Basic Info

Name: Hidden Folks (隐藏的家伙 in China)

Platforms and prices:

A game by: Adriaan de Jongh and Sylvain Tegroeg

Contributors: Celine Veltman, Martin Kvale, Aran Koning, Mirthe Venbrux, Bram van Dijk

Major releases:

Feb. 15th, 2017: Release on Steam and App Store.

Jun. 15th, 2017: Factory update.

Dec. 14th, 2017: Snow update and release on Android and Mac App Store.

May 10th, 2018: Controller update.

Oct. 24th, 2018: Beach update.

Oct. 31st, 2018: Release on Nintendo Switch.

Jun. 4th, 2020: On Tour update.

Press contact: Adriaan de Jongh, hello@adriaandejongh.com

Description

Search for hidden folks in hand-drawn, interactive, miniature landscapes. Unfurl tent flaps, cut through bushes, slam doors, and poke some crocodiles! A strip of targets shows you what to look for. Tap a target for a hint, and find enough to unlock the next area.

Background

When game designer Adriaan de Jongh accidentally stumbled upon product designer and illustrator Sylvain Tegroeg's graduation exposition end of 2014, Adriaan was immediately drawn to the illustrations that served as a background to Sylvain's graduation project. Adriaan jokingly said to Sylvain that they should make a game together. After one casual meeting where Adriaan showed a prototype made of stolen art from Sylvain's website, they decided to dive into the adventure of making Hidden Folks together.

Everything in Hidden Folks is draw by hand, scanned in, placed, layered manually, animated, and scripted. All sounds in the game are mouth-made sounds, made (or rather 'yelled out') by the developers. There are no time limits, no points, just miniature areas with a bunch of folks and objects to be found. Sylvain and Adriaan showed Hidden Folks at various events, taking lessons from each showcase and making completely new version of the game every time. After completely new versions of the game at GDC, PAX East, and Gamescom in 2016, they went into full production to make Hidden Folks v1.0, which was released on Steam and the App Store on February 15th, 2017.

The game initially featured around 15 areas with themes like the camping, the desert, the laboratory, and the suburbs. Adriaan and Sylvain added factory and snow themed areas to the game in 2017, and beach themed areas in 2018, for a total of 25 playable areas. The team has currently put creating new content on pause, but continues to give customer and technical support to the game.

Features

32 hand-drawn areas

300+ targets to find

2000+ mouth-originated sound effects

500+ unique interactions

3 color modes: normal, sepia, and night mode

Cloud sync on iOS and Steam

100+ iMessage stickers (iOS only)

8 Steam Trading Cards (Steam only)

8 Steam Achievements (Steam only)

22 languages (translated by the community)

Supports mouse and keyboard, controller, and touch input.

Videos