You're leading a protest against an oppressive regime. Your followers stream out of downtown skyscrapers to join you, until the crowd becomes a long, multicoloured tail stretching on for blocks. Around the corner lies salvation: a "voting station" where people can cast ballots for democracy. But the road ahead is teeming with police. Helicopters close in overhead. Suddenly, the world goes black.

Game over: you've been arrested. Would you like to share your score?

Love and Peace, a game for mobile phones designed by the Hong Kong-based games company nxTomo, is like a complex, three-dimensional reinterpretation of the classic arcade game Snake – but with strong political overtones. nxTomo's general manager, Adam Siu, 42, says games are like movies and books: they represent the people who make them. And Hong Kong residents have spent recent weeks mired in a debate about civil disobedience.

"I don't think there's any real message in the game," said Siu. "It's more of a reflection of reality."

On Tuesday, the 17th anniversary of the former British colony's return to mainland control, tens of thousands of people took to the streets in Hong Kong's biggest pro-democracy demonstrations in recent history. While the protesters' demands are varied, their unanimous target is Beijing – its creeping influence over the city's boardrooms, newspapers, classrooms and courts.

Around 500 people, most of them students, were arrested for staging a sit-in, and on Friday police arrested five protest organisers, including the "front convenor" Johnson Yeung Ching-yin, 22, ostensibly for blocking traffic.

Hong Kong has a strong recent history of protest, but analysts say this year's participants were particularly young, digitally savvy and willing to break the law to make themselves heard. "Their main platform is Facebook," said Charles Mok, a legislative councillor in Hong Kong and former president of the Hong Kong Information Technology Federation.

The demographic shift began in 2012, he said, when thousands of students, led by a 15-year-old high-schooler, mobilised to halt an impending "patriotic education" campaign, leading the government to revise its plans. "[Hong Kong's students] won that battle, and ever since then they've become more active on a lot of other political issues as well – even participating in the political process, proposing their own reform packages and so on," Mok said. "They've been able to organise younger people in a much bigger way than before."

nxTomo is a division of Next Media, Hong Kong's largest media company and one of its most stridently pro-democratic. It operates out of a windowless, fluorescent-lit office in the bowels of a cavernous warehouse in the city's far-flung suburbs. On a bulletin board someone has tacked a sketch of Edward Snowden, and next to it a poster depicting Taiwan's Sunflower Movement, another recent mass demonstration against Beijing.

The game is based on Occupy Central with Love and Peace (OCLP), a pro-reform civil disobedience movement that has threatened to mobilise 10,000 people to paralyse the city's central business district later this year. The group has demanded that Beijing, which controls Hong Kong under a "one country, two systems" framework, grant the city a more democratic voting process by 2017.

Last month, OCLP organised an unofficial "civil referendum", allowing Hong Kong residents to choose how they would like to pick their next leader. Although more than 700,000 people – about a tenth of the city's population – cast pro-democratic votes, Beijing has refused to compromise.

One day in early June, Siu stumbled across a YouTube video showing a little girl singing a Cantonese version of Do You Hear the People Sing from Les Misérables, the pro-democracy movement's unofficial anthem. "If our generation is to have a future, we need to open our eyes," sings the unnamed girl. It gave Siu an idea.

His team had been working on a protest-themed game for the past two years, and the frenzy surrounding Occupy Central gave them an excuse to release a prototype. He called five employees to his corner office – designers, producers, engineers. "I said take this function out, take that function out, make it simpler and simpler," he said. "Some of us didn't sleep for three, four days." On 18 June, six days after the team began working, they launched the game on the Google Play store. (The release was only temporary, Sui said; he took the game down after Tuesday's protest.)

Just before the launch, Siu reached out to friends to ask for their input. Kit Man, 34, an app designer and budding political cartoonist, was happy help. "I think the [Occupy Central] movement itself is a little bit clumsy – its leaders are very academic," he said, sitting in his concrete-floored studio in the industrial district Kwun Tong. "They're all from the university, and they do things in a very gentle way, emphasising love and peace. But Beijing, to me, is like a thief. How can a lecturer fight a thief?"

After the patriotic education protests, Man helped establish a collective of illustrators called HKSoc Comic, which uses Facebook as its primary platform. His cartoons often feature ugly caricatures of dissembling local politicians. One shows a hunched, nefarious-looking man in a Communist-style hat selling a dilapidated house to an anxious customer.

"It's not quite perfect, but move in first and if you have problems later, I'll help you fix them," the Communist says. "It's a metaphor," Man explained. "Beijing always says accept our conditions now, and things will get better in the future. But do you really trust them?"

Man has faced subtle pressure for his work. In mid-June, just when HKSoc began advertising the referendum, Facebook blocked the site's admin page, making it impossible to update. He has spent weeks lobbying Facebook to unblock the site, with little progress. His family has urged him to stop drawing – most of his income comes from designing apps, and they fear that by provoking Beijing he'll lose access to a valuable market.

The invisible threat has only made him more outspoken. "This is how they scare the community, so they won't speak out," he said. "And I think that's not acceptable at all."