Where is Affinity now?

So most of everything that I've posted to this point has been about the previous actions and history in the design of the game.  I've been working on the game quite a bit recently.  More specifically, I've had quite the bit of time in the last few weeks where I've been sitting in hotels and hospital waiting rooms with my laptop and the current playtest copy of Affinity.  The previous posts have gotten most of the bulk of the background story and development thoughts into the interwebs.  It is possible (if not certain) that future posts will reference a past thought process or decision, I would say going forward from here I'm going to be discussing and posting about mainly current development on the game.

Currently, the game of Affinity has the following:

• 4 unique factions based around the classic elements of air, earth, fire and water
• Each faction has 2 different mechanics that they utilize for an advantage and that synergize together
• 12 unique "Awakened" or player character/avatars, 3 for each faction
• 6 creature cards for each faction, broken into different "rarities"
• 3 spell cards for each faction, broken into different "rarities"
• 120 cards total in the main deck
• 1 card that starts the game as your ticket to adding cards to your deck, and ends the game as a card that allows you to swing tempo in your favor.
• An adaptable draft mechanic that I am very happy with.
• A sense of synergy among the cards that I am also very happy with.
• I believe I've even succeeded in beating the "draft the most powerful card" instead of "draft the best card for my deck" that I had set as a goal.  More playtesting will confirm this.

What I still need to do from a design standpoint:

• Balance the cards - This is always at the forefront of my mind, but I need to get the balance changes from near-complete faction overhauls to minor tweaks in card text.
• Playtest, playtest, playtest.
• Flesh out a story for the game - I understand that, if I were to pitch this to a publisher, they would work on this developmental piece.  However, the odds are that I am going to be Kickstarting this project because I don't think I could give up the control for the sake of just seeing the mechanics published.  To me, a game is a complete experience, which includes tying the story of the game into the mechanics to really get an in-depth experience.  I'm not a fan of pasted on themes.  Either I will be able to complete the project from start to finish, or I wont.
• Find an artist - I have someone in mind for this job, and I've talked to him about the project, the trick now is to get him some free time to be able to do the work.

Outside of tweaks and copious amounts of playtesting, I believe the mechanics for the game are going to be set from this point out.  That itself is a huge relief because that means that I have something unchanging that I can make other decisions around.  It's quite challenging when you have the ability to change the story, the card text, and the game mechanics when you encounter an issue that needs fixing because you have to hope that you're making the correct adjustment.

My real struggle is going to be the story.  I'm not exactly the best writer, I used to do quite a bit of creative writing "back in the day", but that's quite a long time ago for me.  This is unfortunately a sticking point for me, because I often make mechanical design decisions around what would or would not make sense in the story of the game.  One of the easiest examples of this was when I was designing a game around modern military units and trying to come up with abilities for those units.  Some of my initial notes had some units with the ability to heal other units, but how is that going to make sense in a modern sense?  We don't have magic, and healing certainly doesn't take place on the battlefield, so that was something that I had to remove.  Affinity needs the story for the game to be fleshed out at this point, and that's going to be my biggest focus going forward.

So that's where I am in the design.  If anyone reading this has anything specific that they want to know about the process or the game up until this points, or any suggestions or questions, feel free to post a comment.

What makes a deckbuilding game?

I've been having some thoughts cross my mind during some brainstorming sessions lately, and that's wondering if Affinity is really a deckbuilding game or not.  When looking into what other deckbuilding games have to offer, I read through countless discussions about games that deviated from the apparent "holy grail" that is Dominion, and the responses were surprising.

The two camps seemed to be the side that loved the game because of it's differences from Dominion, and the other side of the fence disliked the game because it wasn't like Dominion.  Then you would have the same people who disliked games that were different from Dominion who bash games that are also too similar to it.  I think it's perplexing, but I guess that isn't really the point I was trying to get to.

From what I can tell from the camp of "Dominion is the definitive deckbuilding game" and it's accepted derivitives, here is what I can pinpoint what "qualifies" a game as a deckbuilding game:

1. Have a small starting deck of weak cards.
2. Use a card-driven monetary system to purchase additional cards to add to your deck.
3. Create an "engine" with the cards in your deck.
4. End the game when a specific condition is met.
5. Have more (or fewer) points than all of the other players to win the game.

Well... Affinity doesn't exactly meet those conditions.

1. You (currently) start with 3 cards in your "starting deck".  The first turn of the game is then using these cards to add additional cards to your deck.
2. You technically use the starting cards to "purchase" additional cards to add to your deck, but it doesn't end up being the crux of the game.
3. The "engine" you create is with the interaction of the cards in your deck, and not just drawing more cards to play more cards in a single turn to earn more victory points.
4. I suppose the end of the game is a specific condition, but that condition is player elimination and not a specific trigger like buying all of the cards in a certain stack or running out of tokens in a pile.
5. There are no victory points in Affinity.

So I'm not sure if I should keep calling this a deck building game and suffer the criticisms of certain players who say that my game is nothing like Dominion, or if I should call it a deck drafting game, which is a format from the CCG world that I've modeled quite a few things after.   I'm inclined to start calling it a deck drafting game from here on out, because you're not really purchasing the cards for your deck, instead each card has a value associated to it that is only relevant for the purposes of adding it to your deck.  This used to be a mechanic of adding just one card to your deck at a time, but has since adapted to have values to balance out more powerful cards than others since the frequency at which cards show up are random.

After talking it out here, it makes sense to me, so Affinity is no longer going to be referred to as a deck building game, but instead will be referred to as a deck drafting game.  Hopefully this prevents criticisms in the future, but it likely wont.  <3 Gamers.

The Player Character

The idea of representing one's self in a game by an avatar, or a player character is something that has been used in hundreds of games, and many successful CCG's to boot.  It was done in Magi-Nation, it's used in WoW:TCG, it was used in Highlander and many games you represent yourself with an entire faction or clan behind you like in Legend of the Five Rings or practically any game ever designed by AEG.

There is a psychological aspect to playing a game where you are able to choose and possibly relate to a specific character and when you are not.  That's not to say you can't have a successful game with an abstract character (just look at Magic the Gathering), but it's much easier in today's gaming environment to attract players to your game psychologically if you have characters that they are able to relate to or have as a favorite.

I'll be honest in saying that I wasn't thinking about any of this when for the first attempt at trying to develop a player's character or an avatar for Affinity.  In fact, my first avatar, which I still think was an interesting mechanic, was going to be same for every player.

When you're playing any of the current crop of deck building games, you're not restricted into a faction or a style until you restrict yourself.  This game is obviously different in that there are different factions to choose from, and I want the players to differentiate themselves throughout the game.  However, you can't have the players choose the faction that they're going to be before the start of the game due to the random nature of the  availability of cards throughout the game.  If you choose faction A, and you see hardly any cards from faction A, then you're going to be hamstringing yourself before you even start the game, which is just a horrible design.

Instead, what I decided to try initially, was have an avatar that was just like Morphling, in that the avatar changed what powers it had throughout the game based on the factions of the creatures that you had in play.  So there were 5 powers listed, one power for each faction, and each power would only be active if you had the majority of creatures from that faction in play.


Even in playtest, it was a very neat mechanic, I'd probably say that the biggest problem was tied into Morphlings.  With Morphlings, it was quite easy to manipulate what power the avatar had.  This was intentional, but it turned out to be boring.  Each player was usually doing the same thing on the first turn, using the most powerful proactive power that they could, which was just to gain more essence on one of their creatures.  Sometimes the player going second would use the power to remove essence from an opposing creature, but either way, it was always boring for the first few turns of the game.

After realizing that I didn't need to place vanilla creatures or Morphlings into the player's starting deck, and that the starting decks were going to be dynamic based on the first round of drafting, I realized that I could have the players choose a faction that they wanted to represent after that first round of drafting was completed.  This is what other games that have a draft format, like WoW:TCG will do.  This also allowed me to open up to dozens of other powers that I couldn't otherwise place on the single avatar, which of course opens up more depth to the game.

In addition, I realized after the fact that creating different characters for each faction would allow people to make a psychological connection to those characters, which would in turn be a perk to the marketing of the game.

The issue with Morphlings

So the starting cards that each player had, as I explained before were 5 copies of Syphon Stone, which allowed you to add more cards to your deck, and 5 copies of a universal creature.  At it's base, the Universal creature was just a 3 cost creature with no real energy-gaining or removal powers.  But in an attempt to have it be more than a weak card at the start of the game, and a useless card in the later game, I decided to give it a power to make it a creature of any faction you wanted until the beginning of your next turn.  We nick-named it "Morphling."

This probably wouldn't have been that bad, but since I was using Magi-Nation as a jumping off point, I hadn't really figured out what I was going to do about "Magi" or the characters that you're representing who are casting these spells and summoning these creatures and otherwise battling it out among one another.  My "awesome" idea, which I still think is a decent idea and I may try to implement something along these lines in the future, was to have a "Morphling" character as well.  That is, to have a character that you played whose powers would change based on the creatures that you have in play.  So if you have more creatures from faction A in play, you'd have Power A, if you have more creatures from faction B in play, you'd have Power B.  The concept is still neat in my opinion, but what we quickly found in playtesting was that I couldn't balance the powers on him when you had the ability to essentially choose any one of them that you wanted from the start of the game and generally the first 5 turns of the game when you had morphlings in your deck.  Both players would play Morphlings, choose the same region, and use the same powers.  It was quite dull.

This was largely disappointing to me, but it did allow me to progress to the point that I am currently at for Affinity.  Morphling creatures needed to be removed from the deck, they made the factions not really matter for anything.  They were generally the only ways that we were triggering faction-restricted spells in the deck and allowed you really splash anything into your deck without caring what faction it needed.  They also put the first two turns of the game into auto-pilot mode, where no player really gained or lost energy in access of what the other player could also gain or remove, so the game didn't really start until after you had added some unique cards to your deck and started to see those in your hand.

That's when I realized that I didn't need creatures in the starting deck, I could have a "pre-game" phase of the game where players both started with a hand full of 5 Syphon Stones and would alternate choosing cards for their deck by playing a Syphon Stone and then each player would start the game with a unique "starting deck."  This is currently the system that Affinity is using, and it has proven to add a unique experience to the game that other deck building games don't really create.  Then again this game is doing a lot of things that other deck building games don't, mainly because there isn't a victory point in sight.

So in the end, I'd like to say "Thank you!" to Morphling, for being an amazing failure that helped me find one path that Affinity really needed.

The issue of synergy

The (current and most likely permanent) name of Affinity wasn't what I had started with.  The name of the eventual game was completely unimportant within the design process.  At least to a point.  I do believe that placing constraints on your design at some point actually assists you in developing creative ways to introduce problems to your players and solutions to said problems. Regardless, that's not what I'm really here to talk about today.

Today I'd like to address the big problem that I had after my first playtest, and that was the problem where I didn't feel there was a decision to choose a less powerful card that worked better for your deck over the card with the most raw power available to you at the time.

My initial concept had been to have cards that assisted the other cards with restrictions on how they could be used.  So there were spells that could only target creatures of a certain faction for you to be able to benefit from that spell.  There were also less-powerful cards in raw power that didn't have restrictions like this.  So for an example, there would be a spell that cost 1 essence that added 2 essence to any creature in play, and there would also be a card that cost 1 essence that added 4 essence to a creature of a specific faction.  The second card was only good once you already had creatures of that faction in your deck, but if you didn't, it was a completely useless card to you.  This was exactly what I thought I wanted, but in practice it just didn't work out as well as I had planned.

If I had to pin-point the biggest problem with it, I suppose it would be the random nature of the shuffle.  If these cards were seen before their respective creatures could have been added to your deck, then you could either take the gamble of adding them to your deck and hope that those creatures show up in a timely manner for them to become useful.  In practice, this gamble just wasn't an exciting or strategic part of the overall game.  You were always better off taking the "safe" choice of something that you would guarantee the power level of, even if the overall effect was weaker.

It's not to say that none of these cards worked.  There were some that were much more effective than others and well sought-out in spite of their regional restrictions, but that wasn't really a result of the overall game, that was a result of the starting cards, which I'll address next.

First Playtest

I invited my good friend and long time collaborator over to give the game a go.  He and I are both experienced card players and were responsible for loads of powerful winning decks in our past.  If anyone was going to be able to put this game through the rounds it needed, it would be the two of us.

The game was simple enough to be able to pick it up right away, the gameplay was smooth and the mechanics made sense.  There were, however, some problems with the game that I could see right away.  I didn't really expect to have the winning formula on the first shot, and after some extensive playtesting, I already knew some things I needed to change.

1. Difference in power levels between the cards.  This was to be expected, and much of this was just shaking the rust off of my old card-playing chops.  This is also the most detailed part about designing any game in my opinion.  The game needs to be balanced, and the only way to really figure that out is by trying to break it.  You're not going to know what's broken until you abuse the hell out of it.  I had forgotten some basic  principles of competitive card games that came flooding back to me with crystal clarity after just a few plays.
2. "Monsters" didn't play the way that I wanted them to, the player that was ahead would generally defeat them to put themselves even more ahead.  This was really a complicated problem that I hasn't fully thought through, but when the issue surfaced it made complete sense.  We tried a few variations on how the monsters impacted the game, the players, their rewards, etc.  But about halfway through the playtest, after at least a dozen games I removed all the monsters from the deck to put them on the back burner and focus on the rest of the game.
3. The synergies that I wanted to exist between the cards to make the choices interesting and not just obvious just weren't there.  This was probably the most disappointing thing that I encountered, because this was the biggest focus of the game that I wanted to develop, and I found that I wasn't anywhere near where I wanted to be.