One day, while searching for a store address on Google Street View, this streetart piece caught my attention.
An invader 💡 moment
The artwork is created by French street artist Invader, renowned worldwide for his pieces inspired by 8-bit video game. In addition to his art, Invader also inspired the popular Mobile game, FlashInvader. This indie App turns the artwork into a playful treasure hunt, allowing users to scan the pieces they've found—a game that I'm naturally a part of!
Screenshot of the Mobile game FlashInvader
As a software developer looking for his next side project at that time, this got me thinking:
What if I looked how the Flash invader app worked under the hood and ported it to the browser. This way, anybody, anywhere, would be able to play the game!
My first idea was to use a proxy to examine what type of requests the mobile app was making. Although I would have used Charles's for this purpose in the past, we now have superior tools like MITMproxy.
While inspecting the request content, I gained some insight into how the app functioned.
In essence, it’s making a request to a remote server with the following parameters: