You see, in the deckbuilding games I've played, each player will start with a set of starting cards that they use to purchase more cards for their deck, which in turn allows them to purchase more cards and more cards until the end of game trigger is hit and then everyone counts up the points in their deck to see who wins. That system is a fun system to play, but not at all what I was trying to design because it's already been done. I wasn't trying to create another victory point deck building game. I wanted interaction and player vs. player conflict. I wanted to be able to battle head to head in a deckbuilding game.
Working within the limits of Magi Nation, I wasn't too sure what I was going to do for a starting deck. Going with what I knew of 10 cards in the starting deck, I initially created a set of 10 cards that included 5 creatures from 5 different regions, and 5 universal cards. I knew that this wasn't perfect from the start, but I wasn't too sure how to approach the problem. The issue here, is that creatures are the main focus of the game and you need them to battle with your opponent. In a normal deck of Magi Nation, you'll generally have over half of your deck as creatures, sometimes as much as 80% of your deck will be creatures. This is to ensure that you always have a steady supply. If you only start out with half of your deck as creatures, and draw half of your deck on the first turn, it's very possible (and probable) that you're only going to draw 1-2 of those creatures. If you only draw 1 creature and your opponent draws 4, then you're going to be quite far behind in tempo. The original game had tried to solve this with the use of "starting cards" which were cards that would start the game in your hand, although they were generally weak in comparison to cards you wanted to have in your deck. Because I knew that players were going to be adding cards from multiple regions into their deck due to the need to do so based on card availability, I hadn't planned on creating characters from different regions so this wasn't really a viable solution.
The second issue that I had to solve was how to actually get the cards from the center row that they were revealed in, to being placed into your deck. I had initially considered needing to purchase the cards with the energy that you get every turn, but quickly realized that this would devolve into "buy a few good cards, never buy anything else" because energy is what the entire system is based around. You use it to fight, and to survive, and running out of it loses you the game, so spending it on something that doesn't impact the current game state is going to turn out to be terrible. So then I thought about using 2 seperate energy pools, one that was used for adding cards to your deck, and one that was used for playing cards. This second design is what I had decided I was going to be using in my mind for quite some time because I couldn't think of anything else, but I had a feeling this would be much too "fiddly" for real practical use. You already move enough dice/tokens around in the normal game, adding more of that wasn't going to be a good thing.
As I said before, I initially began this project trying to fit the cards from a dead CCG into a deckbuilding game. The revelation for the current system didn't come until months after the initial concept. I had even shelved the project because I wasn't happy with the actual deckbuilding portion of it, I knew it wasn't going to be an elegant design. I'm not really sure what caused it, but something caused me to realize that the cards aren't going to be balanced based off of energy costs, so why use that resource as the scale in which to add cards to your deck? You can build a deck in a CCG with all 1 cost cards, or all 5 cost cards, but the single unifying thing within all CCGs is that each player has a limit (literal or realistic-imposed) of the number of cards that can be in your deck. You make decisions when building a deck to add one card over another based on the power level or effect of the card and what you're trying to add to your deck. Cards also have a restriction as to the number of copies you're allowed in your deck to prevent abuse and force variety. I should be developing a system around numbers of cards added, not the costs of those cards in the game. Adding 3 cards that cost 1 should be the same as adding 3 cards that cost 5 if those cards share the same relative power level. For anyone experienced with M:tG, Swords to Plowshares and Serra Angel were both powerful cards (when I played Magic), but both were powerful in completely different ways, and adding one to your deck had the same pre-game cost as adding the other. The pre-game cost is the equivilent of what I am trying to replicate while also playing the game.
This brought me around to creating what was initially known as "Syphon Stone". It was known as that, because that's the name of the card that I used to proxy it! The function of the card, in game, was to be a free card that you could play from your hand to choose a card in the center row and add it to your discard (the common way of adding cards to your deck in other deck building games is to add them to your discard.) It was too easy! I created a starting 10 card deck with 5 of these cards, 5 universal creatures that were all identical, and now I was really ready to playtest. I solved what was the bigger problem of the two issues, the balance issue of how many creatures were drawn in the initial hand I planned on solving at a later date, assuming that this system worked.
Monday, September 26, 2011
Tuesday, September 20, 2011
Designing Cards
I started with the base of 5 factions. I figure if works for Magic and it's what Magi-Nation initially released with, it's probably not a bad starting point. After that, I tried to apply different themes for each faction. I'm quite the logical thinker, so my initial concepts are fairly uniform to keep things theoretically balanced, and this is what I first started out with:
It's boring, but I needed to start somewhere, so I ran with it. I also decided to try and keep some of the air of a rarity system in the game, so it wasn't just 4 copies of every card, and instead have more copies of less powerful cards (commons), and fewer copies of more powerful cards (rares). I wanted to keep the deck around 100-150 cards which I felt was a managable number to work with, but enough to give variety to the game every time you would play. I knew there would be spells and creatures as the base of the game, and any other card types I could work on later if I wanted to add them.
With 5 factions, and armed with the above knowledge, I decided upon a breakdown within each region as follows:
This brought me to 18 cards per faction, and 90 cards in the deck. This was perfect for another reason that hasn't been mentioned yet, and that reason was MONSTERS.
Something that I had in the back of my mind, which was a concept that is sort of a part of Ascension, but it doesn't really feel that way is Monsters. Monsters in this context would be bad guys that are shuffled into the deck and would pop up randomly throughout the game that the players would need to fight back, while also fighting each other. The concept sounds like a lot of fun, and with only 90 cards, this allowed me to add 30 monsters to the deck to try the concept out. I made it easy on myself and just put 5 copies of 6 different monsters into the deck, and now I was ready to playtest!
Or was I?
- Air - Remove Energy from Magi
- Earth - Add Energy to creatures
- Fire - Remove Energy from creatures
- Water - Add Energy to Magi
- Void - Prevent Energy Loss
It's boring, but I needed to start somewhere, so I ran with it. I also decided to try and keep some of the air of a rarity system in the game, so it wasn't just 4 copies of every card, and instead have more copies of less powerful cards (commons), and fewer copies of more powerful cards (rares). I wanted to keep the deck around 100-150 cards which I felt was a managable number to work with, but enough to give variety to the game every time you would play. I knew there would be spells and creatures as the base of the game, and any other card types I could work on later if I wanted to add them.
With 5 factions, and armed with the above knowledge, I decided upon a breakdown within each region as follows:
- 6 - 2 Cost Common Creatures
- 4 - 4 cost Uncommon Creatures
- 2 - 6 cost Rare Creatures
- 4 - 1 cost Uncommon Spells
- 2 - 3 cost Rare Spells
This brought me to 18 cards per faction, and 90 cards in the deck. This was perfect for another reason that hasn't been mentioned yet, and that reason was MONSTERS.
Something that I had in the back of my mind, which was a concept that is sort of a part of Ascension, but it doesn't really feel that way is Monsters. Monsters in this context would be bad guys that are shuffled into the deck and would pop up randomly throughout the game that the players would need to fight back, while also fighting each other. The concept sounds like a lot of fun, and with only 90 cards, this allowed me to add 30 monsters to the deck to try the concept out. I made it easy on myself and just put 5 copies of 6 different monsters into the deck, and now I was ready to playtest!
Or was I?
Initial Design
In reality, when I initially began to design this game, I didn't have any intentions of creating something new from the ground up. At first all I was trying to do was to adapt a set of cards from Magi-Nation into a deckbuilding game to be able to play with my friends and possibly share the rules/card lists publically so other fans of Magi-Nation could also enjoy this variant of the game. When creating the lists of the cards that I was going to include in the game, I began to encounter a slew of issues.
You see, it's not necessarily the easiest thing to take the cards designed for one game design and port them into another similar, yet completely different game design. There are about 1200 cards that were created for Magi-Nation, and 12 different regions. Simple logic should let you see that if you wanted a game with a play style that had any coherence with one another that I couldn't have 12 regions in a fixed game, so I had decided just to use the inital 5 regions that Magi-Nation started with. This cut my available pool of cards down to around 500, which was a little easier to manage, but enough to give me some variety to work with.
My first job was to select the cards that would be in the game from within the 5 regions. Since I was using the purchase/selection model from Ascension, the idea was that I would have a pool of cards for each region, all shuffled together and then you'd have a limited number of the random cards face-up at any given time to be able to select from and add cards to your deck. This wasn't too difficult in and of itself, however it quickly became apparent that there were certain cards that would be purchased above all others, no matter what region(s) you had previously added to your deck.
Something about that concept really irked me. There was no real choice to be made. Each player would just purchase the most powerful available card, followed by the next and the next and the next until their deck would just be Pile_of_most_powerful_available_cards.deck. The conclusion I reached was that I wanted a reason to draft "Moderate Power card from Region A" for your deck full of Region A instead of "High Power card from Region B". This difference in card power is usually easy to differentiate when it comes to a standard CCG, because there are only so many cards that have a specific amount of raw power to have their inclusion into your deck be a no-brainer. Then you start picking cards that are less powerful, but go along with the theme of your deck to create synergy.
There it was... the THEME of the deck. That's what I needed to create. But how do you do that when you're looking at a random pile of 100+ cards over 5 different factions? I couldn't just make it so you pick a region and can only purchase cards of that region, that would be too limiting. Also, what happens when you choose a region and the random shuffle places the majority of that region in the bottom of the deck? I needed players to be able to play cards from any region, but give them a reason to purchase cards specifically to match the theme of what they've already drafted.
This entire thought process is what caused me to move away from the existing Magi-Nation cards that were already printed and instead create new cards that had matching themes and synergies that would allow them to be used much better within this system. Isn't it wonderful how any project can quickly grow to a size that you didn't expect it to?
You see, it's not necessarily the easiest thing to take the cards designed for one game design and port them into another similar, yet completely different game design. There are about 1200 cards that were created for Magi-Nation, and 12 different regions. Simple logic should let you see that if you wanted a game with a play style that had any coherence with one another that I couldn't have 12 regions in a fixed game, so I had decided just to use the inital 5 regions that Magi-Nation started with. This cut my available pool of cards down to around 500, which was a little easier to manage, but enough to give me some variety to work with.
My first job was to select the cards that would be in the game from within the 5 regions. Since I was using the purchase/selection model from Ascension, the idea was that I would have a pool of cards for each region, all shuffled together and then you'd have a limited number of the random cards face-up at any given time to be able to select from and add cards to your deck. This wasn't too difficult in and of itself, however it quickly became apparent that there were certain cards that would be purchased above all others, no matter what region(s) you had previously added to your deck.
Something about that concept really irked me. There was no real choice to be made. Each player would just purchase the most powerful available card, followed by the next and the next and the next until their deck would just be Pile_of_most_powerful_available_cards.deck. The conclusion I reached was that I wanted a reason to draft "Moderate Power card from Region A" for your deck full of Region A instead of "High Power card from Region B". This difference in card power is usually easy to differentiate when it comes to a standard CCG, because there are only so many cards that have a specific amount of raw power to have their inclusion into your deck be a no-brainer. Then you start picking cards that are less powerful, but go along with the theme of your deck to create synergy.
There it was... the THEME of the deck. That's what I needed to create. But how do you do that when you're looking at a random pile of 100+ cards over 5 different factions? I couldn't just make it so you pick a region and can only purchase cards of that region, that would be too limiting. Also, what happens when you choose a region and the random shuffle places the majority of that region in the bottom of the deck? I needed players to be able to play cards from any region, but give them a reason to purchase cards specifically to match the theme of what they've already drafted.
This entire thought process is what caused me to move away from the existing Magi-Nation cards that were already printed and instead create new cards that had matching themes and synergies that would allow them to be used much better within this system. Isn't it wonderful how any project can quickly grow to a size that you didn't expect it to?
Monday, September 19, 2011
The resource system
I previously referenced a resource system that I was using from the game Magi-Nation: Duel. I should probably explain this in more detail to the people who are not familiar with that game.
The system should be able to work for a variety of games, but in this context, you would be controlling a main character who would have an amount of resources to be able to spend to cast spells, summon creatures, or use abilities. Anyone who is familiar with Magic: the Gathering, Pokemon, Yugi-Oh, or any number of other games should be familair with a similar concept of controlling a main character that battles against another character controlled by an opponent through the use of creatures, spells and abilities.
You start with a number of resources represented by tokens or dice. In Magi-Nation, this was called energy and the main characters that you controlled were called Magi. So your Magi would have an amount of energy that they started with, and gain a fixed amount of energy at the start of each turn. This energy would be spent to cast spells, summon creatures and use abilities. When you cast a spell or used an ability, the energy would be discarded, completely lost. When you summoned a creature, the energy would be moved onto that creature and act as both it's attack value and it's remaining health. So if I spent 5 energy on summoning a creature, I would move 5 energy from my Magi to that creature card and it would have 5 attack and 5 health.
The combat system for the game would work that both creatures involved in an attack would remove energy from one another simultaniously. So if my 5 energy creature attacked your 3 energy creature, I would remove 5 energy from your creature and you would remove 3 energy from my creature. Your creature would be left with zero energy, and be discarded from play, while my creature would be left with 2 energy and be able to continue to fight, although in a much weaker state.
To my knowledge, this system hasn't been used in another game as of yet, and it's somewhat original in the sense that it has yet to be used by another game, but it's not really unique in the sense that similar systems have not been used before. The idea where you move the resource from your character to the creature that you summon is a unique idea I believe, but gaining a fixed amount of resources each turn is not.
What I really like about the system is the simplicity. You don't need to create attack and defense values to balance vs. a casting cost of the creature, which enevitable causes a power creeep that you can't really do anything about. It's easy for people to understand and easy to track combat. It also promotes some basic math skills, which is always a plus when you're thinking about a younger audience. I have changed the reference names for the resource (Essence) and the main characters (Awakened) for Affinity to fit the world that I'm designing for the game, but the rest of the general mechanics as explained are still intact.
The system should be able to work for a variety of games, but in this context, you would be controlling a main character who would have an amount of resources to be able to spend to cast spells, summon creatures, or use abilities. Anyone who is familiar with Magic: the Gathering, Pokemon, Yugi-Oh, or any number of other games should be familair with a similar concept of controlling a main character that battles against another character controlled by an opponent through the use of creatures, spells and abilities.
You start with a number of resources represented by tokens or dice. In Magi-Nation, this was called energy and the main characters that you controlled were called Magi. So your Magi would have an amount of energy that they started with, and gain a fixed amount of energy at the start of each turn. This energy would be spent to cast spells, summon creatures and use abilities. When you cast a spell or used an ability, the energy would be discarded, completely lost. When you summoned a creature, the energy would be moved onto that creature and act as both it's attack value and it's remaining health. So if I spent 5 energy on summoning a creature, I would move 5 energy from my Magi to that creature card and it would have 5 attack and 5 health.
The combat system for the game would work that both creatures involved in an attack would remove energy from one another simultaniously. So if my 5 energy creature attacked your 3 energy creature, I would remove 5 energy from your creature and you would remove 3 energy from my creature. Your creature would be left with zero energy, and be discarded from play, while my creature would be left with 2 energy and be able to continue to fight, although in a much weaker state.
To my knowledge, this system hasn't been used in another game as of yet, and it's somewhat original in the sense that it has yet to be used by another game, but it's not really unique in the sense that similar systems have not been used before. The idea where you move the resource from your character to the creature that you summon is a unique idea I believe, but gaining a fixed amount of resources each turn is not.
What I really like about the system is the simplicity. You don't need to create attack and defense values to balance vs. a casting cost of the creature, which enevitable causes a power creeep that you can't really do anything about. It's easy for people to understand and easy to track combat. It also promotes some basic math skills, which is always a plus when you're thinking about a younger audience. I have changed the reference names for the resource (Essence) and the main characters (Awakened) for Affinity to fit the world that I'm designing for the game, but the rest of the general mechanics as explained are still intact.
Sunday, September 18, 2011
Origins
Since I'm not exactly a professional designer or anything, most of my designs are inspired by another game, and then slightly modified again and again and again until it's been twisted enough to be considered something of my own creation. It's hard to separate this in your own mind sometimes, knowing that there are bits of your designs that were really "borrowed" or "stolen" from another game. It's hard to be sure if what you're creating is truly original, or if you're just re-hashing something that has been done before.
From a legal standpoint, at least you're generally safe in that you can't actually copyright a game mechanic. You can put a patent on it, but even that is hard to defend. The patent is generally a scare tactic to prevent anyone else from creating a game like yours.
As I said before, my background is in competitive CCG play. One of those games was a game called Magi-Nation: Duel. It was a game that only lasted about 3 years before going under for numerous reasons, but one of those reasons was not the game play. It employed a really great energy system that eliminated the need to have resource cards in your deck which also prevented any concept of "resource screw" or "resource flood". I really loved to play this game, but since it is a dead game (almost a decade gone now) and outside of a freakish miracle where the current cartoon with the IP of the game takes off like gangbusters, the game will never be reprinted. So this is the system that I decided to start with to try and make a deckbuilding game.
The second game that I used for a little bit of inspiration for my game is from the game Ascension: Chronicle of the Godslayer. I'm not sure if the mechanic is used in any other games, because it's not a very unique mechanic or anything, but it is the way that the selection of cards that you have available to purchase for your deck is chosen. In some games, you have piles that are chosen before the start of the game, and you're limited to just the piles that are chosen to purchase cards from. In Ascension, all of the cards are shuffled together, and there is a preview row of sorts where there is a limited number of cards that are available to purchase, but when one is bought, another is filled in from the top of the random pile.
So that's where I started, the energy mechanic from Magi Nation and the preview/purchase mechanic from Ascension. I'd like to say that they went together quite seamlessly, but I'm usually not in the habit of lying.
From a legal standpoint, at least you're generally safe in that you can't actually copyright a game mechanic. You can put a patent on it, but even that is hard to defend. The patent is generally a scare tactic to prevent anyone else from creating a game like yours.
As I said before, my background is in competitive CCG play. One of those games was a game called Magi-Nation: Duel. It was a game that only lasted about 3 years before going under for numerous reasons, but one of those reasons was not the game play. It employed a really great energy system that eliminated the need to have resource cards in your deck which also prevented any concept of "resource screw" or "resource flood". I really loved to play this game, but since it is a dead game (almost a decade gone now) and outside of a freakish miracle where the current cartoon with the IP of the game takes off like gangbusters, the game will never be reprinted. So this is the system that I decided to start with to try and make a deckbuilding game.
The second game that I used for a little bit of inspiration for my game is from the game Ascension: Chronicle of the Godslayer. I'm not sure if the mechanic is used in any other games, because it's not a very unique mechanic or anything, but it is the way that the selection of cards that you have available to purchase for your deck is chosen. In some games, you have piles that are chosen before the start of the game, and you're limited to just the piles that are chosen to purchase cards from. In Ascension, all of the cards are shuffled together, and there is a preview row of sorts where there is a limited number of cards that are available to purchase, but when one is bought, another is filled in from the top of the random pile.
So that's where I started, the energy mechanic from Magi Nation and the preview/purchase mechanic from Ascension. I'd like to say that they went together quite seamlessly, but I'm usually not in the habit of lying.
Friday, September 16, 2011
What is Affinity?
- af·fin·i·ty
- A spontaneous or natural liking or sympathy for someone or something
- A similarity of characteristics suggesting a relationship, esp. a resemblance in structure between animals, plants, or languages
- Relationship, esp. by marriage as opposed to blood ties
- The degree to which a substance tends to combine with another
noun /əˈfinitē/ affinities, plural |
What Affinity is in this blog, is going to be a reference to a game that I am currently designing, with plans of self-publication. The game is a card game, and more specifically a deck building card game. See, game design is a hobby of mine that I spend quite a fair bit of my free time on. I like to analyze systems and sets of data, and I found that when I grew tired of analyzing the systems that other people have created, I find a lot of enjoyment and challenge in designing my own.
I was initially inspired to design a deckbuilding card game when I felt that the current designs that are available for purchase and play were lacking in major conflict between players. My background for playing games is playing Collectible Card Games. I should add that I didn't just play them, but I competed in tournaments at the highest level for basically every game I've ever played. But, as life goes on, I have less time and money to spend on playing games at the competitive level, but I still have the drive in me to do so. When I came across the deck building card game genre, I was fascinated by it. The games had certain similarities to CCGs, however the more I played them, the more that I felt I was just playing multiplayer solitaire.
So what I wanted to do was create a deck building card game that was much closer to the CCGs that I have played over the years. I had a few goals in my initial design.
- Multple factions in the game for players to choose between
- Players draft a deck to play as the game continues
- A reason for a player to choose the best cards for their deck, not just the "best" cards.
- Quick to play
- Simple to learn
- Head to head competition
- No Negative Play Experiences (NPE)
Since then, I think I've managed to include all of the points in the design, the biggest being "A reason for a player to choose the best cards for their deck, not just the 'best' cards." This is something that's always bothered me about limited formats in card games. Even if there were different factions in the game, you were often better off just choosing the most powerful card that was available to you instead of the card that best fit your deck based upon strategy or faction.
First Post
So you might be wondering what this is all about. Well, this is going to be a blog where I chronicle the processes and ideas that I go through for a game that I'm designing called Affinity. There has already been a fair amount of work done on this game, and I plan on making posts with that history as well. This is both to collect and organize my thoughts, as well as let anyone read through this process for whatever reason they have to do so.
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