A Brand activation that speaks to the soul
Untamed Heroine is a poetic tribute to resilience, identity, and the beauty of transformation.
Based on the Fall/Winter 2025 visuals, the coming-of-age story of our Untamed Heroine takes place in a Brontësque sketchbook—raw, romantic, and resolutely feminine: a journey through torn pages and deeply personal thoughts.
Gamification
The platformer gamification, imagined for the Brand’s target, reverts the usual approach of fast-paced arcade games typical of branded gamifications in favor of a more relaxed, story-driven discovery of a woman finding her voice, her courage, and her place in an ever-changing landscape.
The experience is a slow climb towards the summit of self-acceptance, divided in three scenarios, each representing the emotionality of our character.
Throughout her journey, the heroine retrieves pages of her personal diary, each progressively completing a poem that’s an ode to her future.
Untamed Heroine was cared for in its most minute details, with all illustrations hand-made and crafted to represent the ideal version of MaxMara’s heroine and the landscapes she journeys through.
The poem, divided in 8 stanzas, was then voiced in 12 different languages through attentive use of AI, while the sound design, composed of 3 main soundtracks and almost 40 specific sound bites, was curated by a dedicated sound designer.
Reception
Untamed Heroine was launched for both the European, USA and Asian market by the Brand, achieving more than 270.000 users in its first month, with more than 20% (54.327) discovering the new FW25 collection on Maxmara.com through the gamification.
Technologies
Untamed Heroine is a 2D platformer rendered in a 3D scene: Three.js handles the rendering pipeline while Rapier2D, compiled to WebAssembly with SIMD instructions, runs the simulation. The choice of a 2D physics engine inside a 3D renderer was deliberate: it gave us the visual layering and perspective depth of WebGL with none of the overhead of a full 3D collision world. Rapier’s built-in character controller handles slopes, ground snapping and auto-stepping, so the heroine walks, jumps and rides moving platforms with solid physics.
The character is a sprite: a PlaneGeometry mesh with UV-offset animation cycling through hand-drawn frames. Each state (idle, walk, jump, respawn) lives on its own sprite sheet with specific timing. The system monitors frame rate at runtime: when it detects the renderer dropping below 30 fps, it doubles the animation step interval so motion stays fluid even on slower devices.
The most distinctive feature is the bridge drawing mechanic. Players drag from one anchor point to another, drawing a freehand path that becomes a walkable physics surface. Every point is validated in real time: a forward progression check via dot product ensures the line always advances toward the target, while a perpendicular deviation check keeps the path close to the ideal straight line. Once complete, Douglas-Peucker simplification compresses the raw points into a lean polyline, and each segment becomes a rotated physics collider aligned to the visual stroke.
The project’s signature visual is the ink spread effect. A custom post-processing ShaderPass layers two circular masks driven by six-octave Fractional Brownian Motion noise: the inner mask reveals full color, a transitional ring renders at partial saturation, and everything beyond stays in grayscale. When complete, the shader pass self-removes from the pipeline.
Company Info
Adoratorio® is a Design Studio shaping narratives that transcend aesthetics and drive culture.
Every frame follows a strict four-step pipeline: animation mixers update, the scene advances all actors, Rapier steps the simulation, and the EffectComposer applies post-processing. The game engine is fully decoupled from Vue’s reactivity: Vue owns the UI layer, while everything on the canvas is vanilla Three.js communicating through a Pinia store.