This is Tony Hawk's Pro Skater + Splatoon paint guns + ethnic strife. Arabic electronic music and rap. Paint soldiers, tanks, and walls to win. Online multiplayer in 2-3 years. Unity engine, so PC, mobile, Switch, PS4. 3D-animated cutscenes about Palestinians' lives present and future. 2D cutscenes about the wars, Zionism, and The Occupation, and women and Islam.

Will it sell? Democrats in America are currently polling pro-Palestinian, so yes. Games like Bomb Rush Cyberfunk made up to $6.3 million post launch on PC alone (see: 1 2), and across platforms upwards of $15 million. Splatoon made Nintendo at least $200 million. We have better music and fully-voiced 3D cutscenes. Arabic comedians as writers. At minimum 6 artists and coders who want to work on it full time, in need of funding.

The Market Opportunity

Will the West will buy the game? Yes, according to Gallup Polling. Basically, American Democrats and leftists have switched sides as of 2023. They now favor Palestinians. It’s 49% to 38%, in favor of Palestine.

The rest of the West is not too far behind either, though the polls are not so clear-cut. But China, Japan, and Korea are good secondary markets for the game. China especially, given their politics. (And the Chinese game market is about equal to Japan plus Korea's; they constitute the largest market in East/Southeast Asia.)

The Middle Eastern and South American markets are a fraction of the others. But can we still capture a significant portion of that combined $16.1 billion? Yes. Can we find large niches in America and Europe? Yes. And is the East Asian market wide open to us, yes (we have in fact been pursued by a Singaporean publisher).

We believe this game would be coming at exactly the right time and could very well take the media by storm.

We have a few reference points as far as sales go but our biggest one is Bomb Rush Cyberfunk. It's a similar game in terms of gameplay and its focus on art and electronic music. It came out in August 2023, and made $4-6.3 million dollars on PC alone and sold 100-200k copies as of mid-September. (Reported numbers vary but see VG Insights' algorithm's result and GameSensor's limited forecast at 1 and 2.) Across PC, Xbox, Playstation, and Switch, revenues could easily be $15 million-plus in the first month.

Marketing

Bomb Rush Cyberfunk relied heavily on word of mouth, good press, and really good trailers. And it paid off for them, having made $4 million dollars-plus on PC alone. Our marketing plan is to prioritize trailers, press articles, and worth of mouth, and then focus on paid ads.

We have contacts at Vice, NPR, and the New York Times. Our Instagram has about 760 followers and is growing. We're researching and targeting specific writers at Kotaku and Polygon, widely-read leftist game news outlets. We have access to Arab and Arab-American WhatsApp and Discord groups with up to 2000 members each. We're also courting Arabic writers, comedians, voice actors, creative institutions, and fashion designers to partner with on Instagram, TikTok, and beyond.

Some of Bomb Rush's trailers were just static assets with little animation or programming. But they were stylish: they found an audience that craved that. The trailers were integral. We intend to surpass them, with voice-overs, decent but low-cost facial animation, and frankly better music, Arabic electronic.

Business Model

So how will we actually make money? For one, the game will be divided into three episodes. An "Episode" would contain 3-4 Tony Hawk-size levels, 7+ minutes of cutscenes, take 8-12 months to make, cost about $81,000, and sell at $25 a copy. See Rollerdrome at $30, Olli Olli World at $30, and Bomb Rush Cyberfunk at $40.

Single-player will be for the first two episodes--the similar Bomb Rush Cyberfunk again built up a rabid fanbase in 3 years, selling between $2-5 million with 60k-140k copies in 2 weeks, with no official multiplayer. (The fans actually modded a low-rent multiplayer in within a week.)

Multiplayer, Splatoon-style, will come around the 3rd or 4th episode. Replicating Nintendo's online multiplayer shooter juggernaut on PC is a goal. Skater XL, a multiplayer indie title, brought in about $13.5 million. Veteran indie game devs told us multiplayer alone could cost as much as the full game. We're not there yet, but we're looking at it seriously.

For mobile we'd piece the levels out by city (or say 3 city segments) and sell each at a lower cost. $5 or less would pass the parental iPad approval test.

Because we're using Unity, porting to mobile--or PS4, PS5, Xbox, or Switch--isn't hard. Some of the Unity tools we're using have mobile and console controls built-in and they just need to be activated.

Looking at sales of similar games, it's generally safe to assume that if the game is a success, we'll make at least a few times the return on the investment. See below for examples (and again the newer Bomb Rush Cyberfunk made over $4 million on PC alone):

The budget per episode looks is below. It's an inflated number: we can probably do a first episode for under $40k if we had to. Notable expenses include 3D and 2D animated cutscenes, which will use a lot of Adobe Mixamo's massive and free-for-commercial-use library of 3D animations, as well as other special tools for artists, namely VR animation. This is NOT a VR game, it will be PC, console, and mobile, the VR is a tool. It's a cheaper way and less training-intensive way to do 3d modeling. It's how we made most of our characters.

Other major expenses: music licensing (it could be upwards of $20k), and environment modeling which will be highly customized. We also have to pay dialogue writers, voice actors, and graffiti artists for their work.

Game Design

Our major inspirations are Jet Set Radio and Jet Set Radio Future. The core gameplay loop here is to do graffiti then fight or evade the police. High-energy music is essential to the experience. Bomb Rush Cyberfunk copied JSR's formula studiously; it also inspired Rollerdrome, Hover, Sunset Overdrive, and a bevy of other games. We might have levels with a first-person tour of a checkpoint, or a rooftop escape from an IDF raid--but that core loop and the music will be the meat of the game.

Our major gameplay innovation is realistic graffiti and paint-shooting mechanics. This means realistic stencil painting, Splatoon-style paint guns, and shooting paint while grinding. JSR and Bomb Rush don't have any of this. In our game you'll shoot paint at tanks and soldiers, but also helicopter, drone, and Boston Dynamics-esque robot enemies. They'll come in waves and react procedurally to being pelted by paint balls.

We're still early in this process but here's the grinding and shooting paint working at the same time (video here):

The player's goal is to stencil or cover 10-15 walls or objects per level. Below is a mockup of the stenciling gameplay. Our intent is to offer the player great creative freedom and choice. We want to make it easy to make something beautiful. And it should feel like YOU did it. In essence this will be true: the player is essentially using an imitation of Photoshop brushes, with random color and scatter:

We'll also include parkour elements, which 2008's Mirror's Edge was centered around. Completed sliding, wall-running, and vaulting mechanics are already in our Unity Asset Store's character controller packages, they just need to be enabled.

Other gameplay types and scenarios we might consider include a first-person tour of an IDF Checkpoint, jumping across rooftops on-foot to escape an IDF raid, stealth missions where you sneak past IDF soldiers on say a farm. Once again these gameplay types and mechanics are more or less already complete, with the packages we're using, it's mostly a question of whether they're actually interesting or fun.

The graffiti in the game will be sourced from Arabic artists. This is an example, from a Saudi friend of ours:

As far as characters and assets go we have a variety to choose from, we've created quite a bit of it since August 2021 and this project's inception. We'll let these speak for themselves but the Israeli Wall complete with graffiti and Banksy's Hotel (yes, for real) are special additions.

This is Banksy's hotel, the Walled Off Hotel, and it is a real thing he did and we visited it. Banksy, actually got Massive Attack, Nine Inch Nails, Tom Waits, and Elton John to do remote concerts here and/or contribute to the hotel's soundtrack. He also got a team of artists to curate each hotel room. He himself and his helpers filled the lobby with his art, it contains some of his best pieces. It'll be in the game.

Team

We have about 6 artists and Unity coders we could immediately hire to work on the game. Two of us are Palestinian. One is based in Gaza. Most of us do both code and art. One coder teaches Unity programming and is an expert in character controller physics. One is a UX/UI specialist. Two artists are self-taught, one has a BFA in Illustration. We have access to a vast pool of Palestinian and Arab coders and artists when/if we expand, and we're approaching Arabic comedians, writers, and voiceover artists.

Story and Characters

We plan to make the First Episode explore Palestinian lives in the Present. Bethlehem, Hebron, and Gaza are relatively ideal for this. Our characters will live out their daily lives at home, at work, in the markets and bazaars. We'll see their interactions with the IDF at checkpoints, in dawn raids, and in bombings. This will be both in 3D animated cutscenes and in gameplay. We'll see Bethlehem's section of Israeli Wall, symbol of the Occupation, and Hebron, arguably the most divided and apartheid city in the West Bank. Gaza, of course, is perpetually under attack but we intend to show what civilian life looks like there too, not just the "being bombed" part.

The Second Episode will start to see Future scenario where the US stops funding Israel. Jerusalem (called Al Quds or "The Holy" in Arabic) is a natural choice for the second episode when we have crowd AI down and can see some larger scale strife. Eventually, likely in the Third Episode, we'd see what a just and lasting peace would look like from a Palestinian perspective, both politically and on the ground. We envision doing some Good Future levels, with a hot hot sun, futuristic Arabic architecture, and the Occupation dismantled and in pieces.

American tourists and IDF characters will be used to force a dialogue about the effects of American foreign policy and support of the Israeli state on the Palestinian characters. One of the tourists will be Becky, below:

As far as 2D and voice-over cutscenes, we will examine the nature of the US-Israel relationship (some would argue Israel actively takes advantage of and spies on the US), and really delve into the Israeli far-right and extremist Settler ideology. We would also examine failures of the peace process from the perspective of the Palestinians and the failure of some of their leadership. Not everyone loved what Yasser Arafat did. We also intend to give an overview of MENA-region feminists like Mona Eltahawy and Fatema Mernissi, and a look at historians of MENA and Islam like Reza Aslan and Tamim Ansary. Kim Ghattas' Black Wave has an especially interesting thesis about how the region became so conservative in recent decades. Not that we can ignore conservative and religious strains within Islam either and their oppression by secular authoritarians. But progressives, socialists, secularists, and moderate ideologies exist.

(This is all there is for now but if we can think of more to add, we will. Please let us know if you have any more questions or concerns that this doesn't address.)