Video game development is a tougher job than people might think, with the pervasiveness of working practices like crunch prompting a global movement towards unionisation. But for Rasheed Abueideh, a Palestinian software engineer who makes games in his spare time, there are additional challenges. Any minute you could be killed on the road because there is always a gun loaded and pointed at your head. I am in the office in Ramallah, so usually when there are clashes near us we work with tear gas around us, and we are crying. And we call that'work under pressure'." Abueideh is the designer of Liyla and the Shadows of War, a short mobile game in which the player character helps his wife and daughter, Liyla, escape from Gaza. Liyla is fictional, but the game features real events: strikes on schools, the death of four children playing on a beach. When Liyla was first released on the App Store, Apple refused to categorise it as a game, feeding into a historical precedent that Apple prefers games to be frivolous. The game ends with Liyla's death. "I would be cheating if I made a different ending," Abueideh says. "This is what's really happening, and this is what I really want everybody to know." Abueideh is a father of four young children himself. Sometimes, when holding one of them in his arms, he has flashbacks to images of other Palestinian parents holding their child's dead body. When he let his children play Liyla, they asked him: "Why did they kill her?