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.