Hey, everyone!
A few things today:
- Our glorious Curse Award trophy.
- Announcement and previews of some new skins sets.
- An update on the new user interface and arena mode.
A Winner is You!
This just arrived in the mail from Curse (they’re the folks who partnered with us to help build the Prismata wiki). We took home one of their coveted awards at PAX East, and it now decorates our office next to this awesome piece of Prismata art:
If you read this blog very closely, you may recognize the stool that the award is sitting on…
Skins!
“Uh oh. We’re too busy to write something good for this week’s blog?? But they’ll swarm the building with pitchforks if we don’t post something every Tuesday!”
“Just post more skins, that will placate them.”
In the last blog post, we gave a sneak-peek at three of the ninja skins, as you’ll recall:
We’re super happy with these, hence why we want to show them off and hype them as much as possible. But these aren’t all the new sets we’re working on. With ninjas and pirates, we felt we needed cowboys too. Here’s a sample:
Meet the cowboy Engineer!
Next up we have the Super Robot skins, a favorite over here at Lunarch.
Super Robot Cauterizer
Super Robot Cynestra
Super Robot Hannibull
Don’t those look bad-ass? We think so, too.
And finally, here are some more of the ninjas:
Ninja Cauterizer
Ninja Grimbotch
Ninja Polywall
Ninja Tatsu Nullifier
The best part about skins is getting to work with the artists and communicating our ideas to them, and seeing those ideas come to life. It’s also super cool to see what the artist does with our ideas, and the amount of effort and creativity that goes into each skin. There are lots more in the pipeline, many of which I’m really excited about.
This skins will be available immediately once arena rewards go live, which brings me to the final topic for today…
Arena Update
OK, so arena mode pretty much works. So why isn’t it live on the alpha yet?
Well, we mentioned a couple of weeks ago in this post that we’d roll out arena in 5 phases:
- Internal testing
- Arena goes live on alpha
- Rewards added
- Test of paid features
- Paid features and Kickstarter/founder rewards added
We’ve decided to combine phases 2 and 3, because honestly, arena kinda sucks without rewards. The testing has gone OK, but it’s not very satisfying to play a run, get a score, and then get nothing for it. We’ve also just added persistence (so you can keep your current arena run and rewards whenever the server is restarted!)
We’re still working on a lot of the graphics and behaviour of the rewards screens, and we might deploy something with not-quite-final graphics, because we know you’re all itching to play arena. Alex has been running simulations and gathering lots of stats on how the system behaves, and we’ve made quite a few tweaks in the last few weeks (for example, we modified some of the “slot machine” mechanics to reduce the probability of really low rolls appearing.)
As for the rewards, we’re up to about 120 skins, with dozens more in the pipeline. Megan and Alex have been putting together a giant spreadsheet of custom emotes of all rarities. We’ve also got a new designer intern starting next week, and his first task will be producing a ton of awesome animated emotes. We’re working on a new skin selector too, which will probably go live when the new UI does.
Speaking of the new UI, we’re targeting next week for a release. *fingers crossed*
