The Story of the Land — A strategy game about the history of Palestine
The Story of the Land (حكاية الأرض) is a strategy game about the history of Palestine, told from the Palestinian side. You keep one family and its village on the land, month by month, from 1880 to 2026. The game is non-commercial, plays in Arabic and English, and every fact in it cites a source.
- Unity 6
- C#
- .NET 10
- Python
- HLSL
- WebGL
How it plays
- Pick one of seven chapters, from late Ottoman Palestine to October 2026, and a village.
- Each month, read the events that reached the family: a strike, a land sale, an expulsion order, a siege.
- Choose what the family does. Each choice moves ten resources: Land, Home, Family, Documents, Livelihood, Memory, Sumud, Community, Safety and Solidarity.
- A Why panel shows what the choice changed, resource by resource.
What makes it different
- Sourced: 303 events, each linked to its sources (the UN, rights groups, palquest.org, Al Jazeera). Every death toll says who counted it, and contested claims are marked as contested.
- A map that changes: a 3D terrain map built from real elevation data shows the 1948 village fates, then the occupation, the settlements, Oslo and the wall, then the destruction of Gaza month by month from UNOSAT satellite surveys.
- People: 54 figures, each with a sourced biography and an ink-and-wash portrait.
- Arabic and English: the whole game, mirrored right to left, with narration and music.
- Checked footage: clips are shown only after a content note and once a person has signed them off.
How it works
- A deterministic C# simulation runs the rules: the same choices always give the same result.
- Unity draws the map and the interface; there are macOS, Windows, Linux and web builds.
- Nothing is generated while you play. AI use (code, narration voices, portraits, music, 3D models) is disclosed in the repository.
Status
- Done: the simulation, the map, seven chapters and 54 people in Arabic and English, narration, music and checked footage.
- Open: a read by a native Palestinian Arabic editor, and frame-rate tuning.
Stack
- Unity 6 (6000.6.6f1), C#, .NET SDK 10, HLSL shaders
- Python tooling (uv) to build the simulation for Unity
- Code under MIT; art and docs under CC BY 4.0; game text and map data under CC BY-SA 4.0