Istanbul
yuko



Istanbul - Trailer
Interview with the Developer:
+In one or two sentences, describe the main themes present in your game.


Istanbul is about the fading traces of a city carried in the mind of someone who left. It’s about the quiet realization that cities, like people, change without you—and when you leave, you stop belonging anywhere. Not to the place you left, not to where you are now. You exist somewhere in between, in Istanbul.

+What was the inspiration of the game?
What made your team decide to make this game specifically?


Istanbul started from a deeply personal place from being someone who misses the city they left behind, but doesn’t quite want to return either. From being an expat, and being Turkish, and holding all of that at once. 
+Were there difficult moments when developing the game? What led to those difficult moments? What did you learn from it?


The hardest part was how much the city itself kept changing while I was building it. Its transformation political, emotional, visual made the tone of the game shift too. It stopped being just melancholic and turned into something angrier, sharper, harder to hold. Letting the work reflect that chaos instead of fighting it was difficult, but it taught me to let the game be alive, to let it grow with me instead of controlling it. 
+Were there features you had to remove, and if so, what were they and why were they removed?


Yes, many... I had to let go of several scenes and mechanics simply because I couldn’t do everything at once. I had imagined more layered interactions, branching conversations, and a clearer sense of progression through time. But the game kept pulling me somewhere else toward something quieter, more fragmented, more uncertain. Letting things go wasn’t about giving up, it was about listening to what the game actually needed, not just what I planned. I’m still working on it, and I will keep working on it. At some point, the game stopped being just about Istanbul or about myself somewhere in between, a third, parallel reality began to take shape.

+Talk about your teammates! What was everyone's role?

Oyku Yamak - Everything :") 


play this game on itch.io

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