Hi,

I am the gameplay designer at Hardwired. You can find me at our discord channel as Little_bastard22. Before I joined Hardwired as a system designer, the team had four things:

- really compelling high concept

- bunch of great ideas

- ballsy, but experienced team

- and they definitely knew what they wanted to make - an ARPG.

Good enough for me. I was in.

Going from High Concept to Ideas to Systems

System design is a curious work. You are basically trying to distill fun out of game mechanics and export it into boring spreadsheets, formulas and game logic, still respecting the game’s high concept and genre conventions.

Thematically, both cyberpunk and biopunk deal with the questions of identity, usually through the lens of body modifications. Bodymods tend to be rather extreme, completely changing person’s abilities, their appearance and sometimes even psychology and cognition.

We were quick to realize that body modifications should be our core fantasy. Cyberpunk (and biopunk alike) is when your body becomes the tool of your trade, whatever your trade happens to be. If you are a killer, your body becomes a weapon. In terms of ARPG vocabulary, the boundary between character and inventory becomes blurry.

To spare you all the genre theory and philosophical definitions, I will try to illustrate the idea with the language of every ARPG - the base statistics. We are taking a slightly different approach on them, but keeping it intuitive, quick to understand and somehow familiar.

We all know that there are usually three base stats - Strength (STR), Agility(AGI) and Intelligence (INT). Every now and then, they tend to go by slightly different names, but, essentially, they are the same - they describe your character’s physical traits such as strength, movement speed/reflexes and cognitive performance.

One of the ideas the team had was something called “grid system”. Every character, whether tech or bio, would have a statistic derived from the base stat, that would limit the equipment they could handle. You can mount a gatling gun to your wrist, but what good does it serve, if you don’t have enough juice to spin it? So there were certain requirements for your “power grid”, which in turn would be derived from your STR. For other types of equipment (say rigger’s gear), you would use different grid (e.g. INT-based ”processing power” grid), or some kind of improved reflexes for handling fast AGI-based equipment).

There are no restrictions for any character bodytype to choose their equipment as long as you will support it with right grid booster modules, which will allow you to pick your play style.