How LEAVE Started
LEAVE began as a small idea with a purpose behind it. I wanted to create an experience that carries a message, not just a game. The goal was to build something meaningful through atmosphere, mechanics, and emotion. What started simple grew into a project that pushed me far more than I expected.
Inspiration
While developing LEAVE, I naturally drew inspiration from games like Inside and Little Nightmares. I’ve always admired how these games build atmosphere through simple visuals, tension, animation style, and environmental storytelling. What influenced me wasn’t their mechanics, but their ability to make the world feel alive, expressive, and emotionally heavy without relying on dialogue. LEAVE follows its own direction, but those titles helped shape the tone, pacing, and the kind of experience I want players to feel when moving through the world.
Technical Growth and Challenges
Developing LEAVE constantly forces me to improve. Every new feature exposes something I need to rethink, whether in architecture, gameplay systems, performance, or interaction. I had to build most of the mechanics from scratch, create custom physics logic, develop procedural elements, manage character control, and keep everything stable as the world grows. The project taught me a lot about long-term planning, clean code structure, and handling complexity on my own.
Creative and Content Work
Beyond the technical side, LEAVE also required building a lot of content myself. I had to model characters and environment pieces, texture them, create shaders, design camera behavior, craft animations manually when nothing available fit the style I wanted, and blend those animations with procedural systems to make movement feel alive. Balancing the art style, atmosphere, lighting, sound, and pacing became its own challenge, but it’s a core part of what makes the project special.
Solo Development Reality
Working solo means you become every department at once. Programmer, designer, artist, animator, technical director, tester, there’s no one to hand tasks to, and no shortcuts. You have to solve your own problems, rethink ideas, polish until things work, and manage an entire production pipeline yourself. It’s intense, but it also made me grow faster than any other project.
What LEAVE Represents Today
LEAVE is still in development, and it continues to evolve as I improve my tools, mechanics, and visual direction. The project represents years of learning, building, breaking, rebuilding, and pushing myself to create something that feels personal. More importantly, it’s a reminder of why I make games: to tell something meaningful through interactive moments, atmosphere, and design.
If you want to support the development:
– Wishlist LEAVE on Steam
– Wishlist it on the Epic Games Store
– Follow for upcoming updates, devlogs, and announcements:
– YouTube Global
– YouTube Arabic
– Ramdal Games
