Elemental Summaries

I've recently typed up a few sentences for each element to assist new playtesters in understanding what I'm trying to accomplish within each element, as well as bring them up to speed with what each element typically does.  This isn't meant to be the hard and fast truth, as there are always gong to be exceptions to the rule, but this is a good jumping off point.  Since I typed it up for the playtesters, I've decided to share it with whomever reads this blog as well.



Air
The element of Air is focus on small constructs and cycling cards.  It is an easy element to grasp the concept of, but a hard one to really master.  Their Awakened have less essence to work with than the other elements, balanced with the fact that they draw more cards, and have alternative costs in the form of discarding cards from their hand for a benefit.  Ideal play with Air will be spending your essence drawing and discarding lots of cards while still manifesting constructs and bolstering them with special cards that have discard effects.

Earth
The element of Earth is focused on Growth and Combat.  The entire game is about combat, but Earth is just better at it.  Their cards are straightforward, adding essence to Constructs in play, and getting bonuses when they attack or even additional attacks.  Any construct under an Earth Awakened is a potential force to be reckoned with.  Ideal play with Earth will be manifesting a few constructs, and bolstering them with additional spells and effects to create unstoppable constructs in combat.

Fire
The element of Fire is focused on Essence Removal and Rebirth.  Their focus is on removing the Essence from opposing constructs through the liberal use of spells and powers, along with playing cards directly from the discard pile.  Ideal play with Fire will be utilizing a combination of spells and constructs to remove essence from the opposing constructs in play in an efficient manner.  To go with their efficient essence removal, they are also able to replay their cards from the discard pile which allows them to use their cards more times than another element would be able to do.

Water
The element of Water is focused on Control and Big Constructs.  Their Awakened have the most Essence in the game, and their cards allow them to steal opposing Essence and Constructs, manipulate attacks, and generally make it hard for their opponents to do exactly what they want to do.  Ideal play with Water will be controlling your opponent's every move, making them do what you want them to do even though they might not even know it.

Shadow
The element of Shadow is focused on manipulating the Aether Stream and Exiling cards to the Nether.  They run a fine line between control and chaos for both themselves as well as their opponents.  They are a very interesting element in that they are the only ones that interact with the Aether stream and the cards that are removed from the game.  Ideal play with Shadow will be Exiling your own deck to be able to use the Nether as an extension of your own deck while at the same time denying your opponent the cards that they want from the Aether.

Addition through Subtraction

I'm aware that some of this post may not make complete sense because there aren't complete rules for the game available to the public at this time (there aren't even complete rules typed up at this point), but  hopefully this makes sense.

There is a quote I once read in relation to game design that goes something like "Remove as much as you possibly can from the design, and no more."  I really try to take that concept to heart when designing games.  I enjoy the challenge to create something that doesn't have rules in there that seem un-necessary if you can streamline it into something else.  One such occurence took place recently for Affinity in the combination of some phases.  This might not sound like much, but the ramifications were quite large.

Originally, the phases were setup in the way that you would play spells & use powers, then attack, then manifest constructs, and then another phase of play spells & use powers.  This had the clever process of giving constructs "summoning sickness" without actually spelling that out in the rules of the game, but it was also very regimented and new playtesters were constantly trying to manifest constructs before they attacked, and then attack with another construct they had in play.  I took this as a sign that it just wasn't intuitive to do things the way that I had structured it, all for the sake of not spelling out a rule for "summoning sickness".  So I combined the phases into one, allowing someone to manifest a construct, attack, play a spell, attack with something else, all as long as you didn't manifest and attack with a construct in the same turn.  This also increased the power level on some cards to make them more useful, without being too powerful, which is always a good thing in my book.

Back in the Saddle

The month of December is usually a fairly busy month for everyone, either you're impacted with family obligations of your own, or impacted with additional work at your job due to other people's family obligations.  If you're one of the many lucky individuals like myself, you're impacted by both.

That's not to say that I got no work done on Affinity during the last 6 weeks, I just didn't have the time to work on the game and type up some new blog entries to let people know what was going on.  I got a few more playtest sessions in, one of them with another group of game designers and another with a very good friend of mine where we were able to get a lot of games done in a relatively short amount of time.  Lots of changes have been made to individual cards, I've reworked the phases of the game, tweaked the initial draft setup, the ongoing draft mechanism, and I've added a 5th element to the game.  The last playtest also had me reconsider the number of cards in the deck and I'll be testing those numbers going forward.  In addition to that, I also got in touch with a friend who is a really good writer to work on some backstory for the game and I've been talking to a few artists to see if they'd be interested in the project as well.

All in all, I'd say the development is coming along nicely.