On the off-screen rule

The studio has a rule that comes before all the others.

We do not depict Allah, the Prophet ﷺ, the other prophets, or angels. Not in shadow, not in silhouette, not in calligraphy of their names presented as a face, not in a tasteful blur, not in a body part briefly cropped to imply the rest. This is non-negotiable. It is a foundation the rest of the studio is built on top of, not a sensitivity setting we tune.

I want to write about this honestly, because the way the rule is usually discussed is wrong in two opposite directions. One side treats it as a quaint limitation, something a Western audience has to tolerate to play games made by a Muslim studio. The other side treats it as a holy commandment, beyond engagement, something to be reverently mentioned and then walked past. Neither is the way the rule actually works inside a games studio.

The way it actually works is this: you cannot show the most important figure in the story you are telling. So you have to find another way.

What you do instead

We do four things.

Reported speech. When the Prophet ﷺ says something, another character heard him say it, and that character carries the words into the scene. The narration sits on the sahabi’s body language, on the way they choose what to remember, on the small embellishments and contradictions that mark what was actually meaningful to the person remembering. This isn’t a workaround. It’s how the sira tradition itself was carried for the first centuries, through the chain of transmission, the isnad. We’re just being honest about what reaching us is reaching us through.

Calligraphy as voice. When his words appear on screen, they appear as inscription. Thuluth or Diwani, animated stroke by stroke under what looks like an unseen pen, in the space the camera is already in. This is the studio’s most distinctive visual move; you can see a v1 of it on the home page. The technique is centuries old in Islamic visual culture, where calligraphy is representation in a way it isn’t in Latin or Greek-derived traditions. We’re inheriting a rendering pipeline that is already in the tradition we’re drawing from.

Environmental presence. Light changes when he enters a room a player can’t see. Other characters orient their bodies around an off-frame point. Conversations pause, then resume in a slightly different register. Wind moves a curtain. A muezzin’s call carries differently in the next neighbourhood over because of where it’s being addressed. None of these are spectacle. They’re the most demanding visual problem we’ve ever set ourselves: how to make presence felt through absence.

Silence. The right gap, held long enough, does work no sound or image can do. Sound design defaults to more in most games; ours defaults to less, and the Prophet ﷺ’s nearness is one of the things that earns silence.

What that asks of the writers

The honest cost is in the writing room, not the art room.

If the most important character in a scene cannot speak, the second-most-important character has to carry the freight. That means our writing about the sahaba has to be at least as developed as our writing about anyone in a Naughty Dog game. Bilal cannot just be the man who got tortured for his faith and then called the first adhan. He has to be a person, with a sense of humour, with a relationship to his own body, with reasons he chose patience that we can feel without him ever stating them. Khadija cannot be the wife and the first believer; she has to be the businesswoman, the widow, the mother, the woman who stayed up at night when her husband came back shaking from the cave. Sumayyah cannot be a martyr-statue; she has to have been someone whose death meant something specifically because of who she was.

This is why our reading list is so long. Ibn Hisham, Ibn Kathir, al-Tabari, the canonical hadith collections, plus modern sira scholarship from Mubarakpuri to Salahi to Lings. Not because we’re reverent (though I hope we are), but because if you are going to put the second-most-important character in the foreground, you have to know who they were.

What that asks of the artists

The honest cost in the art room is harder to talk about, because most of the art doesn’t exist yet.

What we know so far: every scene with the Prophet ﷺ in it is a composition problem the artist has to solve before they paint a single stroke. Where is the focus? Where is the player’s eye supposed to land? Who is in the frame, and how do they tell us he is in the room without us seeing him? The cheap answer is "he’s just out of frame, the camera is on someone else." That works once or twice and then it gets repetitive. A sitcom convention applied to the most important relationship in the story.

The interesting answer is the one we’re building toward: the calligraphy is a character in the scene. It is not a subtitle or a reverent inscription floating off to the side. It is the visual carrier of the Prophet’s ﷺ presence in the same compositional weight class as a sahabi’s face. The hand of the unseen pen is part of the staging.

We aren’t there yet. The home-page Bismillah is the proof of concept; the slice will be the proof of practice; the full game will be the proof of the technique at scale. Each step of that ladder is real work.

The other prophets and the angels

The same rule applies to all the prophets and to all the angels. The full off-screen system is not a Prophet-Muhammad-specific concession; it’s a feature of how Islamic tradition relates to all of these figures. Practically, this means that Qisas al-Anbiya, when we get to making it, is a game made up entirely of off-screen-protagonist mechanics. Every short in that anthology has the same problem at its core, in a different shape.

I think that’s actually a gift. Qisas will be the first game I know of where every chapter is a different formal solution to the same hard problem. The mechanics shift (point-and-click in one, parallax traversal in another, branching dialogue in another) but the underlying constraint is constant. That’s a unifying language, not a fragmenting one.

What the constraint gives us

I lied a little, earlier, when I said the rule is non-negotiable for theological reasons and we have to find another way. The theology is real and binding; that part is true. But the framing of "we have to find another way" is what I want to push back on now that we’re a year in.

We don’t have to find another way. We get to find another way. There is a difference.

Most studios making narrative games are working in the same shape as every other narrative studio: a protagonist whose face you see, a camera you control, a voice you hear. The constraints are mostly engine-level (frame budget, animation count, dialogue line count) and audience-level (genre conventions, accessibility expectations). The actual creative envelope is wide, and most of the work inside it has been done before.

Our envelope is narrower in one specific place (we cannot do the standard depiction of the most central figures) and dramatically wider in every other place, because nobody else is solving the problem we’re solving. Calligraphy as character. Environmental presence as primary scene driver. Silence used as deliberately as score. The visual punctuation of the studio (geometric pattern as motion design, Islamic architecture as UI scaffold) inheriting from a thousand-year tradition that mostly works in still media and is only just being translated to interactive ones.

That’s a lot of unclaimed territory. Most studios don’t look like our studio because they don’t have to find any of these techniques. We have to. So we will.

The constraint is the signature.

What you should expect to see

In the next devlog, I want to write about the calligraphy reveal specifically: how the v1 on the home page works, what we got wrong on the first pass (it was mechanical, not handwritten), what v2 fixes, and what v3 will need (true SVG path-drawing per stroke). It’s the technique most likely to be the studio’s public visual signature, and we should be honest about its current limits.

After that, art briefs. We’re a few weeks from commissioning the first concept art for Sira: The Companions, and the brief itself, the document we send the artist, is going to be public when it’s done. Studios usually keep these private. We don’t have to.

Moody