.

It generates small, randomized walking adventures from wherever you are. Pick how long you want to be out, open the map, and Side Quest gives you somewhere to wander.

Not a hiking guide. Not a fitness tracker. Not a carefully curated tour.

Just a side quest.

Where it came from

Side Quest started as one of the first personal projects I built that I thought might genuinely have legs as a consumer product.

The motivation behind it was much more personal.

I spend a lot of time strapped to a desk, and I've never been particularly good at maintaining the simple habit of getting outside for fifteen or twenty minutes. At the same time, I've always loved the complete opposite of that: hiking, camping, long walks and getting properly out into nature.

I wanted to find the space between those two things.

How do you capture even a tiny amount of the feeling of going on an adventure when you've only got fifteen minutes?

I didn't want to solve that by turning walking into another points system. There are enough products asking you to close rings, maintain streaks and optimize yourself.

I wanted going outside to feel like something.

So I started building Side Quest.

Wandering, not navigating

Modern navigation is incredibly good at getting us from A to B.

That's also part of the problem.

Put a destination into a map and you're given the most efficient route there. Follow the blue line. Arrive. Repeat.

There's increasingly little reason to wander.

Random generation became one of Side Quest's most important principles.

Give it fifteen minutes and it might take you through an estate you've never walked through before, around a road you normally pass, or towards something nearby that you didn't know existed.

Tomorrow's walk can be completely different.

There's no grand promise attached to that. Sometimes it's literally just:

Go straight. Turn left. Turn right. Keep walking.

But that uncertainty is what makes it a quest rather than a route.

The map as a quest scroll

I wanted opening Side Quest to have its own little moment of anticipation.

Something closer to unrolling a map and discovering an adventure than opening a navigation app.

You choose the scale of the quest—from a short stroll to something more substantial—and the app uses your location to generate a walkable journey out and back, with an estimated distance and duration.

The current build is intentionally simple. It is essentially the MVP I can experiment with: the route generation exists, the experience exists, and the foundation for discovery exists.

The interesting part is where it can go from there.

Finding the things we walk past

Ireland is extraordinarily good at hiding things.

A lot of us know the places we're supposed to visit. Glendalough. Croagh Patrick. Powerscourt. Lough Key.

They're beautiful places.

But go a little further and Ireland is covered in old churches, forts, megalithic tombs, caves, ruins, mythology and fragments of stories embedded into the landscape.

You can know a famous mountain without knowing what's hidden around it.

You can know an area without knowing the stories underneath it.

That's the part of Side Quest I'm increasingly interested in.

The long-term idea is to build a much richer Ireland-specific collection of points of interest. As a generated quest passes close to something interesting, that place can become part of the journey.

Not necessarily a tourist attraction.

Just something worth stopping at for three minutes, looking at, reading about and perhaps telling somebody about later.

A good Side Quest should leave you with a story.

Rediscovering Ireland

There is a light progression system hiding within that idea.

Visit different places. Discover different categories. Find three monasteries and perhaps you've earned the first monastery badge. Gradually build a record of the Ireland you've actually encountered.

I've experimented with the idea of a literal fog of war, progressively revealing the map as you explore it.

I'm less convinced by that now.

It risks turning exploration into a mechanic rather than a feeling, and obscuring a map you're about to walk through isn't necessarily a particularly sensible design decision.

That's indicative of how I want to approach gamification throughout Side Quest.

There can be badges, discoveries, levels and collections.

But the reward for going outside should still be going outside.

The game shouldn't become more important than the walk.

Reconnecting with the land

There's a broader idea underneath the project that I've become more conscious of while building it.

I think we're becoming increasingly disconnected from the land immediately around us.

It's entirely possible to spend an hour walking on a treadmill without ever considering spending that same hour walking somewhere outside. I'm absolutely guilty of that myself.

And I'm not approaching this as somebody who knows every mountain, archaeological site or piece of Irish folklore.

Quite the opposite.

I want to know more.

I've been fortunate enough to experience enough hiking and traveling around Ireland to realize how much I don't know about the place I live.

Side Quest gives me an interesting way to change that.

Maybe technology doesn't always have to make movement more efficient.

Maybe occasionally it can deliberately make it less efficient.

Send me down a different road.

Show me something I didn't know was there.

Give me fifteen minutes away from the desk.

Where it is now

Side Quest is still an experiment.

The fundamental experience works: open it, generate a route, and go somewhere.

But there are two areas that need significant refinement before I'd consider it a mature consumer product.

The first is routing and safety. A randomly generated route is only useful if it understands the difference between somewhere that technically permits walking and somewhere a person would actually feel comfortable walking. Any public version of Side Quest would need much stronger consideration of paths, road types, pedestrian infrastructure and safe routing.

The second is discovery data. The points-of-interest system currently exists in a relatively basic form. For me, its potential lies in moving beyond generic map data toward something far more deliberate and specific to Ireland—history, archaeology, landscape and lore.

For now, that's okay.

It started because I wanted something that might convince me to leave my desk and go for a fifteen-minute walk.

And sometimes that's exactly what it does.

The idea in one sentence

Side Quest turns an ordinary walk into a small, randomized adventure—encouraging you to wander, discover something nearby, and reconnect with the place you're already in.