Guest experience concept · College project
Curse Tracker
An interactive experience concept for Dark Universe at Universal Epic Universe. Guests opt in, explore the land through five checkpoints, and reach a finale shaped by the path they took.
Concept project. I wrote this as a college project in July 2025 and presented it as an executive summary. It is an original concept. It was not built, piloted with guests, or adopted by Universal Orlando Resort.
The curse starts before the ride does.
Curse of the Werewolf sends guests racing to find Maleva the Seer. My concept starts from a question the ride leaves open: what if the curse is already at work on a guest before they ever step into the barn?
Curse Tracker wraps the attraction in a story the guest carries across the whole land. It gives guests a reason to slow down and explore Darkmoor in detail, and it builds a throughline that runs before and after the ride, so the meeting with Maleva at the end feels earned rather than scripted.
What if the curse found you before the ride did?
I designed it for guests ages 13 and up: fans of immersive storytelling, return visitors looking for something new in a land they already know, and anyone who wants to be part of the story instead of only watching it.
Five stops, and a fate at the end of them.
Guests opt in through the Universal Orlando app or pick up a themed wristband, the Curse Talisman, at a station near the entrance to the land. The experience opens with a message from Maleva hinting that the guest carries more than they know. From there, the land itself is the queue: five lore locations, visited in whatever order the day allows.
Wolfsbane Field
Learn the signs of infection, and the symptoms that give the cursed away.
Seer's Cart
Receive a fortune or a warning, decided by random chance.
Alchemist's Forge
Handle protective items like iron and silver, and learn what they are meant to keep away.
Ruined Chapel
Listen to eerie recordings left behind by the cursed.
Finale
The Mirror of Fate
Near the exit of Curse of the Werewolf, guests approach a reflective surface where Maleva reveals their fate. Which checkpoints a guest visited, and how many, decides the outcome: spared, or told they have succumbed to the curse. A personalized visual, delivered by projection effects or through the app, closes the story.
Because the paths branch, a second run can end differently. That is the point. The concept is built to be replayed.
Four pillars, and two of them are operations.
The summary organizes the concept around four guest experience pillars. Safety and process are operations decisions as much as creative ones, which is where my attractions background shaped the design most.
Safety
Checkpoints are spread across the land, which reduces the chance of congestion. Each one uses passive interaction, scanning a QR code or tapping a zone, so guests stay hands free and never have to line up or gather closely.
Service
Themed Team Members called Seers guide guests through the story, sharing cryptic messages and helping them understand their progress. Their narrative based scripts add texture and a little unpredictability to each visit.
Setting
Every checkpoint is designed to blend into Darkmoor's existing gothic environment, using spaces that are already part of the land's storytelling. Sound design, atmospheric lighting, and practical effects support the illusion without overwhelming the space.
Process
Guests opt in through the app or the Curse Talisman wristband, and progress is stored digitally against the guest's profile. Each stop influences the outcome, and that branching path structure is what supports replays and alternative endings.
How I think about guest experience.
Design at land scale. The unit of design here is not one attraction. It is a whole environment, and the story has to survive real guest behavior: people skip stops, double back, and arrive in the wrong order. The concept is built to hold together anyway.
Respect for the source material. Everything in Curse Tracker grows out of what Dark Universe and Curse of the Werewolf already established, from the lore at each checkpoint to Maleva delivering the verdict at the end.
Operations inside the creative idea. Checkpoint spacing doubles as crowd management. Passive interactions keep guests moving instead of queueing. The finale sits at the ride exit, where the story naturally lands. An idea that ignores operations does not survive contact with a real park day.
Curse Tracker is part of my history with theme park work, and it is still the clearest early example of how I approach guest experience: start with the story, design for the whole land, and plan for how guests actually behave. The full executive summary is linked in the first section, exactly as I wrote it.