Yearly Archives: 2014

Coding huge multiplayer tournaments in 30 hours: the Prismata hackathon 12

This entry was posted in Banter Game Features News and tagged hackathon tournament tournaments on by

Edit: stream and publicly viewable docs are up, and we’ve blown up over at /r/gamedev.

This is a post about a game development hackathon that we’ll be live-streaming for much of the next two days. But this is no ordinary hackathon. We’re upping the ante by setting a hard deadline that could result in extreme embarrassment if things go horribly wrong. Allow me to explain.

Organized tournaments are a favourite aspect of many of the games we know and love, and Prismata is no different, being an excellent candidate for compelling and competitive tourneys. After the success of events like Alex’s Prismata Cup Hearthstone tournament, our fans have been begging us to host an actual Prismata tournament. So, at long last, we’re doing it. The first ever Prismata Open Tourney will happen tomorrow, Thursday October 16th, at 7pm Eastern time. We’ve recruited a slew of Hearthstone and poker pros to participate, including millionaire poker superstar Mike ‘Timex’ McDonald and Hearthstone number one Americas legend Jeffrey ‘Tarei’ Liu. The tournament is going to be epic.

There is just one problem.

Prismata currently doesn’t support tournaments. At all. There is literally no tournament feature in Prismata, and we’ve never worked on one before.

That’s why we’re adding tournaments, today. We’ll be designing, coding, and refining Prismata’s tournament features in a 30-hour hackathon that starts 1pm EST Wednesday and ends at 7pm Thursday—when the first Prismata tournament will begin.

Oops. We just did.

 

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Prismata Highlight Reel: “What the f*** is going on in this game?”

This entry was posted in Banter Highlights and tagged casting highlights replay replays stream on by

Welcome to the Prismata Highlight Reel—a new series showing off some of the most epic games we’ve played! These matches test the limits of what’s possible in Prismata, and show some of the most out-of-the-box play that we’ve ever seen. For our first instalment, we’ll count down the top three craziest games played by Elyot during the Twitch stream (be sure to follow us if you want to catch the stream live!)

3. “I have a 9-turn time limit to get something going!”

This was the very last game played at the tail end of a 7-hour-long stream by Elyot. He was up against poker legend Mike “Timex” McDonald in Blitz Mode (12 seconds per turn), but the game lasted more than 20 turns. What ensued was one of the most cutthroat games in Prismata history, with an absolutely unpredictable ending. (Hint: one player lost all of his Drones 10 turns before the game ended.) Watch the replay, and catch the #1 and #2 highlights below.

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2 New Units, 1 New Mechanic: Let’s see how you like the red dot! 2

This entry was posted in Game Features News and tagged new units snipe sniping on by

making prismata ma

 

You’re 10 turns into a game of Prismata. Both you and your opponent are pumping out attackers as fast as you can, but nothing seems to be enough to penetrate their Defense Grid. They buy a Wall, you buy a Wall. Tit for tat.

What’s the best move in this type of situation? To stop buying defense in favour of burst attackers? Risky! Switch your tech to a more offensive play? Inefficient! Wait for them to run out of defensive unit seeds? There isn’t a clear answer in situations like this, especially for new players who aren’t sure how risky each option truly is.

Until now.

 

Let’s talk about our latest two units, and the new game mechanic that’s going to change everything about turtle defense builds in Prismata.

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How to stop sucking at Prismata: 6 common mistakes you might be making

This entry was posted in Insight Strategy and tagged how to play intermediate player guide strategy tips tricks on by

[youtube=http://youtu.be/pmvvxmUkfqY&w=640&h=385]

 

“If you build it, he will come,” the voice said.

We’ve been readying ourselves to expand our server capacity, and would-be beta testers—20,000 of them, in fact—will soon be coming to play Prismata. So in preparation for the huge influx of new players, I’ve decided to make a sequel to our original how to play video for beginners, and the supplementary text guide. They were successful in explaining the rules and user interface of Prismata, but some players, especially those unfamiliar with real-time-strategy decision-making, had no idea what to do each turn.

Should I be building Drones, or laying down a lot of Blastforges, or spamming attackers?

In this article, I hope to answer these questions with some simple rules of thumb—guidelines to help new players through the overwhelming amount of options. Of course, the true art in Prismata is discovering, through experience, when these rules should be broken.

If you haven’t already checked out our introductory how-to-play video, you might want to have a look at that first.

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Introducing a new feature in Prismata: the Grandmaster Set 5

This entry was posted in Game Features News and tagged Design features Gamedev grandmaster sets units on by

If there’s one feature that sets Prismata apart from other games, it’s the diversity of units available. Most games of Prismata use a “base set” of units, plus some advanced units that are randomly generated. But unlike in deckbuilding games where you might need to spend $3,000 or more to get all the good cards, players in Prismata are evenly matched because:

  • All units are available to EVERYONE from the beginning
  • Both players in a 1v1 match have the same units available in each game

 

Vel'kar

Until now, static unit sets have only been available when playing Vel’kar. Players have never been able to refine strategies on a static set for competitive play.

When players begin the automatching process (or choose to fight against an AI), they choose a subset of the hundreds of unit combinations to play with. The current options are:

  • Beginner Set: This set doesn’t use any of the green resource in its 10 units. Instead, it focuses on introducing the Prompt, Stamina and Lifespan unit abilities.
  • Base + 5: A set that includes the base set and 5 additional, randomly generated, units.
  • Base + 8: A set that includes the base set and 8 additional, randomly generated, units.

These options provide virtually endless unit and strategy combinations, as well as opportunities for new players to learn basic game mechanics. The only thing lacking is an opportunity to sink your teeth into a static and intricate set of units that can be played again and again as you refine a specific strategy. Until now.

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What’s in a name? The 5 steps that led to “Prismata” 20

This entry was posted in Insight Origins and tagged Gamedev marketing name naming Prismata trademark on by

Prismata is the gaming love of my life. My obsession with Prismata is so great that I literally dropped out of school to work on it. In this article, at long last, I’m going to address a question that I’ve received countless times, but have never spoken publicly about:

Why is the game called “Prismata?”

Honestly, there is no short answer. Naming Prismata was probably the hardest decision we ever had to make. I imagine that it might feel similar to naming a first child, except there are lawyers involved.

I’m pretty embarassed to post this; it was a doodle I made in MS Paint (mostly for comic relief purposes) during one of many stressful “name the game” meetings with other devs. I was really hoping something would just “feel right”. Nothing did. That red one in the middle was close, though.

It took us almost 4 years to name our game. The process had me adding the US Patent and Trademark Search to my browser bar, and murmuring awful name ideas like “Savant Horizon” in my sleep. I don’t know the optimal way to name a video game, or how to decide which of the million options suck the least, but these are the steps that led us to choose the name “Prismata”:

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Four reasons you MUST watch the Prismata Cup 2 FINALS, airing this Sunday Sep 21 1pm Eastern Time 1

This entry was posted in Banter and tagged Hearthstone prismata cup tournament on by

The stage is set as 64 of the best players in Hearthstone will play to a winner in the Prismata Cup 2—probably the most hyped Hearthstone tournament ever. Following the success of the original Prismata Cup, which saw a peak of 40k concurrent viewers and was the strongest Hearthstone tournament to date, this event is already promising to be even bigger.

 

Stream: twitch.tv/lunarchstudios

Date: Sunday, September 21st, 2014

Time: 1:00pm Eastern Time

Casters: Frodan and Reynad

Produced by m1lkcast LIVE

 

If you watch one Hearthstone tournament this year, watch the Prismata Cup 2 finals.  Below are four reasons why this event will be even better than last time:

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Prismata’s soundtrack is radically different from most video game soundtracks. Here’s why. 115

This entry was posted in Banter Game Features and tagged music on by

Fun fact: for more than 3-and-a-half of the 4 years that Prismata has been in development, the game had no sound or music at all.

After the break: something you *can* hear!

It was about five months ago when that finally needed to change, and we began the process of acquiring a proper soundtrack together for Prismata. We produced our soundtrack in a manner that’s quite a bit different from what most game studios do, and the results have been brilliant. At long last, we’re ready to give you a sneak peak.

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Prismata at Boston FIG! (#EVENMOREHYPE)

This entry was posted in News and tagged bostonFIG conventions on by

Showcasing Prismata at Fan Expo was a wonderful experience, despite all of the small hiccups we encountered along the way. It was exciting to see so many people take such a deep interest in our game, especially coming from an audience that we didn’t expect at all! Anyway, I bet you thought we were done talking about conventions once we posted up our full Fan Expo post-mortem account, huh? Well … you thought wrong!

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Exhibiting Prismata: How we got screwed by PAX, blew $6500 showing our game off, and then lost our entire mailing list (PART 2 of 2) 8

This entry was posted in Banter Insight News and tagged cons conventions Fan Expo on by

This is a continuation of Part 1 from last week. Read that first, as it explains how we ended up at Fan Expo in the first place.

Fan Expo Preparation

Fan Expo for us practically began after the first week of August, when we finally got confirmation that we’d have a booth. It was exciting, especially after the disappointing news from PAX, but there was a lot to be done and we didn’t have much time.

Most important of all was figuring out the booth. We provided our own tables, seats, and computers, so we had to determine the exact dimensions of the space to ensure that our equipment would fit in the booth. Acquiring this information was more difficult than expected; Will had to make a huge number of phone calls to receive an answer, since the plans weren’t terribly well-organized and no one was completely sure how much booth space we actually would be getting.

Mock Prismata booth

We’re not losing our sanity! We’re just planning out a booth!

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