Rise to Power: Banana Republic is a political sim set on Isla Paraíso, a fictional Caribbean island. The dictator who ran it for forty years has died, leaving a fragile democracy behind: the rules are new, and the democratic state is still slowly taking shape.

You start as an ordinary citizen, with no office and no power.

What I want to build

A game about how power is acquired inside a political system. The reference point is the Paradox games, Crusader Kings in particular, for how their stories come out of relationships between characters. Compared to those I want to go deeper into the political mechanics: how voting happens, how appointments are made, how an office is won and lost.

The island has three administrative levels: provinces, regions and the central state. Each has an elected assembly, a governor, and a government of ministers the governor appoints. I want moving up through those levels to be mainly about building relationships with people you will need later, rather than obtaining ever more important offices.

Under the ministries' jurisdiction are the public institutions and agencies, which remain even when whoever appointed them changes. They exist to improve the territory's social and economic statistics. But I also want them to work as an instrument of personal power: whoever controls one decides who works there and who gets the appointments, and can build a network of people who owe them something.

The same applies to elections. I want rigging one to be a concrete option with its own costs and risks, rather than simply the wrong choice.

More generally, I want to avoid a single always-optimal line of play. Situations should present choices where every option has a cost.

Part of what I have described is already implemented, part is in development, and part is so far only designed. In future posts I will say each time where things stand.

Who is developing the game

I work alone: code, design, content and communication. This means development takes a long time. It also means the person answering in these discussions is the same one who writes the code.

Current objective

Getting a playable demo ready for Steam Next Fest. It is what I am working on now and takes up almost all my development time.

The first release will not be a complete game

What ships will be more limited than what I described above. I intend to maintain and expand it in the months that follow.

Feedback

You can post in these discussions. I read everything, although I will not manage to reply to everyone.

At this stage the most useful comments are about:

• Aspects of political power that come across as unconvincing, or are missing entirely
• Points where the simulation turns out to be shallow
• Information the interface does not show that you would need to understand events
• Things you have been looking for in this genre and have not found

Feedback on art and interface is useful too, but a lower priority at this stage.

Use of AI

I use AI for three things: the game's translations, the character avatars, and drafting posts like this one.

The rest of the artwork is made by me together with a professional illustrator and UI designer. The design, the simulation systems, the in-game text and the code are entirely my own work.

The reason is a production one. I am a single developer, the game involves hundreds of characters that each need a portrait and six languages, and I want to keep the forum updated in English too. AI covers the parts I cannot cover alone. It does not replace the creative work.

The community's role

I cannot go into equal depth on everything, so I need to work out what to focus on first. Some examples:

• Forming a coalition government when no party has a majority
• Internal party conflict and voting discipline
• The role of the press in setting the topics of public debate
• The army as a political actor rather than just a budget line

Do you like the idea? Which of these would you most want to see simulated in depth? And which one do games in this genre usually handle badly?