Yearly Archives: 2014

Exhibiting Prismata: How we got screwed by PAX, blew $6500 showing our game off, and then lost our entire mailing list (PART 1 of 2) 4

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This is the complete story of the first public appearance of Prismata, our new Starcraft-meets-Hearthstone turn-based strategy game. As you may know, PAX Prime—one of the world’s largest video game festivals—happened about a week ago in Seattle, Washington. Tens of thousands of fans were treated to exciting previews, live announcements, and playable demos in the massive Washington State Convention Center. It’s always been a dream of mine to show off Prismata at PAX, and we’d been planning to have our own booth there since early spring of this year. It was going to be great!

Except, we didn’t go.

In a move that left us all extremely disappointed, PAX’s sales team left us hanging for weeks without returning our emails, and ultimately denied us the opportunity to even submit an application for floor space at the event, giving preferred treatment to AAA developers and other established exhibitors. We ended up relocating our PAX booth to Fan Expo Canada—another large convention that happened to fall on the same weekend. Despite requiring a ton of planning, effort, and upfront costs, the Fan Expo booth went really well. Thousands of people played the game, and many of them came back multiple times, often bringing their friends, or waiting in line to play a fourth, fifth, or sixth time. There was nothing more satisfying than watching newbies turn into veteran Prismata players, after which most of them happily signed up to our mailing list to receive a beta key. Everything was going great! That is, until we returned to the office and realized (to our horror) that the entire list of hundreds of emails we had collected was wiped out by a bug in Google spreadsheets. More on that later.

This article is our exhibitor post-mortem. Here, you’ll find a full description of what happened with PAX, info on how we planned and ran the booth at Fan Expo, a full listing of our expenses, and a complete description of everything that we wished we’d done differently. If you’ve ever considered presenting a game at a convention, this is a must-read!

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FAN EXPO!

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Hi everyone!

This will be a pretty quick post, as we just got back from the labour day long weekend. Most of our team spent the last 4 or 5 days in Toronto, where we showed off Prismata at Fan Expo Canada 2014. At our booth in the largest comic/anime/gaming convention in Canada, over ONE THOUSAND people tried Prismata for the first time, and their responses completely blew away my expectations. People absolutely loved the game, with many people returning to the booth to show Prismata to their friends, or coming back a day later to play for a second time (or third, or fourth…).

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Prismata at Fan Expo! (#HYPEHYPEHYPE) 1

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As mentioned in our previous blog post, Lunarch will be making an appearance at FanExpo in Toronto, Canada from Thursday, August 28th to Sunday, August 31st. We’ll be demoing Prismata to anyone walking by, so if you’re around, stop by our booth and you can get a chance to chat with the co-founders about the game and experience playing it firsthand. Our booth is located around the same area as Riot Games, Teletoon and Hasbro.

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The 10 questions most frequently received by Prismata’s design team 5

This entry was posted in Game Features Insight Strategy and tagged balance Design game mechanics Prismata on by

After releasing our how-to-play video two weeks ago, we’ve been getting more questions than ever about how Prismata was designed, what Prismata matches feel like, and why we made such unconventional decisions in crafting the game itself.

Prismata is unique in that it combines aspects of both card games and real-time strategy games, which led to many difficulties and challenges in its design. This article will attempt to shed some light on the design decisions that seem really bizarre to first time players, and answer other common questions.

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The Prismata Base Set

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Prismata is different from many strategy games in that when challenging an opponent, you don’t build your army from a fixed tech tree, nor do you bring a deck of cards with you to battle. Instead, the units available for purchase are randomly chosen from a set of dozens of different units, meaning that new strategies must be planned every game.

However, there is one special set of units—the Prismata base set—that is available in every single game.

In this article, we’ll be focusing on the base set, which lies at the foundation of all of Prismata. The Prismata base set contains eleven core units, providing a flexible and reliable selection of technologies that you can use as a starting point whenever you begin planning your strategy. The base set units in Prismata allow you to ramp up your economy, invest in technologies, and obtain essential offensive and defensive capabilities that can supplement the rest of your forces. (more…)

An Exposition of the Exact Rules of Prismata 9

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Prismata is a fast-paced, turn-based game that mixes together ideas from real-time strategy games and card games.  In Prismata, players take turns collecting resources, building up units, and eventually attacking each other.  The objective is to destroy all of your opponent’s units – before they do the same to you.

Screen Shot 2014-08-12 at 4.37.51 PM

Your forces are displayed on the bottom half of the screen, while your opponent’s forces are displayed on the top half.

Resources in Prismata

There are five resources in Prismata: gold, energy, green, blue, and red.  These are their symbols, in order:

Screen Shot 2014-08-12 at 1.17.46 PM

At the bottom of your screen, you see how many of each resource you currently have. Your opponent’s resources are displayed at the top of your screen.

Gold and green, once produced, are stored until they are spent.  Energy, blue, and red expire at the end of each turn, meaning they can only be used on the same turn they are produced.

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How to win at Hearthstone by playing dirty: 5 deceptive tactics inspired by online poker 38

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As a veteran of online poker, with over a million dollars in profit, I’ve learned that in turn-based online games, there’s a great amount of value in concealing information and deceiving your opponent. Poker players need not look far to find lengthy articles on how to profit from timing tells and deceive opponents through timings.

Such tactics really shine in Hearthstone because there are an incredible number of interesting ways to abuse Hearthstone’s user interface to hide information, cause confusion, and lure your opponents into making sub-optimal plays. Whether or not you decide to use these tactics, I hope you’ll find them interesting.

Before we begin, a couple of disclaimers:

Disclaimer 1: These tactics will irritate your opponents. These tactics are controversial. Many of them involve completely unnecessary stalling. People will think you’re an asshole if you employ them. Using them on your friends (assuming you want to keep them) is not recommended.

Disclaimer 2: These tactics aren’t for everyday laddering. They’re not gonna help you climb fast from rank 20 to rank 10. They’re not gonna help you grind faster to earn gold and unlock heroes. These tricks are for tournament matches and legend-level ladder games that you really want to win.

Disclaimer 3: These tactics are not for everyone. These tips are for the soulless masochists among us—those willing to sacrifice our integrity to squeeze out every last advantage possible in every match. They’re not fun. They may waste your time, and may encourage your opponents to grief you. But if you crave every possible edge you can possibly get, these tips are for you!

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Tempo Storm Gaara: “The best matches ever recorded in Hearthstone history.” Why you should watch the Prismata Cup finals 8

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The matches have been played, the VODs are in the casters’ hands, and the stage is set.  In roughly 7 hours from the time I post this, the Prismata Cup finals will be aired.

Stream: twitch.tv/itshafu
Date: Sunday, August 3rd, 2014
Time: 6:00pm EDT
Casters: Trump and Hafu

The Prismata Cup is a merit-based tournament open only to high-rank legends. 32 incredibly good players—likely the strongest field of any Hearthstone tournament that has taken place thus far—competed in a competitive 5-round Swiss format, with those having 4-0 or 4-1 records advancing to the single elimination finals that will be broadcast today.

Tempo Storm Gaara, one of the finalists, claims that this tournament produced the best matches ever recorded in Hearthstone history. Having taken a peek at the VODs myself, I couldn’t agree more. If you watch one Hearthstone tournament this year, watch the Prismata Cup finals. Below are five reasons why:

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The Prismata Cup: Why it happened, how it went down, and what Blizzard can do to improve Organized Play 1

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Last weekend, we ran the Prismata Cup—a merit-based Hearthstone tournament open to high-ranking players. It featured 32 of Hearthstone’s top Legend-rank players, and likely had the strongest field of any Hearthstone tournament that has taken place thus far.

 

“The best matches ever recorded in Hearthstone history.”

“Everyone who plays Hearthstone has to watch these games.”

-Two of the six finalists from the Prismata Cup

 

The playoff rounds of the Prismata Cup, featuring the top 6 players from the tournament, will be broadcast this Sunday, August 3rd, with Trump and Hafu commentating.

You should watch them. Because the games are unbelievable.

The Prismata Cup wasn’t the first competitive tournament that I’ve directed. But it was the first time we’ve run a Hearthstone tournament of this scale. Though things generally went well, some hiccups inevitably had to be dealt with on competition day. In this article, we’ll discuss some of the more amusing things that happened, along with some of the problems that arose, and what Blizzard could change to help organized tournaments run more smoothly.

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Prismata unit art and concepts 1

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In designing the combat units for the game Prismata, there are a number of important considerations relating to gameplay, narrative, and artistic style. The look and feel of the game units affects how users feel when playing the game, how they perceive the story, and how well they intuit the actual game mechanics. We began by designing the most important and difficult units: those in our base set. These are the units that users can purchase in every single game of Prismata, and they are among the first units that users encounter in the single player campaign. We needed their look and feel to be perfect.

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