Synopsis
Each chapter follows one sahabi from a moment of choice that shaped the deen they passed to us. The mechanics are gentle: parallax traversal, environmental presence, scenes that resolve through choice and conversation rather than combat.
The vertical slice in development is Bilal ibn Rabah’s arc. From his enslavement in Mecca, through patience under torture, his liberation by Abu Bakr, and the day he stood on the roof of the masjid in Medina and called the first adhan.
Future chapters cover companions from across the first generation. Men and women, those whose names everyone knows and those whose names a thousand years almost lost. The full game is not one story. It is an anthology of arcs that, taken together, are the sira told from underneath.
Setting & characters
7th-century Hijaz: Mecca’s narrow streets, the caravan roads, the new mosque-and-marketplace at Yathrib. The architecture is sourced from period scholarship rather than orientalist illustration. The whole world is hand-painted in 2.5D, brushstroke preserved.
The companions appear as stylized 2D characters with full agency. Faces are sometimes obscured by composition (turban shadow, profile, framing) where doing so serves the frame, not as a hard rule. Khadija, Sumayyah, Khansa, and Aisha are written with the same depth as Abu Bakr, Umar, and Hamza.
The off-screen rule
The Prophet ﷺ is never depicted visually or voiced. Neither are the angels, nor any of the other prophets. This is the most non-negotiable thing about the studio.
He is present through the most demanding visual problem we’ve ever set ourselves: how to show his weight on a scene without showing him. We do it through Thuluth and Diwani calligraphy of his reported words, animated stroke-by-stroke as though under an unseen pen. Through the way other characters orient themselves toward an off-frame presence. Through light, through silence, through the gravity of what has just been heard.
The constraint is supposed to be the limitation. It has turned out to be the most generative thing in the project.
On sources
Every narrative beat is traceable to a classical source: Ibn Hisham’s Sirat Rasul Allah, Ibn Kathir’s al-Bidayah wa-l-Nihayah, al-Tabari, Sahih al-Bukhari, Sahih Muslim. We do not invent dialogue for the Prophet ﷺ. Where the traditions disagree, we either pick the strongest with citation or stage the disagreement honestly. An in-game sources codex will let the player check any cited beat at any time.
Stay close to development.
We’ll write when there’s something real to show: concept art, audio drafts, scene blockouts. No marketing.
Codename: sira-companions. Engine: Unity 6 LTS + URP. Target Y2 ship. See the studio’s principles for the rules every frame is held against.