Solo developer from Turkey has spent 2 years building GTA in 1970s Istanbul on stream with zero budget and doner delivery

Turkish developer Burak Akşahin, known as Bufuak, has released the official trailer for ALATURKA. It's a low-poly open-world action game in the spirit of the PS2 era, set in a fictional 1970s Istanbul.

The developer described the game like this:

I spent all my free time over the last two years building ALATURKA from scratch, entirely on stream and on a $0 budget. It's basically a PS2-era GTA set in 1970s Istanbul, with heavy driving physics and doner kebab deliveries.

The protagonist arrives in the city of Bosphorus from a village to work as an apprentice for his uncle at a doner kebab shop. His pockets are empty, and he has one goal – save up some money. The city sits on two continents, traffic never moves, and the seagulls don't shut up for a second.

The core of the gameplay is honest but thankless labor. Players carve meat off the spit, wrap shawarma, load up a tri-porter, and deliver orders before the food gets cold. The pay is pennies, there are no breaks, and the uncle is already prepping the next batch.

Delivery routes run across the whole city, where the hero runs into shopkeepers, cops, cats, and shady characters. Some of them offer a chance to earn in one night what the shop pays in three days. Those jobs can turn out to be illegal, and it's easy to get shot at while completing them.

The developer put special focus on vehicle physics. The game features tri-porters, rust buckets, and bulky cars of the era with unforgiving handling, and escaping the police means racing through streets that were never built for chases.

Bosphorus has a life of its own, and there's plenty to do besides work:

• toss simits to seagulls

• feed stray cats

• chase pigeons

• fight street gangs and escape the police

• beat up the ice cream vendor, if you feel like it

ALATURKA also includes shootouts, ragdoll physics, and explosions. The Steam page warns of frequent violence and gore.

Akşahin is a certified Unreal Engine instructor, the leader of the Istanbul Unreal Engine community, and a computer engineer with a master's degree in game technologies. ALATURKA started out as educational content, a live example of how to build an old-school open world. Over time, the experiment grew into a full game.

Development runs on Unreal Engine 5 exclusively through Blueprints. Since the project began as an educational one, Akşahin set out to write every system himself, from character movement to traffic AI and pedestrian behavior. After each stream, he posts short progress videos on social media, and viewer feedback directly shapes how the city turns out.

He works on the game in his spare time. Akşahin earns his living on other projects and builds ALATURKA in the hours that remain.