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It cannot be avoided heaviness when you enter the world Liyla and the shadows of war. You act like Liyla’s father, jump through the rubble, hide behind trash cans, and escape the Israeli bombs that hit the Gaza Strip. Your goal is to protect your daughter. But you can’t, no matter how many times you play, what to do. Unlike regular mobile games and like war itself, there is no extra life, no superpower, and no winners.
A dangerous idea
“I saw a picture of a father carrying the body of his dead daughter. And I wondered if I didn’t support my family? What if it happened to me? “For Rasheed Abueideh, who was a 37-year-old father of 37, it wasn’t an exercise in imagination, but it was a very real opportunity.
In 2014, a Palestinian software engineer saw from his home in Nablus that Israeli ground bombings and airstrikes were hitting the West Bank, just 130 kilometers away. This sparked a frightening idea that could cost him his freedom: making a video game about war.
“I live in Palestine, and if you do something that makes noise, you are endangering your freedom.”
He began his work in secret, carefully sharing nothing on social media platforms. He gathered a group of mostly international members so as not to endanger anyone. This was the beginning Lilac, A 20-minute platform / choose a mobile game for your own adventure, influenced by art styles and games. Linbo and according to some stories The last of us.
But Abuehid did not want to use his game as a mere escape: “Palestinians in the mainstream media are always dehumanized. Their personal stories are not covered, they ignore that we exist, that we have feelings, that we live in attack, and that we have no rights like everyone else in the world. I tried to do something to break that, ”he told WIRED in an interview.
Getting things up and running
Abueideh makes sure you know that the game is based on real events. It’s the first information you face when you start playing and you feel it all during the gameplay.
Many, if not all, elements of the world Lilac they were shaped by photographs taken during the war and distilled into a very minimalist style, based on silhouettes and completely colorless, with the exception of rocket flares and explosion feathers. For Abueideh, resemblance to reality was a key part of his development process.
“People died. Actually, this is not a game. It has a much deeper meaning. So by linking all these images, I wanted to reflect exactly what happened and convey the exact emotion of the person in it. That situation.”
It was this effort to accurately reflect what happened that Abueid had the greatest challenge. In the two years he played the game, he had to read and watch war footage over and over again, “I literally cried sometimes while writing code or designing a game. It was hard,” says Abueideh. “The war lasted 51 days, and I repeated it for 2 years.”
In 2016, the year it was released, Apple wanted to re-categorize Abueideh Lilac In the “News” or “Reference” category in the App Store, rather than “Games,” in the category of “political messaging.” This led to a wave of player support, which eventually led to Apple releasing and displaying it again Lilac as a game.
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