Why DeenOD is becoming a studio

For three years, DeenOD has meant one thing: a competitive trivia app about the deen. It worked. A small audience that played hard, got something out of it, and stuck around longer than I expected. Then I quietly stopped working on it.

The honest reason was that I had been building the wrong thing. Trivia is a frame I reached for because it was the easiest one to ship alone. The questions are bounded, the loop is mechanical, and the audience for "Islamic anything" forgives a lot of rough edges. I wrote that app because I could finish it, not because it was the thing I most wanted to make.

What I most wanted to make is games. Specifically, the games I wished existed when I was a Muslim teenager.

The frame

The reference I keep coming back to is Studio Ghibli. Ghibli draws from Shinto folklore and Japanese pastoral life the way you can imagine breathing. Naturally, with the assumption that the wells are deep enough to last centuries. They don't market the Shinto, and they don't apologize for it. They make beautiful films and let the source come through as texture.

I want to make games like that, drawing from what's downstream of the Qur'an, the sira (the Prophet's biographical tradition), and the broader Islamic intellectual and artistic inheritance. Not "Islamic games" the way "Christian rock" is a genre. That frame turns the work into a sermon and the audience into a niche. Games that happen to come from this well, made well enough that someone who has never opened a Qur'an plays them and walks away changed in some quiet way.

The closer studio reference is Supergiant. Bastion, Transistor, Pyre, Hades, instantly recognizable as the same studio while playing nothing like each other. Hand-painted, voice-led, no compromises on craft. One title at a time, finished properly. That's the bar.

The constraint

Here is the most interesting part of the work, and the thing I want to be clearest about.

We do not depict Allah, the Prophet ﷺ, the other prophets, or angels. Not in shadow, not in silhouette, not in a tasteful blur, not in calligraphy of their names presented as a face. This is not a marketing position or a sensitivity setting. It is a foundation the rest of the studio is built on top of.

Most studios would treat this as a problem. We treat it as the most generative constraint we have ever been handed.

Because if you cannot show the Prophet ﷺ, you have to show his weight on a scene without showing him. You do that through how the other characters orient their bodies. Through the calligraphy of his reported words, inscribed stroke-by-stroke under what looks like an unseen pen. Through the change in light when he enters a room a player cannot see. Through silence. Silence used more deliberately than most games are willing to use it.

That problem, how to make presence felt through absence, is the studio's most distinctive visual problem. It is also a problem nobody else is solving, because nobody else is asked to. Solving it well makes the studio recognizable in a way no logo or color palette could. The constraint is the signature.

The slate

I have five titles in mind, sequenced by readiness.

The active one is Sira: The Companions, a narrative anthology following the people closest to the Prophet ﷺ, the men and women who heard the message first and built the community that carried it. Sidescrolling, hand-painted, no combat-as-spectacle. The vertical slice in development is Bilal ibn Rabah's arc, from Mecca through the first adhan (the call to prayer) in Medina.

After Sira, the next two run in parallel exploration:

Andalus, a metroidvania set in the late convivencia of al-Andalus. You play a young scholar fleeing the fall of a city, carrying an illuminated manuscript the inquisition wants destroyed. The progression system is knowledge: fahm (understanding) unlocks inscriptions and hidden corridors, sabr (patience) survives long environmental hazards, hikma (wisdom) de-escalates enemies who would otherwise be lethal. Combat exists, but every mandatory encounter has a non-violent solution.

Qisas al-Anbiya ("stories of the prophets"), an anthology of mechanic-distinct shorts, each adapting a prophet's story with its own camera, mechanic, and pacing. The unifying language is the studio's visual and audio DNA, not the gameplay.

Behind those: The House of Wisdom, a choice-driven RPG in Abbasid Baghdad's translation movement; The Ummah, a life sim of a community and its masjid; and a long-horizon grand strategy that does not have a name yet.

The first three are believable inside five years if I keep my head down. The other two are real, but I am not going to oversell them.

The model

I am not going to put microtransactions in these games. I am not going to put gacha in them, energy timers in them, FOMO loops in them, manipulative push notifications in them. I am not going to sell your data to anyone, run ads at you, or design daily-quest systems that pretend to respect your time while measuring how often you check.

I am going to ask you to pay once, when the game ships, and then leave you alone.

Until the games ship, the studio is patron-supported. The reference is the Bible Project, which has run for a decade on patrons because they are honest about what they need to keep going and because the work is good enough to deserve it. When the patron tier is live, supporters get devlog access, behind-the-scenes art and audio, beta access to vertical slices, and their name in the credits. None of that gates the games. The games ship to everyone, premium one-time purchase, the day they're ready.

That is the deal. It is the deal I would have wanted on the other side of the screen when I was sixteen, scraping for the next thing I could learn from.

The cadence

I will write here every other Monday. The post will be short or long depending on what the work earned that fortnight.

Some posts will be engineering: how a shader works, how a scene is composed, why a system was cut. Some will be art: concept-art process, palette decisions, what the contract artists and I argued about. Some will be narrative: what we are sourcing from Ibn Hisham this month, why we ended up siding with one tradition over another. Some will be philosophy: why a constraint, what it freed.

I will publish the unflattering things alongside the flattering ones. Devlog culture works when it is a working journal, not a marketing channel. Lucas Pope's Papers, Please and Obra Dinn devlogs are the reference. So is Ben Brode talking about Marvel Snap before it shipped.

If you sign up for updates from the studio, you will get these posts in your inbox the day they go up, with no extra layer of marketing email around them. That is it.

The invitation

If anything here resonates, the most useful thing you can do right now is sign up to follow the work. The waitlist is one field; we will write only when there is something real to show. The patron tier launches when there are fifty of you and the studio site has earned that ask.

If you know a hand-paint artist, a Spine 2D rigger, a qari (a Qur'an reciter) willing to record exclusively, a sira scholar who would advise without rubber-stamping, or anyone working in this space who would want to talk, reach out. The contact form has a hiring path.

We do not have a trailer. We do not have concept art on the home page yet. We have words, a vertical slice in development, and a clear sense of what the studio is and is not.

That is enough to start.

Mahmoud