Starting the Journey
I didn’t keep a development blog for Heliosail over the last few years, but on multiple occasions I’ve wondered if it might be of some interest or use to other devs out there. I have sound such blogs indispensable in my own journey for tackling specific issues.
I started making the game in 2019, when I had been missing playing tabletop RPGs, but was craving something a little more versatile than D&D 5e. I was nostalgic for my days of running GURPS, but I remembered my significant issues with the system. Specifically, I found that while GURPS promised universal applicability, this wasn’t true in practice, and attempting to mix technology types became problematic and unbalanced. I decided on a whim to see if I could throw together something that took the concept of GURPS and the elements of some other systems I’ve enjoyed, and make something that would avoid the worst problems.
When I entered the project, I had no experience with any kind of game or system development, and no expectations. I decided to take my favorite things about GURPS and build from there. For example, I really liked that the system used only common 6-sided dice, so it was accessible to people who didn’t typically play TTRPGs. If they had any other board games in the house, they could likely come up with 3 dice to use, and that was all they needed. I also knew I wanted something universal- but I liked how elegant D&D 5e was, and that the time spent doing math was minimized and flow of the game was prioritized over realism.
In order to avoid the problem that I already knew existed with universal systems, I decided rather than try to put everything under the same umbrella, I could create a core engine, and then smaller subsets of rules that applied to specific genres or technology levels. I called these modules “Ages” and the game at large the “Game of Ages.” I outlined several Ages that I wanted to include: Fantasy, Sci-fi, Modern, Steampunk, and lastly Solarpunk. These were all settings that interested me or I knew would be popular, but I was especially driven to the Solarpunk Age because I couldn’t find any other game system that was specifically set in this genre.
As work progressed, I realized that I was just more interested in this solarpunk setting than any of the others. Filling out the other Ages started to sound like a chore, and I started having ideas for things that I worried would negatively impact other settings and lead to a GURPS-like problem. So, I scrapped the concept of the Game of Ages completely, and decided to expand the Solar Age into its own game entirely. At this point, joining it with an unrelated project of mine seemed like the logical next step.
Since 2017 I had been developing the concept for a point and click adventure video game based around a crew of space pirates in a solarpunk world. This project, code named “Sundial,” featured 5 playable characters with distinct sets of abilities, each of which could be used to progress through levels in different ways. Making a video game was beyond my ability to do alone, but making a TTRPG based on this world felt much more approachable. I didn’t need to learn to code, I only had to write out the rules of the game for my players to follow. I didn’t need to have a finished script for people to enjoy the game either, since the genre depends largely on GMs to create their own stories in a compelling universe.
I started by trying to build characters using the Game of Ages framework (in its very unfinished state) based on my 5 pirates. This helped me figure out what kinds of skills and abilities were lacking, and what needed to be made to enable even creating a character to begin with. At this stage I considered building a class system based on these 5 characters and their abilities, but I didn’t like the idea of limiting my players in that way. Whether or not to use a class system was a major design decision and I went back and forth on the idea, and created and then scrapped many ideas in the process.
In the beginning, I tried to not put too many restrictions on my development process. Instead of saying “no” to myself, I simply grabbed onto things I liked from other systems, and original ideas that seemed cool. Even if I wasn’t sure they would work, I still fleshed them out to the entirety of my inspiration and filed them away. I only had 2 rules for myself during this phase:
Don’t worry about bloat and complexity.
Don’t copy systems you don’t like from other games just because you feel like you “should” have them.
The result of this approach was a mess- but a useful mess. As I went on, I trimmed out ideas that weren’t cohesive with the others, or if there was a rule or mechanic I just couldn’t let go of, I made it into an “optional” system rule. Ultimately these ideas are what lead me into a class system after all.
At the time, I wasn’t using classes. Character creation and progression was entirely free-form. I loved the freedom this gave to the player, but I was concerned about it feeling intimidating to new players. I decided to return to my 5 pirate characters and make them using the system the way it was now, turning their basic themes and abilities into “archetypes” that a player could adopt and edit to create a character more quickly. One in particular, Neroli, was a socialite who specialized in resources and political influence. At the time I had a Reputation system that was party-wide as an optional rule- but after building a socialite archetype based on Neroli, I realized that she was really lacking without this system.
And so the current version of Archetypes was born, where each one has a defining unique mechanic. This allowed me to re-introduce some of the cool ideas I had to put aside earlier. Scaling them back to being a single player meant I could simplify them, and since proper etiquette in TTRPGs dictates that players should know their own mechanics, implementing these mechanics this way meant I could have them in the game without treating my GM like a human computer.
I still had 2 issues with the idea of classes though:
I disliked the restriction classes can place on the player, especially for characters who are generalists or jacks of all trades.
I disliked how artificial and “video gamey” leveling up in a class system like D&D feels.
I had decided long before this that the game would be “skill based.” In TTRPGs this refers to a design decision where emphasis is placed on the skills a character can have, which can be improved independently of each other. For reference, D&D is the opposite, this system is “attribute based” where a character has a large number of attributes (strength, dexterity, intelligence, etc) that dictate most of their skill. The original Game of Ages had been skill based, with the idea being that specific lists of skills could be changed depending on the Age in question to best suit the setting. Rather than have a class system shoehorn players into a specific set of skills, I chose to allow them to pick their own, while encouraging ones that would complements their core mechanic. In this way, I felt I could direct new players, while not boxing more adventurous players out of playing their character the way they want.
With that issue mostly solved, it left me with the problem of leveling up. I find the way leveling up works in D&D 5e to feel artificial- you hit a new level and suddenly have all these new abilities. It’s functional, but not elegant in my opinion, so I knew I wanted character progression to work through the skill system instead. This also helped with problem number one above. The two systems I am the most familiar with that feature level-able skills are GURPS and Call of Cthulhu. Both require a bit of paperwork, where the player must keep track of how many successful uses of a skill they’ve had in order to track when that skill levels up. This gets the job done, but I didn’t want to bog players down with a lot of paperwork, or have them miss leveling up when they should because they forgot to tick a box. I wanted it to be easy to keep track of, intuitive, and I also needed it to provide the kind of exciting developments you usually get by taking levels in a class. In addition, Call of Cthulhu in particular works on a percentage die- so your skill is represented a percentage of possible success. When you roll your dice, you must roll that percentage point or less. I didn’t want to implement a “roll under” system when success in the rest of my system meant rolling over the target number. I also didn’t want to represent skills as a chance of failure in a percentage system like this because that would mean that more skilled players would have their skills be represented by a lower number, which is counter intuitive.
Leveling didn’t have a ready solution unless I wanted to introduce discrete levels with milestones or experience points to keep track of. Many games do this, but it was antithetical to how I wanted my game to feel. I eventually decided on the Trick system. This advances skills by giving the player cool abilities based on their skills rather than a simple numerical bonus. It’s also implemented so that it happens naturally through the course of the game, with some rules in place to prevent progressing too rapidly.
As of this post, I am working on the next major update of Heliosail, which includes more major changes to the system. As I continue working, I will try to capture my brainstorming on specific problems.
