Hidden Resistance was my team’s final year project at SupInfoGame, France.

The objective was to offer a geolocated multiplayer experience - also known as Alternate Reality Game (or ARG) - where the players try to conquest territories around the world, and this on mobile!

The team was:
– Pierre Blanchon: Game Designer
– Moi-même: Game Designer
– Théo Rasimi: Artist
– Yann Sarrat: Programmer
– Axelle De Sousa Teixeira Valerio: Project Manager

We’re back in 2012. Niantic Lab is not unknown, Ingres and Pokemon Go have not been released yet. And Yann Sarrat - future programmer on the project - tries to convince me with his idea for the final year project. As a long-term player of World of Warcraft and Guild Wars 2, he dreams to design a multiplayer experience which can make people be involved into it, as those who already reached the max level in MMORPGs but continue to come back to find their guilds, without any other objective than spending time with friends.


We consider the smartphones, with the various options it gets (geolocation, gyroscope, camera). We already see some ARG games based of custom maps from Google (Parallel Kingdom is an example).
Unity is an engine that starts to be interesting for mobile development.
We have a look on what augmented reality offers (the Nintendo 3DS has launched one year before and makes us getting nuts with cards and RA mini-games).
We also see that several transmedia experiences get some fame, like In Memoriam or Alt Minds by Eric Viennot and his studio Lexis Numérique.

From this mishmash of influences, we get our first concept:

Earth is controlled by an invisible enemy who enslaves its population without her knowing it. The players, aware of that manipulation and gathering in guilds/clans, fight each others in a geolocated turf war around the world. Taking over the more places gives supremacy to a clan. But keep focused, that Big Brother won’t let people resist without doing anything...

The Order is this all-powerful Big Brother that has taken over the world. Without the ordinary people seeing it, he made the world sad, grey, colorless, flavourless. Asepticized.
In the game, the Order is the map itself.
Police units patrol in the street to make sure its authority is respected.

Visually, we were mainly inspired by John Carpenter’s movie They Lives, but also the game De Blob.

Against this, a secret resistance took place. Its modus operandi: the street art.
We had various references for this: Banksy, Blek Le Rat, Shepard Fairey, Jef Aérosol. Those Artists/Activists from the real life who try to wake up people through their painting.

When a player starts his first gameplay session, he is asked to choose between the 3 factions of resistance which are visually distinguishable:
- Red Faction: Its tags are aggressive and try to make people acting, starting a revolution
- Blue Faction: More rational, its paintings try to make people think and question, making them changing the Law
- Yellow Faction: More joyful, she only wants to make fun of the Order and make her lose credibility

Once the player chooses his faction, he needs to tag the buildings from the place he is to spread the message of his new family.

Every player is geolocated on the map. He can act in a reduced perimeter around his current position.
His objective is to tag the more buildings he can in the name of his faction. BY city, each clan participate in this conquest of territories.

The player possesses a paint gauge, which runs down every time a player tags a building. To reload this gauge, he gets different options:
- Walk and collect small reloads of paint on the way
- Wait, it refills slowly over time
- Receive paint from other players of the same faction
- Go to one of his faction’s Headquarter (or HQ) and collect paint

By tagging the majority of the buildings in a certain area, players unlock installment of new HQs. Those places - in addition to providing paint - generate experience points (or XP) and credits to the members of the faction. The more a faction installs HQs, the more ressources its players get in order to fight.

As the player acts like a street artist, the tag is his main weapon.
To tag a building, he simply needs to touch it on the screen (if it is in his action perimeter). Then a tag mini-game will start:

On the screen, a tactile pattern appears. The player has to reproduce it the best he can before the end of a timer. If he do succeed, the first stencil is printed. The same mini-game then occurs a second and third time (but with different random patterns each time) to print 2 other stencils. The final tag is then complete.

Following if the player managed to draw correctly his patterns, he will get a global score. If the building was not already tagged (so still under The Order control, grey), it passes under the player’s faction color. His nickname in-game and the score he made appear then on the building, as a signature.
If the building was already conquered by another faction, the player needs to beat the score from the person that tagged it before so it passes to his faction’s color.

The player can customize the stencils that compose his tag mini-game, because part of his “signature” on buildings.
The more a player progress in the game and levels up (by getting XP), the more he ranks up within his faction. New functionalities are available then, and he gets access to new stencils. The tag a player leaves on a building can this way be a proof of a player’s rank.

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© 2016 Copyright Laurent Puichaud