Creating a map of space invaders for easy hunting

The artist Invader has been leaving his mark on cities around the world with mosaic art. These pixelated invaders have become a treasure hunt for many. However, tracking these invaders has always been a challenge, especially when it comes to knowing which ones have already been flashed, and which ones have been destroyed.

While there are several good maps available for tracking invaders, none of them display the previously flashed invaders. This gap inspired me to create MapInvaders, a map that not only shows the location and status of the invaders but also indicates which ones have been flashed.

What we need

Let’s not reinvent the wheel. Most data are readily available or scrapable:

To find this last piece of information, we had to intercept requests from the flashInvaders app to understand the underlying API calls.

The method depends on your mobile religion:

For Android

Enable developer mode: go to Settings > About Phone, tap the Build Number seven times, then go back to Settings to find and access Developer Options then toggle “Allow USB debugging”.
Install adb on your computer and connect your phone to the computer. Confirm adb is working and seeing the device with adb devices.
Once adb installed and your device is detected, execute the following command in your computer’s terminal:
– mac: adb logcat | grep “space-invaders”
– windows: adb logcat | findstr com.ltu.flashInvader or adb logcat | findstr api.space-invaders.com

Open the flashInvaders app on your phone and a line containing your uid should appear in your computer’s terminal.

For iPhone

Ensure your phone and computer are on the same WiFi network.
Install mitmproxy:

On mac, open your terminal and paste this:

/bin/bash -c “$(curl -fsSL https://raw.githubusercontent.com/Homebrew/install/HEAD/install.sh)”

Then type brew install mitmproxy in the terminal. Upon installation, just type mitmweb

then start it with mitmweb in a terminal.
Configure the proxy, then start the flashInvaders app and have it make a request (e.g. by going into your account).
A line containing your uid should appear.
If you have any question, ask your favourite LLM:

Adding the uid to the map

Equipped with the uid, we can query the flashInvaders database from outside the official app, allowing us to retrieve the list of previously flashed invaders.

In the map, simply add “?uid=xxx” to the url (replacing xxx by the uid you found) to see your data.
Be careful not to leave “?luid=” and do change it to “?uid=”.

Making the map

The rest is now just a matter of asking an LLM to write you the code for a page with a map showing all the invaders. Instead of the boring details here’s the map.

Thanks to