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Along the way he managed to secure an investment from the Canada Media Fund, and even pick up a design award from at the GamAR 2013 Metaio Developer Competition based on an early prototype of the game.

Now Clandestine: Anomaly is just days from release. Post Arcade chatted with King to learn more about the game, the role that alternative reality plays (it turns out to be optional), and whether we ought to expect to see paranoid looking people on the street staring at the world through the screens of their phones anytime in the near future.

Post Arcade: It’s safe to say some people are flummoxed by the whole geolocation AR thing. Can you explain what it’s all about, and, more specifically, how it works in your game?

Corey King: Geolocative AR is about using technology already in your pocket to transform your environment. Using your smart device’s camera, compass, GPS, and gyroscope, we try to create the illusion that digital characters and objectives have been placed in the real world.

It’s kind of like Who Framed Roger Rabbit?, only the live action elements are the real world, as seen through your mobile device.

Weirdly, the closest I’ve come to experiencing a geolocation AR game was inside another game: Watch Dogs. It has AR mini-games in which the protagonist blasts aliens only he can see (via his phone) in public spaces. Is that vaguely the same as Clandestine: Anomaly, or am I totally out to lunch?

It’s similar in that they are both about a hidden conflict you can only see with a phone, and that the deaths of aliens are involved, but that’s where the similarities end. We are inspired by ARGs (Alternate Reality Games), and trying to sell the fiction of the game as “real” as opposed to arcade-y or cartoony. This informed a lot of design choices.