Shadow Government was conceived in the height of the Facebook Social Game era and right after the work I did on Dog Show Friends.    We began our process by researching the Ville style games on Facebook with an emphasis of Games like Empires and Allies and CityVille.  We wanted to create a game that felt like it fit into the existing game ecosystem but had unique mechanics that set it apart.

We did hundreds of hours of research to get at a strong story with an interesting visual style.   We were aiming between the hyper casual games on iOS crossed with deep seated conspiracy theories  bubbling under the surface of American society. We devoured books, movies, podcasts, and radio broadcasts to learn more and eventually found a style and story that was deceptively simple but also went deep.

Part of our design pillar was to use our research to inform motifs that hide deeper meaning out of plain sight. Of note, we were able to find documents from the Bilderberg  Conferences over the years, documentaries from the like of Alex Jones, photos from Jekyll Island, pieces of the Voynich Manuscript and more.