The main idea was to create a platform to encourage the community to explore the lore of the upcoming game Den of Wolves in a playful way. When the experience was released it pivoted into a (lightweight) alternate reality game by the community which was really fun to see.
A fictional retro style hacking tool called Xero was created that monitored and hacked network traffic in Midway.
I helped the agency North Kingdom (and Magnus as the main concept driver) and game studio 10 Chambers with all the WebGL.
Read more at northkingdom.com/case/den-of-wolves
The map
The map is where players jumps into each node/game. Other players cursors are shown as symbols on the map, to emphasise the multiplayer aspect of the experience.
The main nodes have HTML overlays that matches the position in 3D. The smaller ambient nodes symbolise network traffic between different devices. Points, labels and lines are drawn with instanced meshes. It's very rewarding to draw many things with few draw-calls. It's more creative than one might think to squeeze as much unique data into systems that make it all happen on the GPU.
Minigames
Each main node reveal an asset, either an image or a 3D model. I created a "glitch"-engine to obfuscate assets into noise and data-packages that forms a messy stream of data. Many layers of effects could be combined and animated. I developed a custom syntax that could be parsed and then animated over time with the animation library GSAP. Content creators could create custom presets for different kind of assets.
By playing minigames, players can control the noise and "decrypt" the assets to reveal them for 20 seconds. Some nodes are multiplayer (via WebSockets), there different users controlled different settings, decrypting the assets together.
Den of Wolves – Official Trailer
Try the experince yourself, if you can find it: