Dev Diary - Provincial Administration (Part II - Prototype)

Today we’ll take a look at the province administration prototype. I decided to create it separately from the main game in order to get player feedback more quickly.

This prototype is playable right now, but available exclusively to Substack supporters as a way to thank them for their support. It will be available for free for everyone soon, as I will need more playtesters. Join our Discord and sign up to the mailing list to be notified! Or, if you can’t wait, you can become a Substack paid supporter to gain access now:

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Please note that it’s a prototype, so it’s not representative of the final game. Also, there’s currently no in-game tutorial, as the mechanics will change considerably. So I made a video tutorial, where you can watch me do a playthrough:

(Above is a 20min video of me explaining this prototype of province administration)

A quick note on visuals

This prototype is ugly. I believe I’m able to make pretty graphics, but right now I’m focusing purely on gameplay. It didn’t seem worth it to me to work on the visuals yet, so it looks very barebones, like this:

It’s not pretty but hey, it works.

Here’s an image of the current build of the full game that shows some nice visuals (even though it’s not done either):

So you can expect province administration to look a lot better in the future. With that disclaimer out of the way, let’s get into the diary itself, and talk about mechanics and game design!

“Work” as the basis of provincial administration

But most of his time he spent in judicial business, settling the disputes of cities and kings, and for those to which he himself could not attend, sending his friends.

Plutarch, Life of Pompey. 39.1

The above quote is about Pompey’s work as a governor of Asia. When Plutarch says “his friends”, he’s talking about the Roman concept of friends: amici, the people that a governor would surround himself with and take to the provinces as his staff. Men, old and young, that would do the work of administrating the province with the governor. These men went out to the provinces and worked there.

From high concept to low-level implementation

Last time, I wrote about the high concept for this prototype. But a high concept doesn’t account for the low-level needs that arise. There are so many little questions that a prototype must answer. How exactly do the mechanics work, what are the elements and moving pieces? When you start implementing, you realize how much is left unanswered (or I do, at least!).

The most interesting thing I discovered, and was a bit surprised by, was the need to bring in an element that was completely absent from the high concept: work.

Administrating a province was work. And so I drew from the concept of work to answer lot of the design questions that came up.

Teamwork and the Division of Labor

We don’t know exactly how the Romans worked in a governor’s staff and in the provinces in general. There are no in-depth sources about the day-to-day of a governor and his staff. Or at least I didn’t find them — if you know any, please let me know!

But, to some extent, work is work! So I was able to draw from my own experiences with working, making stuff and collaborating with others. We all have some experience with work, even if it’s school work or house