Elyot Grant

About Elyot Grant

A former gold medalist in national competitions in both mathematics and computer science, Elyot has long refused to enjoy anything except video games. Elyot took more pride in winning the Reddit Starcraft Tournament than he did in earning the Computing Research Association's most prestigious research award in North America. Decried for wasting his talents, Elyot founded Lunarch Studios to pursue his true passion.

Balancing Prismata Openings Through Unit Design – part 2: Tempo and Initiative

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Hey guys!

A quick news update before we get on with the rest of today’s article: in celebration of our new balance patch, we’ve posted a Kickstarter update highlighting some of our recent accomplishments and previewing a few more new skins. If you haven’t yet claimed your supporter badge, instructions are provided there!

LP bloodranger color

Did you know that blog articles containing pictures are 82% more likely to be read and shared, and that 63% of statistics are actually made up on the spot?

Today, we’re going to be continuing our discussion on how Prismata openings influence our decisions regarding unit balance. Last week, we discussed how our goal in designing each Prismata unit is to find the best, most balanced, and most interesting version of that unit, and showed how specific opening timings can create design challenges because certain unit designs can favour certain players or certain strategies too much.

Like last time, I’ll be sharing a few pages from our developer-exclusive secret opening book. To understand how to analyze some of the rushes and timings that exist in these openings, we first need to discuss two important strategy game concepts: Tempo and Initiative.

 

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Our Largest Balance Patch Ever 1

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Today at 12 noon EST, we deployed our largest Prismata balance patch thus far. A total of 14 units have received changes. In this article, I’m going to provide an explanation for each change, explaining our thought processes, and what we’ll be looking toward doing with future units and balance changes.

Militia

Militia – health has been increased from 2 health to 4 health.

This is a simple change that will hopefully make some Militia games a bit more interesting. We found that, while players often bought Militias during the opening to take advantage of their gold-producing ability while the opponent constructed early defenses, Militias had little use in the late game, often being simply worse than Steelsplitters. Now, with higher HP, the decision between Militias and Steelsplitters will be more interesting later in the game.

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Balancing Prismata Openings Through Unit Design – part 1 1

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Hello everyone!

In today’s article, I’m going to reveal a few Prismata secrets that we’ve never shared with the public: we’ll be showing off some pages from our secret opening book (yes, we have one!)

Before I do that, I have two announcements to make:

(1) A huge balance patch is happening this weekend, and it will go live at noon EST on Saturday, May 23rd. We’ll be tweaking a total of 13 different Prismata units. Just for fun, the tweaks are being revealed one at a time on our Twitter page. Be sure to follow us to receive every update as it arrives.

(2) Our AI Mastermind Dave is conducting a Prismata AI survey. We’re really interested in how people think we’re doing with respect to the Prismata bots, so if you haven’t filled out the survey yet, we’d really appreciate it!

Prismata’s robot overlords will be taking over soon.

Now, let’s get to the meat of the article. I apologize in advance for the fact that this is a bit rambly, geeky, and somewhat technical. But revealing secret openings is serious business!

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Being Excellent to One Another 1

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Hey everyone! Happy Tuesday!

Before we get to today’s article, I want to introduce our latest new summer intern, Jordan Verasamy!

jordan

As you can see in the background, Jordan uses a mechanical keyboard with no letters printed on it. And yes, he looks this smug in real life. Like our other co-ops, Jordan was temporarily granted access to sunlight for this photograph.

Jordan will be working on various roles in support, QA, and automation. He’ll be catching bugs, making our server more secure, and simulating thousands of users on our system to help pinpoint scalability bottlenecks. He’s also a Tier 8 Prismata player.

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Help Prismata get to E3! Plus Updates, Balance Changes, and Survey Results.

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Hey, everyone! Lots to talk about this week! Here we go!

 

Help Prismata get to E3!

E3—The annual Electronic Entertainment Expo—is the biggest video game industry conference in the world, and it provides an unparalleled opportunity to meet the press and network with all kinds of platform-holders and other industry folks. Small indie games like Prismata are seldom present, but a group of folks called Indies Crash E3 has raised some funds to host an indie booth at E3.

However, there’s a catch. They can’t send everybody, so they’re having a contest to determine which indie games will get to go to E3. And it’s not a simple voting contest—the contest itself is a browser GAME called indieclicker, which is a bit like “Cookie Clicker” or other simple clicker games. Everyone who plays earns points for Prismata to help us rank up on the leaderboard.

clixer

Indieclicker. You can play it to earn points to unlock a spot at E3 for Prismata!

 

Indieclicker is actually kind of addictive.

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New Prismata Skin Sets! 2

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Greetings, everyone!

With all the excitement surrounding our upcoming Arena Mode, we thought that it would be a great time to unveil some of the new skins that players will be able to unlock as rewards for completing sets of matches in The Arena. You’ve already seen some skins from our Pirate Set, our Natural Set, and our Military Set, but today we’re unveiling two brand new skin sets that will be available as soon as The Arena is released.

Let’s take a look!

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