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The Administrator : Reinstalled - Devlog #01

game, devlog, update  · 

Long time, no see! I wanted to write on this blog for some time now, but haven’t got the time due to having to work/study, and also “not having a lot” to talk about. But now I do have stuff to talk about, because I’m working on a 3-month project for school with a great team, and I’m starting this new personal project. But what is this project exactly ?

What is The Administrator ?

Before talking about this remake/sequel project, I need to explain what is “The Administrator”, the original. It’s the first of many projects produced as part of exercises aimed to sharpen our prototyping skills. Each exercise had a sheet with a bunch of elements to include (look at the article about Tic Tac Mix, you’ll understand). This time it was :

Paired with 2 other people, we chose to create a management game. Taking place in a desolated post-apocalyptic univers, you use a very “old” looking terminal-based interface to handle a population in an underground bunker. Type commands, send citizens out to gather resources, survive as long as possible…

Now that we understand a bit more the original project, that you can find here, we can go and talk about my objectives and progress about the sequel.

What are the objectives ?

My goal with this project is to provide (of course) a “modernized” version of the game, straying from the text-based interface to a Windows 98 inspired graphical interface while keeping the core gameplay elements and expanding on them.

I can mention the room (now called infrastructure) system, that was obviously very simplified due to time constraints, will now be much more complete with the ability to “dig” to increase vault space and build more rooms. Using graphical interfaces will also enable the ability to add details like equipment for squads members in exploration.

I will also take this occasion to expand a bit on the lore and universe. It’s going to be a challenging task because I do not want to be explicit in my storytelling.

What have I done so far ?

This is not Windows… This is Fenêtre.

I started work on the UI first, iterated upon it and updating the assets I had to create a custom theme for my project.

I used “Retro Windows GUI” by Comp-3 Interactive and changed the colors, and got some of the original Win98 icons from “Windows 98 Icon Viewer” by Alex Meub (which are of course, placeholder).

The interface was updated alongside the code, with elements being added and refined.

At first, the topbar was not present. But, I decided to include it to display the players resources to prevent the player from going too insane in a game that will already have so much elements to manage at once.

The wheel was not reinvented… Almost.

I took the original code that does the command parsing in the console system and adapted it, with some minor adjustments and upgrades (with the help of some robots you may know).

I also took my TimeManager class from the original code, and added more events to have more control over the flow of the game.

I’m also using my utilities package of code I gathered from various tutorials over the years.

A window was created to replace the checkup command in the original game. Later on, there will be buttons to request a report on the health and working status of the entity.

New stuff too!

Before, villagers/citizens had their own data class but they now are called entities. This is a class that will be also used for enemies/creatures when implementing the exploration mechanic for combat, and the merchants, a cut feature from the original prototype.

On top of that, I added “races”, started with the humans, and added a new one for ghouls. I plan to add dogs and mutated creatures as races.

A new gender is added: “Intersex”. This gender will be able to mate with every gender (provide they have the right sexual orientation) and get pregnant. Sexual orientation is also a thing, and will determine how the citizens will interact with each other (form couples, families, etc).

There is four sexual orientations : heterosexual, homosexual, pansexual and asexual. No need to explain how each of them will work.

This will add, in my sense, an interesting layer around the management of population. Maybe the player will be able to force experiments to change the orientation to a heterosexual to make more babies, or the total opposite and make asexual people to prevent having too much population.

I have been working on the health system and diseases, like in the original game, but with much more detail. Causing health damage, debuffs for certain actions, etc.

For the infrastructure system, I have been working on the rooms and their data, the ability to repair them, damage over time.

What’s next ?

A lot of systems are incomplete, like the infrastructure/rooms, that need to have so much more logic implement as well as the Window UI that need to be created.

The exploration system will be the next big thing to be added. But I need to implement a lot of small stuff too before, like resources decay when there’s a surplus.

Conclusion

I probably forgot a lot of details, but I think I yapped enough already. I’ll try and make another update when enough progress is made on the project. Until then, have a good one!