LiberationGame - This article is part of a series.

Part 1: This Article

Part 2: The Liberation Game - Script/Mechanics document

Part 3: The Liberation Game - Anderran language sample

The Premise
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I’ve been in game development for quite some time now, having volunteered as a developer since 2016 for Catharsis Reborn, a total conversion mod for the game Postal 3, initially as a tester then as a writer/designer and now as the overall director of the project, but while Catharsis Reborn changes so much it might as well be considered an original game, it is a mod for another game and is based on an existing franchise, the POSTAL series.

Since this initial dip into games I’ve worked on other projects, briefly testing for the game Space Beast Terror Fright and for a more extended period being a tester for an official POSTAL game, POSTAL 4, but I’ve also experimented with designing my own games as well, with fully original IPs.

The one of these that I’d like to talk about today is something called the “Liberation Game”, it’s a concept I came up with in 2019, I never thought of an actual name for it but it was intended to be a game with a civil war theme.

I had played a lot of games themed around civil wars, for example the Far Cry series and Just Cause 3, these are games that I love a lot but what I noticed about them was that they were often very simplistic in how they portrayed conflict, the formula is almost always the same, you have your rebel group and the government, just those 2 factions.

Your rebel group is either one unit, or if it is split into sub groups their differences aren’t significant, what I thought would be an interesting idea is a game and a world where things are much more complex and realistic.

Civil wars are usually very messy, once a country destabilises any group can start picking up guns and that causes internal conflict within rebel movements, some notable examples being Syria, where the rebel movement was divided between thousands of groups, some secular and some religious, democratic and undemocratic, etc etc, or Libya where the divisions became very obvious when shortly after the country’s dictator Gaddafi was overthrown, factional conflict broke out again leading to another civil war.

For an older example we could look at Cuba, the Cuban Revolution is known for its Communist rebels particularly Fidel Castro and Che Guevara, but a lesser known part of that conflict is that they actually had Anti Communists fighting alongside them in their struggle against the country’s dictator, Batista, once Batista was gone the Anti Communist movement, the Escambray Front, waged the Escambray rebellion against Castro’s new government, they were defeated.

So what I wanted was a game that would reflect this kind of war, where it’s as much about politics as it is the battlefield, you would have your central group of rebels under you and then as you go about liberating your country more factions would emerge, you could either collaborate with them as a broad front, try to ignore them or destroy them.

Another layer of complexity would be ideology, you wouldn’t be able to have factions with staunchly different visions for the country in your front at once, so for example if you recruited a Communist faction, trying to recruit a Fascist faction to your cause would make them give you an ultimatum, you either keep the Communists on board and end up in conflict with the Fascists, or embrace the Fascists and ditch the Communists.

Maybe some of these conflicts would be impossible to avoid, or maybe you would have to work very hard and have a silver tongue to convince these rival groups to cooperate, maybe with a peaceful solution being left open if you were democratically oriented and could convince everyone that after the war these rival groups could settle their differences at the ballot box rather than with bullets.

I also had the idea that these dealings would influence how the government you’re trying to overthrow reacts to you as well, for example their propaganda against you would change depending on who you have in your coalition, i f you were aligned with Communists for example they would accuse you of trying to drag the country back to the dark days of Stalinism, if you were with Fascists maybe they would present you as racist extremists, if you have a broad front they could try to play on this by saying your coalition was doomed to split apart and destroy the country, that sort of thing.

Another influence would also be how you conducted yourself, if you act like a tyrant, brutally killing civilians the government propaganda would become more effective, the authorities would put up much more of a fight, if you were much more fair you might instead see soldiers and police giving up their posts and either defecting to the rebellion or just going home back to civilian life.

This would all culminate in your end goal to take the capital city and the Presidential palace, maybe if your reputation was in the gutter the last government troops would fight fanatically, dying to the last man like the Battle of Berlin, if your reputation was strong you could just march in without a fight, the palace guards either standing by and doing nothing as you take the building or handing over their weapons and surrendering to you.

These sorts of things would decide how bloody the war would be, if you leave the country in ruins or mostly unscathed and better off, there would be other smaller differences too, for example the flag of the rebel movement - and the country once you take over - would be different depending on who is in your coalition.

And of course the rebels would have their own propaganda machine trying to justify what you do, for example if for whatever reason you start killing your own rebel comrades your propaganda machine would justify it as rooting out traitors.

Lastly, an element I thought out less was foreign involvement, I had the idea that the international community at the start of the game would be pretty much universally on good terms with the government, but you could somehow earn the support of foreign superpowers like the US, Russia or China in exchange for certain favours, this could lead to them gifting you with advanced weapons to turn the balance of power of the war or maybe even directly launching airstrikes to support you, like with the local factions I imagine it would be very hard or outright impossible to earn the support of all the superpowers at once.

The bulk of the work on this idea was in 2019 but I returned to it a few times in 2022 and tinkered with developing the setting on and off between 2019 and now.

The Setting
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Speaking of that setting, let’s talk about that, what would the country you’re fighting for be? And what would the government you’re fighting against be like? This is something I thought out quite extensively, as I wanted the setting to feel more like an actual place than a bit of window dressing, it was the first thing I developed for the game and something I fleshed out more than the concept of the gameplay itself.

The setting is an archipelago nation in the Pacific Ocean called Sal Anderro, made up of 5 islands - split into 6 provinces and 1 special region (the capital).

I picked out a spot where it would roughly be in the Southern Pacific, bordering countries like the Solomon Islands, Tuvalu, Vanuatu and Fiji, I marked out a spot where I imagined the country would roughly be on Google Maps.

Image: An image showcasing where Sal Anderro would be on a map, at coordinates 8°15'36.9"S 169°37'18.1"E.

Image: An image showcasing where Sal Anderro would be on a map, zoomed in closer so neighbouring countries can be seen.

_{Coordinates: 8°15'36.9"S 169°37'18.1"E, I imagine this would have been the location of the third island of 5, with 2 more above it forming the North of the country and 2 below forming the South.}

This would place it roughly in the middle of the region’s intersecting groups, Polynesia, Melanesia and Micronesia:

Image: A map showing the cultural boundaries of the 3 Oceanian regions.

_{Oceania regions map - Credit: Wikimedia user “Maulucioni” - Licence: CC-BY-SA 4.0 -
https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Continente_Ocean%C3%ADa.png}

Image: An image showcasing historic migration across Oceania.

_{Oceania migration map - Credit: Wikimedia user “Pavljenko” - Licence: CC-BY-SA 4.0 -
https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Chronological_dispersal_of_Austronesian_people_across_the_Pacific.svg}

I chose the pacific setting because it’s one that is almost never explored in media, most people don’t even know that the countries in this region exist, or if they do they don’t know anything about them, so I found that more interesting than another setting in Europe, the Americas, Africa or Asia, which have seen extensive use for narratives.

Another reason is that the pacific actually fits the kind of scale a game like this would have quite well, many games have settings that are supposed to feel really big but are constrained by technical limitations, leading to either worlds that are implausibly small or filled with invisible walls, locked off doors or other obstacles that are frustrating and poor for immersion, these settings are also often supposed to be home to hundreds of thousands or millions of people in their lore but in-game you’ll probably only see a few thousand NPCs at most.

The pacific countries are a setting where you can avoid this problem, they genuinely are very small places, if you take out the Vatican City and Monaco, which are basically city states, the pacific is home to the top 2 smallest countries on Earth, Nauru and Tuvalu, their populations are just over 12,000 and 11,000 respectively, Nauru is so small you could run round the entire country in about 2 hours.

Now, I imagined that Sal Anderro would be bigger than that, but the point is this is a region where a world that a game could reasonably render, especially an indie game, is one that would also be plausible in terms of scale for its surroundings.

The region does also have a precedent for some of the civil conflict issues I had in mind, of course no major wars on the scale of what I was thinking of, Syria for example, but the Solomon Islands had a serious civil war between ethnic paramilitaries in the early 2000s, although in that case there was no tyrannical government involved, in fact the government was essentially powerless to do anything about the militias, with the conflict only ending due to foreign intervention.

In the late 2000s Fiji saw authoritarian rule as the military took over the country, with military commander Frank Bainimarama ruling the country, after 8 years he embraced civilian rule and became an elected Prime Minister, ruling for another 8 years before losing his majority in an election in 2022.

Another example I learned of much more recently was the Sandline affair, where Papua New Guinea faced a mutiny by its army after its government tried to hire mercenaries to end a civil war in the country’s Bougainville region.

So while the pacific is mostly a politically quiet region, these periods of chaos and extremes do crop up, fitting what I had in mind for Sal Anderro.

And for Sal Anderro I developed a rather lengthy history, the country first went through Spanish colonisation then British colonisation, under a period of democratisation as a British colony several political parties developed, 4 of them being legal, the Conservative Party, Liberal Party, People’s Party and Agricultural Party, and 2 of them being underground movements, the Communist and Nationalist Parties.

After World War 2, which saw the country briefly occupied by Japan, the Communist and Nationalist parties merged into the National Justice Party, which in the 1950s was legalised by the colonial government and allowed to take office.

After doing so however, the party under its leader Renaldo Munúz Palacios declares independence, renames itself to the “Revolutionary National Communist Party” and chases the British off of the islands, the other 4 parties are forced underground.

In the 60s, Renaldo dies and is replaced by his brother Fabrizio Palacios, who radicalises the country with a cultural revolution, but by the 1970s this has caused major unrest as radicals purge those they deem insufficiently revolutionary, Palacios calls in Army General Martin Duarte to ruthlessly crush the disorder which he does by the end of the decade, at the same time courting the Army to become his own power base.

In 1980, Duarte launches his own rebellion and after a brief civil war takes control of Sal Anderro, he removes the Communists from power, driving them back underground, and creates a new model for the country; Elections are held, media becomes more free, the economy changes to a capitalist one and Sal Anderro normalises relations with the wider world, the country also becomes much less centralised with regional governments for each island, giving them more autonomy.

But under the surface things are not so rosy, that capitalist economy is enforced through a ban on unions, meaning workers have very few rights, the election process is also rigged with gerrymandering and meddling with the electoral register being used to ensure the opposition can’t win even in areas where they are popular, as a result Duarte’s ruling party the United Patriotic Party has a monopoly on power across the country.

The situation remains this way to the present day.

This is the short version of a setting I lined out in extensive detail in documentation, I stored this documentation in a rather unorthodox place, a game/website called NationStates. NationStates is basically LARPing as a country, you get to create a country, give it a flag and then name a bunch of attributes (currency, national animal, religion, leader and a capital city) and write factbooks about your country. The main gameplay comes from “issues”, which are little political narratives that you get several options to make a decision for.

I don’t play the game anymore and haven’t done for years now, I deal with an issue once every so often so the country doesn’t get obliterated for account inactivity, because I’d like the documentation to stay online in the form of the factbooks.

The factbooks I wrote were:

A general summary page for the country, styled as a Wikipedia page which includes the country’s history, geography and demographics
2 pages for the country’s military and police divisions, with backgrounds on their organisation and details on the weapons they use
A page for the history of the country’s flag, with an explanation of the current flag’s meaning and some history of flags from previous eras
And lastly a page about the country’s media and its history from the Communist era to the present day

They give a bunch of insight into what kind of a place this country I made up in my head is supposed to be like.

I also have another document lying around on my computer which I wrote with LibreOffice Writer (a free equivalent of Microsoft Office’s Word which I use sometimes because I don’t feel like paying a subscription just to write text), the country was intended to have its own language for example, Anderran, which I came up with some words/grammar for using a mix of languages like English, Spanish, Esperanto and a few others, I have a file for English words and their Anderran equivalents, this wasn’t a proper language with clear rules or anything, just me fucking around to try and give the country a sense that it had a culture.

As for where I got the ideas for its lore, the country’s Spanish rule was inspired by reality but with my own twists, in the 1500s an explorer called Álvaro de Mendaña de Neira sent ships from Spanish ruled Peru towards Oceania, coming across what is now the Solomon Islands and Tuvalu. One of these ships, called the Santa Ysabel, got lost during an attempt to colonise the region and has been missing ever since, my idea was that in the game’s world this lost ship ended up on one of Sal Anderro’s islands, word was eventually sent back to Peru and the country became a little Spanish outpost, being taken over by the British after the Spanish Empire waned. The Spanish had colonies in Oceania in real life as well, but this was mostly in the North Pacific as opposed to the South where Sal Anderro is, this lost voyage is essentially how the Spanish ended up this far South in the pacific.

The history of British colonisation is of course also from real history, much of the pacific region was ruled by the British Empire and many of these countries still show it today, the Pacific countries of Tuvalu, Fiji, Niue and the Cook Islands all still have the Union Jack in their national flags, just like their bigger neighbours Australia and New Zealand.

Image: A map showing the flags of Oceania.

_{Oceania flags map - Sourced from
https://www.reddit.com/media?url=https%3A%2F%2Fpreview.redd.it%2F6ih9b6zwwd431.jpg%3Fauto%3Dwebp%26s%3D7ffccba96efadf072a1d8dfd8ace8e03d61adf93}

In earlier versions of the story the coloniser was the USA instead, based on how the US had ruled the Philippines after taking it over from Spain, but I realised that this didn’t really fit the history of the region and wasn’t very credible so I changed it to a colonial power that was actually there.

The country’s history with Communism is a bit of a mix of Cuba and China’s history, Duarte’s actions are somewhat inspired by Frank Banimarama in Fiji, and the country’s modern day system of election meddling is based on the US and Russia, so a wide range of influences for this fake country, culminating in something that would hopefully be a unique and interesting setting.

The Game Itself
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So beyond the setting, what about the game itself? Well because this was only a vague concept, there isn’t that much, I came up with some plans here and there in a Google Doc I wrote which was partly about gameplay mechanics and partly about the story.

I had worked out an idea for an opening which I wrote down as a script, you would be an opposition leader returning home from exile in the US alongside a group of your armed bodyguards, planning to speak at a large rally in the capital of the country’s northern island, at the same time Duarte is giving a speech in the capital city on its southernmost island.

You are let through the airport but it’s a trap, as you and your guards are detained at the exit and carted off to a police station where you were going to be interrogated by the Falange, Duarte’s personal guard unit, instead a group of rogue police officers bursts in and rescues you and you escape.

I didn’t write more from here, but the idea would be that these rogue police officers and your original bodyguards would become your first group of rebels, from there you decide whether to take over the city or to flee into the surrounding settlements and start small, you then go about taking over the country island by island from north to south.

If you fled into the surroundings I had the idea that you would take shelter in a favela type area that government forces stayed out of, controlled by 2 rival drug gangs Il Mastros (The Masters) and Nova Generacion (New Generation), Il Mastros would contact you offering weapons and support if you wiped out Nova Generacion, you could take them up on the deal or wipe both groups out for a reputation boost.

I intended that the game would be open world, but that you would probably have to unlock each island in a linear manner, so you couldn’t just miss all the gameplay by rushing to the final island, raiding the palace, killing Duarte and calling it a day.

One idea I remember having for this was that each island would be connected to the next through a big raised bridge, you would have to get a key that you would plug into a console at the bridge to lower it and open access to the next island, to get the key you had to complete a “liberation checklist”, I had only come up with the first checklist for the first island, which was:

Liberate/Destroy All Reserves Dil Militarez Outposts
Liberate/Destroy Anti-Air Command Center
- Destroy Patrolling SAM Trucks*
Faction Choice:
Kill Provincial Governor And Collect Their Keycard (Only Available When All Other Objectives Are Completed)
Lower Bridge To Next Province Using Governors Keycard

_{*“Surface-To-Air” Missile, Anti-Aircraft trucks that will shoot down any rebel air transport}

I never got as far as figuring out what this particular faction choice would be, presumably you would have a few big factions per island as part of the checklist and then smaller factions dotted around the map like the drug gangs, where dealing with them was optional.

Actually navigating the world was something I never decided on, for most of the time I spent coming up with this game I imagined the whole country would be a map for you to explore like any standard open world game from these days, but at one point I was shown gameplay of the Mount and Blade series where actual playable maps are restricted to settlements and the areas in between them are represented by a point and click world map, this is also a technique used in the original Fallout games.

I considered this as a way of hypothetically making the game world a lot more manageable to create, with only individual cities and towns needing to be made rather than the entire 5 island landmass, but I never made my mind up on that one, a lot would’ve been lost with that method even though it would have made actually creating the game a lot easier.

The main gameplay would be rooted in first person shooting with something probably similar to the latest Far Cry games, your goal would be to take control of the islands by destroying or capturing outposts, but there would also be an RPG style emphasis as well, a good reference maybe being Fallout New Vegas, while shooting would be one of your main communicators with the factions dialogue would also be important, recruiting rebel groups of certain ideologies would require you to convince them you have similar ideals to them or at least that their ideals could co-exist in the Sal Anderro you’re trying to build.

The faction system would go beyond just different rebel factions as well, on top of say Communist, Fascist, Liberal and other types of rebel militias, the government forces would be split into several different groups as well: The regular Police, the Secret Police, the Riot Police, the SWAT, the National Guard, the National Army, the Reserve Army and the Presidential Guard.

Image: An infographic depicting the branches of the Sal Anderran security forces.

These would be different enemy types with their own arsenals to boot, for example I imagined that the Reserves Dil Militarez would be a weaker version of the Militarez Nacionale that patrolled the Northern islands, where you start the game, while the Militarez Nacionale patrolled the South, where the most government-loyal areas are located, similar to Far Cry 4’s early game Royal Army giving way to the Royal Guard in the late game.

But there was more to it than that, depending on your actions you could find these different units either staying loyal to the government or over time finding your rebel alliance more appealing; Imagine that say if you play your cards right you don’t just have individual police officers defecting to the rebels, but the entire police force as an organisation joins the rebel coalition and starts waging war with the other government forces across the country, or the Riot Police simply stop fighting the protests and either go home or join in, causing entire cities to be taken over by demonstrators sympathetic to your cause.

This would make the game’s politicking interesting and worthwhile as being a skilled negotiator and having a silver tongue could have just as much of an impact as being a sharpshooter.

On top of this there would be more neutral groups like other emergency services, the Fire Services and Police, for the Firefighters if they would start neutral, extinguishing whatever fires they come across, but maybe depending on your behaviour they could become more loyal to the government and extinguish fires on government territory but refuse to act on rebel territory, or vice versa.

For medics I had the idea that if you attacked medical workers too often they would replace one of their crew with a soldier or police officer, meaning they could save fewer lives and you would have more problems on the roads, in this scenario maybe they would be so scared for their safety that they would just stop serving rebel held areas, with abandoned ambulances lining the sides of the roads.

And these systems would all be interconnected, let’s say your actions towards medical workers have caused them to use police escorts, what happens if you then convince the police force to defect to the rebellion? Would they replace their escorts with soldiers or would their police guards “convince” them to start working in rebel areas instead and abandon the government?

The end result of this would ideally be a world that while driven by you would be living and reactive.

Why didn’t it happen?
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So why did this just remain a concept rather than anything practical? Well it’s pretty simple, I’m not a game developer and I’m not cut out to be one, I have no programming experience at all and I have no enthusiasm to learn it, while I’ve worked with programmers who enjoy what they do from my POV it looks extremely frustrating, learning to speak to a stupid computer and if you misspeak everything breaks, it’s not something I have the patience for.

I do have experience in the game making process from my long running involvement with Catharsis Reborn but project management, writing and game design are very different beasts from game creation; Programming all the mechanics, nipping bugs in the bud, creating the models and the textures, that’s all something I have no experience or qualifications in, learning to do all that by myself would probably be a hellish experience and I feel that it would be way too time consuming given that I already have a lot of projects on my hands like CR, my job, writing articles like these and writing full scripts that become the videos you see on this site like the MEGA series.

And I couldn’t just recruit my team that develops CR to make this either, the team has its hands full with just 1 project and it’s a volunteer skeleton crew, so I couldn’t ask for more by saying “Hey! Can you help me make this game I came up with?”, especially considering the complexity of the concept, although I did ask for help in some small areas, one of the artists from the CR team, Melasauce, very kindly helped me create the Sal Anderran flag, I picked the initial colours and he created the graphics for its stars and central emblem, a waving palm tree.

Image: An image of the Sal Anderran flag, depicting a tricolour of orange, blue and green with a symbol in the middle containing a circle of 6 five pointed stars with a palm tree in the centre.

Conclusion
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So I’m quite sure the “Liberation Game” is doomed to be just a concept lying around in my head, but I thought it was worth sharing anyhow, maybe a game like it will one day get made and we can get lost in its chaotic world.

There is actually something like it already, a game called Boiling Point: Road to Hell, I discovered it years ago through a video by one of my favourite YouTubers, TehSnakerer, and I started playing it recently, that was what prompted me to actually start writing this article after I’d been thinking about it for a while beforehand.

Boiling Point shows a civil war in the fictional South American country of Realia, it doesn’t actually have the war as its main focus, instead you’re a foreigner trying to rescue your kidnapped daughter, but the war is a major part of the game as you have to interact with the factions to find out where she’s gone.

The war also does have another simplistic conflict with a singular rebel group, the Communist guerillas, but it makes up for that by having several factions between the guerillas and the government: The Mafia, Bandits, CIA, the indigenous population and the regular civilians, its reputation mechanics are also very basic, working just like the old Respect system of GTA 2, kill members of a faction and that faction likes you less, the factions opposed to them like you more, but the complex relationships between them make for some interesting reactions, kill a lot of the Mafia for example and both the guerillas and the government will like you,

The civilian reputation also has a more modest version of what I had in mind for the “Liberation Game”, if you start harming civilians you can find random people on the street drawing their guns on you, or old ladies tossing grenades from their handbags.

Its combat was also very well done, with fast kills, location based damage and an interesting health system where you could develop immunity to the health syringes you use to heal, making them less and less effective if you use them too much and forcing you to get your addiction cured by a doctor.

Another nifty feature was a conversation log that keeps track of all your conversations with important characters so you can easily check what options are open to you.

Anyway I should stop rambling about a different game in an article about my idea for one, as for the “Liberation Game” I still very much love it as a game idea, if I could snap my fingers and have a full time team to work with on any game project it would probably be this one. However I would probably change a few things today, for example rather than having your main character be this blank slate opposition politician in exile I imagine I would add a degree of character creation to the concept, where you pick what kind of background and ideology you start with and that would impact your initial faction relations, although maybe with an “apolitical” option that would let you be a revolutionary who wants to get rid of Duarte but doesn’t have a concrete idea of what to replace his regime with, allowing you to learn about the faction ideologies and decide naturally for yourself.

I would want to write these factions as genuinely well motivated with arguments grounded in a case that they know what’s best for the country based on the setting and a serious argument in defence of their ideals, like how Caesar of Caesar’s Legion in Fallout New Vegas makes a genuine defence of his totalitarian Fascist views.

For example I would imagine the Communist guerillas would tell you about life under the revolution, arguing that under their regime price controls and the planned economy meant everyone could afford their basic needs, there were no homeless, no one starving, and that they were working towards an even better utopia without the divider that is money, a system where you put up walls so people can pay to get past them.

The Fascists would argue Duarte’s mistake is not going the full way in authoritarianism, that by maintaining a fake veneer of democracy he has opened the door for the country to be torn apart by competing ideals from a population that knows very little about how to politically express themselves, as the only genuine democracy on the islands lasted for about 5 minutes in the 1950s and was constrained by an empire, essentially the argument would be “we aren’t ready for democracy and we don’t want it anyway”.

They would also emphasise that their dictatorship would have very different ends in mind than the old Communist one, teaching that people aren’t equal and so treating them like they are is immoral and unnatural, blasting the Communist ambition to live without money by pointing out no large scale society has ever managed something like it in the modern day, and that money is the best system we have for trade compared to the old ways of bartering any random crap.

The moderate movements (think the Liberal and Conservative movements) would essentially argue that the country already experienced the worst extreme ideas, Fascism through the Japanese in World War 2, Communism through the decades after, and both brought the country into isolation and hardship; Their pitch would be basically the opposite of the Fascists, Duarte’s mistake isn’t opening up too much but too little, although he liberalised the country in some areas it was only for self serving purposes, to enrich himself and his cronies and secure his own power base, and what Sal Anderro really needs now is the chance to open its doors and let people express their will fairly.

Of course I would want to have a lot more groups with a lot more views as well with their own red lines and pressure points, for example maybe a left wing Anarchist group that would be hardline and radical but could be encouraged to work with others based on their commonalities, for example you could convince them to work in a coalition with the moderates because a representative democracy is progress compared to the dictatorships of the Communists, Fascists, Duarte loyalists, etc etc, or you could play on their hatred of Capitalism to convince them to join with the Commies, a red black alliance.

Another area I can imagine being tackled would be an indigenous nationalist group, indigenous rights are a big conversation in Oceania because of the history of colonialism, where indigenous communities like the Maori in New Zealand or the iTaukei in Fiji were suddenly uprooted and became a minority in their own land, with a modern day debate over whether their history should mark them out as a separate group or they should be integrated into the modern day nations that exist on their lands, for example in Australia there was most recently a failed referendum to create an “Indigenous Voice to Parliament”, a body for the indigenous chosen by the indigenous, in Fiji even the name “Fijian” is politicised, until recently only the iTaukei were called Fijians by law while the country’s citizens of other races were called “Fiji Islanders”, when this was changed it caused a massive controversy and it only did change because Bainimarama made it one of the main goals of his dictatorship, deracialisation of Fiji.

In the background I came up with for Sal Anderro most of the Anderran population is Mestizo (mixed hispanic/austronesian) while there are minority Austronesian groups (that’s the umbrella term for Micronesians, Polynesians and Melanesians, it also includes some other people groups from Oceania), maybe some of these groups would be part of an Indigenous Nationalist group wanting autonomy and their historic ownership of the islands to be recognised, other factions would either be neutral on the idea, for or against, with some seeing it as a path to righting a wrong and others seeing it as a dangerous reintroduction of racial divides by treating the indigenous as separate “others” away from the population (this was an argument that came up in the Australian debate quite often), I imagine the Indigenous Nationalist response to this would probably be “we already are others, you othered us by invading our lands and making us strangers in our own land”.

And here’s a fun one, what would the Fascists think? Would they back indigenous recognition as a way of connecting people to their national culture and race, or would they attack the idea because they see nothing wrong with empire building? Maybe you could convince them either way as part of your coalition building efforts, if you were so inclined.

Or you could just be a tyrant and kill anyone you meet outside your loyal cadre, it would make your cause a whole lot harder but if you want just a straight shooter I wouldn’t force you to participate in all that diplomacy.

This would be incredibly complex and need a lot of serious systems to track it all and correctly react to all the possible outcomes, but it could make for something really fascinating and enjoyable done right.

Another thing I would probably change from the original concept would be the linear system where you’re forced to go north to south, I would allow freedom to go wherever you want when you want but with realistic outcomes, if you try to take a boat straight to the capital you would find the seas swarming with navy patrols that would obliterate or arrest you on sight, if you actually somehow made it to the city you would find yourself in enemy territory against thousands of soldiers, police and other security forces totally loyal to Duarte and ready to die for him, or more likely kill for him.

And let’s say you really did make it, it would probably lead to one of the worst endings as without any revolutionary presence to take over on the islands with Duarte’s death the country would either collapse into chaos or you would simply be arrested, tried and executed and then someone else from Duarte’s circle would take power, meaning you changed nothing except the face at the top.

That would be a lot more of an interesting “fuck you, do it properly” response than just having you slam up against an instant death or invisible wall.

The “liberation checklist” system would probably remain as a kind of way of judging how much control you have over each island, but the player wouldn’t be forced to complete it to progress, I would also probably remove faction choices from it and just let the faction politics be something the player naturally stumbles across and figures out, with no prodding from the game.

Anyway, it’s about time I wrapped this up, I honestly don’t know why I’m devoting so many pages worth of writing to a game idea I know has basically no chance of making it to reality, but I guess it’s just because I fundamentally love this concept and exploring it, even if I know it will just remain that, a concept.

But it has potential in a lot of ways, firstly as just a fun game idea, second as a vehicle for exploring a number of complex political/social topics, and then as a way of shining a light on a region that doesn’t get much publicity, I think I’ll always be fond of the idea or at least what could’ve come from it.

To finish I’m going to link below all the resources I created for the concept, so that anyone curious can take a peek: