The Kapuluan ng mga malaya!

Batikan happens within the islands of Lusong—at least for now. From the start, we wanted the world to feel truly grounded, so we’re drawing directly from the real elevation map of Luzon. The satellite image you see here is of the northern Philippines, and our goal is to present it in ways that spark recognition: angles that make you think, “Wait… I’ve seen that ridge before,” and perspectives that make familiar places feel new again. For so long, we’ve viewed our homeland through the eyes of outsiders. It’s time to see it the way our ancestors might have—through memory, myth, and lived experience.

But why build a game around a “nationalistic spirit” in the 16th century? The truth is: there wasn’t a single unified nation then. What did exist was something just as powerful—a shared cultural identity. Across islands and languages, people recognised one another as kin, rivals, allies, trading partners, or enemies within the same cultural world. There was a mutual understanding of who “we” were, even without a nation-state. “The peoples of the archipelago shared a common culture long before they shared a common government.”

To illustrate this, here’s a short excerpt from William Henry Scott’s Barangay (quoted within fair use):

On an Austronesian language tree produced by this method (by comparing borrowed words from other languages and inheritance from a common ancestral stock), Philippine languages are found on the lowest branches, meaning to say that Austronesian languages were being spoken in the archipelago earlier than in places like the Malay Peninsula or the Pacific Islands. By the time of Spanish advent, Austronesian speakers had occupied the whole archipelago, absorbing or displacing the sparse populations already present, as their original tongue diversified into three main branches: A northern branch included Luzon languages like Ilocano, Ibanag, and those on the Cordillera. A southern branch included almost all the languages spoken in Mindanao. A central branch had proliferated most widely; it included not only Visayan but all languages between Pampanga and Butuan, as well as Taosug in Sulu. Except for the Sama-Badjaw languages, all Philippine languages have more in common with one another than any one of them does with a language outside the Philippines. This means that the Filipinos the Spaniards met in the sixteenth century were speaking languages produced within the archipelago, not introduced by separate migrations from abroad. (Source: Scott, W.H. (1994), Barangay)

This idea is at the heart of the world we're building, a world where identity is not defined by borders, but by relationships, traditions, and the stories people carry.

Some sources we used to map territories: