The following info and comments come from creative director Jonathan Morin, lead designer Danny Belanger and story designer Kevin Shortt...

- the motion capture suits didn't have pockets on them
- this caused a problem for when Aiden needed to take out his cell phone from his pocket
- the dev team decided to use a magnet to attach a phone to the mo-cap actor's leg
- this allowed him to slide his phone off his leg upwards, acting as if the suit had a pocket on it

"The only mandate we had was to work on an open-city game. So one of the big things for us was reflecting on the urban life of today. We chatted a lot about ideas for the game, and the one subject that kept coming up was the impact of technology on our daily lives. Back then, smartphones were somewhere in between pop culture and geekness. My family didn't know what they were. They were just emerging, but it was obvious they would become something big.

It's very rare when you start a project and you have this canvas of possibilities. Facebook, social media, privacy--it was so easy to go into hour-long discussions about those subjects. That fascination early in the project became a weapon for me to [go to management] and say, 'Let's do something where fun can collide with thinking.'" - Morin

- the ctOS is the in-game operating system that controls cameras, traffic lights, steam vents and more
- the original idea the dev team had included images of a finger over a red object accompanied by the phrase "Control an entire city through the press of a button"

"When we started to talk about the game, we asked, 'What should Aiden do while he's at his safe house?' Well, he should be monitoring everyone. He should know about everybody. The fantasy has always been, what if you can access everything? What if you were the invisible man in the room?" - Morin

- tap into the city's repository of personal records and surveillance data to learn about pedestrians
- get info on profession, salary, and Web browsing habits
- listen in on phone calls and remotely hack text messages with people of interest

"We wanted to give that sense you get when you sit on a bus and overhear people talking about whatever. Snippets of conversations. You just hear enough to go, wow that's a *crag*ed up relationship. And off you go." - Shortt

- the dev team observed real-life people outside of their office building to see how they move about and interact with the city around them
- the same level of attention was paid to people traveling via subway
- a huge amount of writing went into NPC profiles and text messages
- there is a white outline around items you can hack
- you can hack a drawbridg
- you can hack a window washer to elevate you up
- devs consulted with Russian security firm Kaspersky Lab to ensure that none of the various hacks were too extravagant

"The core for us is having a simple way to connect and interact with the world, but by doing that, it has to be useful and not feel like a win button. It's a window of opportunity. It's a win against one guy, but the other AI might become aggressive and start searching, and that puts you in even more danger. And then you chain the other hacks to distract them. So it's all about risk-reward and giving people windows." - Belanger

- AI react smartly to your hacks, picking up on things when they become fishy