Welcome back to the dev diaries. This one is a bit of a departure. Instead of building out a corner of my own worlds, I spent September drawing fan art for someone else's, specifically the Arma 3 mod Antistasi, and then, in a decidedly me fashion, I let it spiral into a much bigger question about Greek resistance, near-future Balkan wars, and how weirdly close that all sits to WW2044. Let us ramble.
WHAT EVEN IS ANTISTASI
For the uninitiated: Antistasi (Greek αντίσταση, literally "resistance") is a legendary Arma 3 mod where you play a band of guerrillas trying to free their island from an occupying army. The hook is that you start with basically nothing. No arsenal, no vehicles, no air support, just a few angry people and some worse rifles. Every weapon, every truck, every scrap of kit has to be stolen off the enemy first. It is hardcore milsim colliding with something that feels a lot like an extraction shooter, and the persistent, grind-it-out-from-nothing campaign is what makes it sing. It is also, and I cannot stress this enough, the most fun you can have with the boys on a Saturday.
Drawing for my favorite mods
Most of you know me as the guy who did the Kaiserreich logo and art, and fair enough, that is the project that put me on the map. But I have a soft spot for doing art and concepts inspired by other mods I actually play, and Antistasi has been in heavy rotation in my group for ages. So this is me scratching that itch: no client, no brief, no deadline, just making something for a community I am already part of.
Antistasi Steam banner concepts
The actual starting point was a small, concrete question: what would a really good Steam banner for Antistasi look like? Something that sells the feeling of the mod at a glance, not just a logo slapped over a screenshot. The vibe I kept chasing was insurgency, so I drafted a stack of ambush-flavoured compositions, all centred on scrappy FIA fighters catching someone out on a bad stretch of road.
The RPG gunner and the low-angle ambush framing did the most work here. When your whole fantasy is punching above your weight class, you want the composition to feel like the little guy is about to ruin a very expensive vehicle's day.
Making the FIA feel more distinctly Greek
The FIA is Antistasi's independent insurgent force (GREF, in Arma terms), and it is deliberately a bit generic in vanilla, a stand-in guerrilla faction. So I gave it some thought and tried to make it feel specifically Greek. My trooper carries an RPK with modern furniture (yes, a G3 would be the more "correct" Mediterranean choice, I just really like the RPK, this is my drawing and I make the rules), a hand-lettered ΦIA patch, and a Smersch-type light chest rig. Little identifiers doing the heavy lifting, same principle I bang on about every time.
My best stab at a face for the faction is a fighter I have affectionately named Solid Stavros, a Greek-inspired modern militiaman loosely based on a certain famous Greek actor. The reenactor hoplite in the corner is not an accident: I wanted the modern guerrilla to rhyme, just a little, with the very old idea of Greeks defending their own rocky ground.
Antistasi story mode: Some worldbuilding notes
Here is where the tangent properly takes over. Antistasi inherits its Greek flavour from Arma 3 itself, which is set on fictional Mediterranean islands, but it is a sandbox, it does not really have a story. And I could not stop wondering what it might become if it did. Picture resistance fighters bedded down in a bombed-out Orthodox church, guitar going, a faded mosaic of some forgotten emperor watching over them. That image would not leave me alone.
The Greece 2035 insurgency setting is genuinely one of the more fascinating parts of Arma 3, and honestly, a Greek setting is just something you almost never see in this genre. Everyone defaults to the same handful of deserts and post-Soviet backdrops. A sun-bleached Aegean island with two and a half thousand years of "someone is invading again" baked into its bones? That is a world worth telling stories in.
The WW2044 x Antistasi crossover
Which of course drags me back to my own sandbox. Apply the WW2044 conceit (take a historical conflict and shove it a century forward) and a Greek insurgency writes itself: a near-future Balkan Wars, Greek partisans against Ottoman occupiers. The maths even lines up nicely, the First Balkan War kicked off in 1912, so a "2012" version is exactly the same hundred-year shift that gives me WW2 in the 2040s. That blue-and-white banner up there is the Greek War of Independence flag, and if the vexillographer in me is honest, half the pull of any alt-history setting is the excuse to redraw its flags (and yes, you can order any historical or invented banner as a real custom flag over at the day job; a man has to fund his hobbies somehow).
And here is the part that made me laugh when it clicked. In vanilla Arma 3, the main OPFOR is CSAT, an Iranian-led bloc, so your enemy already reads as a modernised Middle-Eastern power. Which means the overlap between Antistasi and a WW2044 "Greeks versus a surviving Ottoman Empire" scenario is weirdly, almost suspiciously strong. Same island geography, same underdog-guerrilla fantasy, same broad shape of occupier. I did not plan that. The two ideas just happened to be standing in the same spot.
GO PLAY IT, SERIOUSLY
All of this fan art exists because the mod earned it. If any of the above sounds like your kind of misery, go grab Antistasi on the Steam Workshop. It is actively maintained, it has more flavours than I can list (Chilled Revolt, desert variants, the community branch), and it is, once again, the peak Saturday-night co-op experience as far as I am concerned. My group plays it constantly and I regret nothing.
One last extra, because I could not help myself: here is Amira, one of my southern Mediterranean OCs, reimagined as an FIA insurgent too. This time with a G3 (see, I do own one), a radio or drone-operator pack, and a Macedonian lion patch that quietly doubles as my inspiration for the island's flag. She started as a WW2044 character and slotted into this world without a single complaint, which tells you everything about how close these two ideas really are.
That is the tangent. What began as "I should draw a Steam banner" ended, as these things do, with me sketching a whole alternate Greek insurgency and muttering about the Balkan Wars in 2018. If you enjoy concept art buried under long ramblings about references, favourite mods and settings I love, well, you are already reading a dev diary, so you know where to find more of them. If you'd like to join our Antistasi games, check out our community gaming Discord on https://kaisercatcinema.com/discord
This is callsign Big Cat - Actual, signing off
V
About the Author
Vincent 'VincentDN' De Nil is a designer and app developer specialized in the reproduction of historically inspired flags, propaganda posters and artwork. He is the founder of Flagmaker & Print and the Kaiser Cat Collective. KCC is a global coalition of content creators united in the mission of creating high-quality narrative alt-history content, set in the great What-Ifs of alternate timelines.
Homepage (all projects): https://vincentdenil.com/
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/vincentdn/
Kaiser Cat Cinema: https://kaisercatcinema.com/about
Flagmaker & Print: https://flagmaker-print.com/pages/about-vincent
ArtStation: https://www.artstation.com/vincentdn
Discover our alt-history projects
What if there had been an American Medieval age? https://american-kingdoms.com/
What if there had been a Second American Civil War? https://dividedstates-project.com/
What if WWII had happened in the 2040s? https://kaisercatcinema.com/s/about-ww2044
What if there had been a three-way cold war? https://kaisercatcinema.com/s/about-coldwarproject