It's the summer of '32.
(WIP scenes are animated in-game, utilizing Devil Spiδεr's CRT Monitor Shader)
In the midst of the Fratari Civil War, a telecomputer game begins to circulate. Its anonymous authors belong to a largely ineffectual anti-war movement.
They didn't take the time to consider that their target audience, namely those in the war-torn Takunsaki River Valley, don't own telecomputers, especially not ones that can handle advanced graphics.
Not that this changed much. The Blank Republic went on to be distributed by (and almost exclusively to) self-congratulatory students, hosted on an array of pricey personal telecomputers and university mainframes.
Already preparing for an assignment from the magazine LUMO, an up-and-coming journalist thinks to slip a diskette containing the controversial game's demo into his bag. Ordinary people in that region don't own telecomputers, he knows that, but he isn't going to be with ordinary people. He's been tasked with interviewing the exiled first family.
If nothing else, it'd be a bit fun to see how well they fare in the game. It isn't that hard to play.
…Right?
Originally conceived as an independent game, Blank Republic has been a gameplay experiment I've been kicking around in the background for quite some time. A stripped down version of it now appears in the opening of Farewell Intervale, allowing you to intervene in some of the critical decisions that brought the Second Fraternal Republic to its knees by '31.
It's taken quite a few forms over the last year, including a Twine game…
The events contained in this story are de facto canon, and some assets have already been made to integrate into S&M.
Ex.
…And a short-lived Godot project with placeholder assets.
Needless to say, Godot wasn't as easy to tackle as I hoped it would be. ._.
I still might release Twine version of Blank Republic, probably after FI is done. Aside from some editing, it's pretty much finished and just sitting there. It's nice when you don't have to work on art after finishing a script, right? The story is meant to allow you to form a more well-rounded picture of Döma by placing you in his shoes from the start of his life to its abrupt end, and flesh out the life of his daughter, who also appears in FI.
The telecomputer game has been stripped of that, giving you an abstracted, loosely-accurate version of the events that sank the Republic. After all, how would random game developers know anything of substance about a dead politician from an irrelevant country?
(P.S. If you want any idea of how bad my luck has been for the last few months, I lost my healthcare coverage while writing this post. Do NOT take me to Vegas.)