Hello everyone!
Until now, there have been only two types of unlockable content in Prismata: badges—given to our crowdfunding supporters, ambassadors, and tourney winners—and equippable emotes, the tool of choice for congratulating (or BMing) your opponent after a game. However, we’ll soon be massively expanding the availability of unlockable (and collectible!) items in Prismata. Today, I’m going to outline some of our plans.
The eventual plan is to have five different kinds of unlockable collectibles in Prismata:
- Skins – equippable alternate art for each Prismata unit
- Emotes – both graphical and text-based in-game emotes
- Badges – to display status or commemorate outstanding in-game achievements
- Avatars – selectable display portraits
- ****** – (something secret that we have not announced yet)
Details on each of these are provided below. As usual, none of our plans are completely final, but we’d love to hear your feedback on what we have in mind!
Skins
Like the WideEye skins above (whose creation in Photoshop was streamed live this past weekend), all of our skins come in skin sets that each have a unique theme. We’ve currently completed over fifteen different skin sets, for a total of over 250 unique skins (not counting the original unit art, of course). We’ve already spoiled the Confectioner set here, but we’ll be unveiling several other skin sets over the next few weeks.
To start… we’ve posted the complete collection of pirate skins!
Peg-legged Shredder, one of 14 Prismata pirates
Skin Rarities
Prismata’s skins will be separated into seven distinct rarity classes, from basic (the most common) to prismatic (the most valuable). Each skin set (such as the Pirates above) will include skins across multiple different rarity classes.
Right now, all of our current skins are just costumes for the Prismata units. However, we plan to eventually provide the rarer skins with some special treatment; possible ideas include animations, custom sound effects, or even special programming (we had some fun this past weekend making a googley-eyed Drone whose pupils follow your mouse cursor).
David added this in about 20 minutes. He’s a genius.
If you’ve got any cool ideas for other features you’d like to see in skins, let us know!
Emotes
I’m happy to announce that we’ve produced over 200 unique equippable emotes to collect. Here are a few never-before-seen new animations:
Of course, not every emote will be animated, but with text emotes, we’re going all-out. I don’t want to give too much away, but here’s a screenshot of a few rows from our gargantuan text emote spreadsheet:
In addition to numerous hellos, threats, and resignations, Alex abused our unicode support to produce these masterpieces.
Like skins, each emote will have its own rarity that determines how difficult it is to unlock. However, some emotes are even more special: each skin set (pirates, confectioners, etc.) will also have a special show-off emote that players will automatically unlock if they collect all of the skins in that set. For example, collecting all the pirates will get you an exclusive pirate emote featuring many of the Prismata pirates.
MOAR EMOTES PLZ!
We heard that six emotes isn’t enough. So we’ll be increasing that number FOR EVERYONE! It’s very important to us that our players like using and earning emotes, so we’ll do whatever we can to encourage you all to do so. Expect to see a redesigned emote menu and in-game emote flyout in the upcoming months, allowing you to equip a larger selection of emotes.
Badges, avatars, and more
Badges and avatars can’t be collected as rewards like skins and emotes, but they will have their own purpose in Prismata.
Badges
Though badges are currently only given out via special codes (to supporters, tourney winners, ambassadors, and other special members of our community), we plan to expand the badge system to include commemorative badges that are automatically awarded for outstanding Prismata accomplishments. These would be a bit like “achievements” in many other games, but will only be provided as rewards for true accomplishments, like hitting a high rating on the ladder, winning an event, or beating a series of incredibly difficult missions.
Do you have any ideas for a special badge that we should reward players with? Let us know!
Regarding achievements… we’ll probably put a ton of them into Prismata when we launch on Steam, with badges being awarded for the extra special ones that take true dedication to unlock.
Avatars
Avatars, in contrast to badges, will be simple to earn just by playing Prismata. Each time you clear a mission, defeat a bot, or play against another player, you’ll earn experience that will help you slowly unlock the entire cast of Prismata units as available avatars. Sick of the default characters? If you want to go with a Xaetron display picture instead, you’ll soon be able to.
Of course, custom avatars will continue to be available to supporters at the Centurion Tier and higher.
The other thing on the list…
I did mention that there was a fifth collectible coming to Prismata. We’re still working on this idea, so we’ll announce it at a later time, but here’s a hint: it will allow you to further customize some of your other collectibles.
Firestorm Auric Impulse, an upcoming skin.
When will everything be ready?
We don’t generally provide a schedule for when new features will be released, but here’s an idea of how far along everything is:
- Skins: done and ready to go live in our next patch. Supporters will get codes for their skins soon after this patch is deployed.
- New emotes: mostly ready to go, but we won’t release them until…
- Arena rewards: design done and finalized after months of revisions, programming done, art about 70% done but we’re really going all-out to polish it as much as possible. Once these are deployed, you’ll be able to earn more skins and emotes just by playing Prismata. We’ve got a surprise or two planned here… more info will be forthcoming soon; thanks for all your patience!
- Real-money store: the inner functionality is done and works, but we’re still developing the client-side interface and designing the various screens. The art team (Dan and Talha) will start on this as soon as they’re done with arena rewards. Being real-money and all, it will get A TON of testing before it goes live.
- Badges for achievements: We’re still planning this feature, but we might test something soon.
- Level-up avatars: We’ve already programmed a level-up system into Prismata’s servers, but we need to add the level-up bars, reward popups, and actual reward unlocking.
- More than six emotes: We’re planning a full redesign of the emote selection screen, and the ability to equip more emotes will get added around the same time.
In the mean time… it’s spoiler season!
We’ve got literally hundreds of skins and emotes ready to go, so get ready for SPOILERS, SPOILERS, and MORE SPOILERS! We’ll be slowly leaking new skins and emotes on our blog, subreddit, facebook page, and twitter page in the upcoming weeks. Be sure to like and follow us if you want to be privy to every single announcement.
In other news, a content update is coming…
In less than a week, we’ll be deploying a content update that includes a few small balance nudges, and adds three brand new Prismata units to the game. Keep your eye on Twitter for a preview.
And of course, since it’s spoiler season, here’s one final new skin preview for today:
Musclehead Tatsu Nullifier
See you next time!
