Were you alive in the '80s and '90s and remember huddling with your family in front of the TV after breakfast in Ramadan to solve the daily fawazeer? Then the new Alf Leila Wy Leila app, which is offering digital fawazeers, might be something you can look forward to this Ramadan.

The app that offers original comics based on the iconic story of Arabian Nights – hence the name, Alf Leila Wy Leila – but reinvented as contemporary comics to suit the digital world and accompanied by classic Ramadan riddles for users to solve and win prizes.

The mobile app, available on Android and iPhone as well as on Facebook, was originally launched by Egyptian startup Colors during Ramadan in 2014 as a demo app called “SuperSayem.” It featured the first season of the “Alf Leila Wy Leila” comics which told contemporary stories of the legendary Arabian Nights characters King Shahryar and Queen Scheherazade.

“We are doing something that is really new, very contemporary, but with characters that people are familiar with. What we actually did with 'Alf Leila Wy Leila' is take it out of time and put it in a different context to create a story that is extendable, so that in each season we have a different plot,” CEO and Founder Amr Hussein told StepFeed. “We took the characters and gave them different tales this Ramadan."

While developing the app, Hussein focused on gamification of the stories as a way to build on the fawazeer tradition of the past, as well as a way to keep readers plugged into the app.

“We want them to feel the thrill they felt before when they used to solve questions for Nelly and Sherihan [the hosts of fawazeer] sending the solutions in an envelope and waiting till the end of Ramadan to know who the winner is,” Hussein said.

Hussein thinks the Ramadan fawazeers were so successful back then because they combined entertainment and competition in a way that allowed people to participate actively in the entertainment process, instead of just passively watching a TV show, as is the case in today’s Ramadan entertainment scene.

In addition to bringing the fawazeers into the digital age, one of the main objectives of the app is to create creative animation and comic art based on authentic Arabic stories, as he noted the popularity of foreign animation and comic art in the Middle East and the lack of Arabic contribution to the field despite the richness of the Arab Word’s cultural heritage.

“Everybody likes Batman, Superman and The Simpsons, but we have nothing that is authentic from our culture, we have no team of superheroes, yet we have a lot of culture,” Hussein said.

However, Hussein stressed that this was not due to a deficit of creative minds in the Middle East, but a dearth of financial support in the publishing industry for artists trying to publish their work, as well as a lack of distribution channels for artwork.

That’s why Hussein’s vision for the app includes integrating a new feature that will allow creative artists to access the platform, publish their work and even sell it.

“We are not doing this only for 'Alf Leila Wy Leila,' actually it is just the beginning,” Hussein said. “The mobile app will allow other artists to publish their comics in the future, and sell them to people, so instead of the traditional way of selling comics, which is a burden for artists, we will give them a mechanism to do that without any cost, just upload the stuff, press the button and sell it to the people.”

Hussein said the biggest challenge facing entertainment and media startups in MENA was the need for funding to cover high marketing costs and he has recently started a crowdfunding campaign on Zoomaal to get better prizes for the riddle winners.

“Our plan was to give them an iPhone each Friday and 1,000 Egyptian pounds in cash every day for it to go pretty much viral, but now I believe that the Zoomaal campaign is not going in the right direction, so we have another backup plan to reduce the number of prizes and continue putting the season live based on our budget,” Hussein said. At the time of publishing, the campaign hadn't reached 30 percent of its goal, with only a few days left.

“Everybody used to experience 'Alf Leila Wy Leila' in Ramadan years ago, and what we are trying to do is to bring back the users’ nostalgic feeling about the competition but implement that using technology," Hussein said.