On crowdfunding "Dreams on a Pillow": Award-winning Palestinian game developer of "Liyla ..." talks motivations, challenges, and influences

New game a story of 1948 Nabka (Arabic word meaning catastrophe)

Concept art for “Dreams on a Pillow,” a stealth adventure game award-winning game developer Rasheed Abueideh is crowdfunding right now on LaunchGood.

Update on Jan. 13, 2025: The campaign for “Dreams on a Pillow” was successfully met and exceeded its goal by about $45,000. As of mid-February, you can still support the project via its continuous LaunchGood campaign.

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Eight years ago Rasheed Abueideh published the award-winning game “Liyla and the Shadows of War,” a platformer based on events in a phase of the 2014 Gaza War; in the game, a Palestinian civilian struggles to survive amid attacks on his and his family’s neighborhood and the often indiscriminate destruction all around them.

On Hamas’ Oct. 7, 2023 attack on Israel resulted in 1,200 people killed and 250 abducted. The IDF response and ongoing bombardment has killed 45,000 people (who can be counted — others likely are under rubble) according to Gaza health officials as of Dec. 16, with half of that number being women and children, the Gaza Health Ministry says.

A United Nations Special Committee called Israel’s actions “consistent with the characteristics of genocide” in a report released on Nov. 14.

As December began, Abueideh started the crowdfunding campaign for his long-awaited major follow up to “Liyla …” which is “Dreams on a Pillow.”

The campaign on LaunchGood at —https://www.launchgood.com/v4/campaign/dreams_on_a_pillow — has 28 days left as of Dec. 17 and has raised $116,440 of its $194,800 USD goal.

“Dreams on a Pillow” is a “pseudo-3D stealth adventure” inspired by a folktale based on actual events that happened during the 1948 Nabka, which saw about half of Palestine's population forced from their homes after the United Nations Partition Plan for Palestine lead to the establishment of Israel. Hundreds of predominantly Arab villages were either destroyed or resettled into parts of what make up present-day Israel. In the folktale, a young mother is fleeing as her husband is murdered and grabs their newborn only to discover later, when she can finally take a breath, that what she’s grabbed is a pillow.

In the game from Abueideh and his team, this young mother is Omm; and she flees to Lebanon carrying her Pillow [sic], which limits the range of what she could do in the game as it would in real life. But without the pillow, Omm is haunted by nightmares from trauma and just how scary the reality of what she’s going through is.

“Games frequently perpetuated stereotypes, casting Arabs as terrorists and framing their killing as a heroic act, narratives used to justify wars. This misrepresentation deeply impacted me and became a source of inspiration to create something that challenges those harmful depictions” - Rasheed Abueideh

Abueideh said he wasn’t able to capitalize employment-wise on the success of “Liyla …”; he had to put gaming development on the backburner and opened a nut roastery near his family’s hometown in Palestine to help support them. That building, under present circumstances, sits empty.

Abueideh answered some questions from Chilltown Blues about the challenges on making a game or piece of art when its subject matter challenges what’s politically comfortable, because as the phrase popularized by second-wave feminism and civil rights movements goes, “the personal is political,” meaning everything is political to someone, and if it seems otherwise it’s because one is either unaware of or insulated by different places in various hierarchies.

Abueideh took the crowdfunding route out of absolute necessity, he said, to be able to tell the kind of story he believes is critical to be explored the way “Dreams on a Pillow” is planned to.