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.

Prismata’s Arena is Coming! 2

Hey everyone!

Alex and I are finally revealing the design of the upcoming meta-structure we’ll be unleashing on top of ranked Prismata play. We’re tentatively calling this mode “The Arena” (I know; it’s a completely unoriginal name used by a zillion other video games… deal with it.)

Alongside this blog post, we’ve also created a Reddit thread in which we’re answering any and all questions about how the new mode will work. We’d love to hear what you think, and appreciate any and all suggestions, ideas, or concerns.

Before we get to the specifications (and screenshots), I want to mention a few quick things:

  • This specification is a work in progress. Not a single thing written here is set in stone. We may make further changes and make no promises that what we write here will even make it to the alpha.
  • Our design approach is highly experimental. We plan on trying a few weird things out “just for fun”. We’ll decide whether to keep them based on the feedback we receive. If the whole system fails to captivate people, we’ll scrap it.
  • The design is likely not perfect. Pieces of the design will likely require tweaking after going live. Even though we’ve written computer simulations and tested things like crazy, we don’t expect everything in the original design to survive contact with the real world.

We plan on making the updates described in this post sometime in the next few weeks, with further changes to go in regularly as we test new features and add more options.

With that out of the way, let’s check out The Arena!

 

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Five Awesome Hacks for Exhibiting your Indie Game at PAX or GDC 1

In the last few weeks, three huge North American gaming conventions have come and gone: GDC (March 2-6 in San Francisco), PAX East (March 6-8 in Boston) and SXSW Gaming (March 13-15 in Austin, Texas).

Prismata—our upcoming designer strategy game—was represented at all three conferences, so I felt like a good post-mortem post was in order.

However, after seeing so many other wonderful post-mortem articles go up (like Jotun’s and Juicy Beast’s), and having done one ourselves last year for our trip to FanExpo, I felt like doing something a little different. So instead, I’m going to highlight five small things that made a huge difference in the overall value we got out of our exhibitions, either by saving us cash, preserving our sanity, or by increasing the awesomeness of our booth.

Call them “life hacks for indie game exhibitors”.

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The State of Competitive Prismata: Ladder, Ratings, Arena, and Unit Updates

My apologies for the late post. I have been a bit sick, and spending a lot of time on the road with PAX and now SXSW. It’s finally up; you can put your pitchforks away.
This post is actually a bit overdue. I wanted to talk about a number of changes that we’ll be making in the upcoming weeks as a direct result of the feedback we have been receiving from our players. This post is pretty long, containing a lot of info, comments, pseudo-announcements, and actual announcements, and will cover:
  • Unit balance tweaking
  • The Prismata leaderboard (and its future)
  • Ratings
  • Our policies regarding smurfing
  • Competitive game modes

We’ll also be giving a few sneak peeks of some upcoming new units.

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Unit Balance Tweaking

The most important of today’s announcements is a new unit balance survey, featuring questions about Scorchilla, Electrovore, and all the other units we’ve added or changed in the last few weeks:
ANNOUNCEMENT 1: there is a new Prismata Unit Balance Survey available

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A Collection of Extremely Exciting Announcements

Hi, everybody!

We’ve got good news. No, we’ve got great news. Actually, there is so much incredible news happening that I’ve barely been able to sleep this week (which might be why this blog is so late!)

In any case, I can say that March 2015 is going to be HUGE for Prismata. Possibly the most exciting month yet.

Yes. Yes it is.

Today’s blog contains a number of exciting announcements, including TWO major convention/exhibition appearances next month. Here’s a TL;DR:

  1. We’ll be showcasing Prismata at PAX East next week in Boston (as part of the Indie Megabooth).
  2. We’ll also have a Prismata booth at SXSW Interactive the weekend after (as part of the Media Indie Exchange Humble Bundle Showcase).
  3. We’re also partnering with Humble to handle backer fulfillment as part of our crowdfunding initiatives.
  4. We have a new website up.
  5. Winners have been announced for our wiki and video contests.

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Custom Prismata Sets, Badges, Top Games, and More!

For today’s blog, I wanted to unveil a few new Prismata features that will be going live this week. Rather than write a big article about them, I’ve made a video. Have a look:

In addition, here are the three new units that will also be going live:

Here are their exact stats and final costs (and yes, Rectifier’s text is a little funny with the whole “does not heal” bit… we’ll fix it later):

Arka Sodara

Arka Sodara – Supply 1

 

Mahar Rectifier - Supply 10

Mahar Rectifier – Supply 10

Redeemer - Supply 4

Redeemer – Supply 4

 

 


Quick update: balance survey results are out!

Hi everyone. Just wanted to post a couple of quick updates.

 

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Survey results, and our plans for Desktop and Mobile Distribution

Hey guys,

First off, I want to apologize for the lateness of this week’s blog post. On Tuesday, we deployed a new version of the software with some huge updates that massively improved Prismata’s load times, AI speed, and server efficiency. We’ve received a ton of feedback (mostly quite positive) and have been tweaking things non-stop all week to really smooth out the Prismata experience. So the blog took a bit of a backseat.

This week’s post is also an important one, so I didn’t want to rush it. I’ll be revealing the results of our post-Kickstarter “What should we work on?” survey, as well as talking a bit about some of our future plans for mobile and desktop distribution.

Before we get to the survey results, I’d also like to announce that we have a NEW SURVEY out concerning the balance of Prismata units. If you’ve been raging about Apollo, Cluster Bolt, or Deadeye Operative, this is your chance to let your complaints be heard. It should take about 10 minutes, but you can definitely spend a lot more time on it if you want!

 

The Survey Results

Remember the “What Should We Work On” survey that we asked you to fill out a few weeks back? Well, the results are finally in! After nearly 500 responses, we’ve compiled the data and can now share the results with you. So, without further ado, here they are:

 

What Should we Prioritize?

If you took the survey, you probably noticed that we asked the first (and most important) question of “what should we prioritize” twice, in two different ways. We did this in order to ask you what you wanted versus what you felt we should do. Both answers are really important to us, and we thank everyone who took the survey!

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Help Improve Prismata’s Wiki… and Win Awesome Prizes! 1

Prismata’s greatest strength has always been our community. Since its creation two months ago, the Prismata Wiki has blossomed into one of our greatest community resources for information concerning Prismata. The Prismata Wiki has become a hugely important resource for both beginners and experts alike, as it contains a wealth of information on every unit in the game (basic tips, advanced strategies, and even build orders).

table

The Prismata Wiki contains a lot of really cool stuff, like this massive unit table! Click for the full table.

We want to make Prismata’s Wiki even better by getting even more people from our community involved! Hence, we’ve decided to run a wiki-editing contest.

Yes, a contest. The kind with prizes!

Anyone who makes a contribution to our Wiki in the next month will receive a new rare emote (“I learned that from the wiki.”), and the top contributors could win a Prismata T-shirt, or the chance to develop their own Prismata emote! More information below.

To kick off the contest, I’ve also written up my own highly-detailed article on one of my favourite Prismata units—the Hellhound. It’s pasted below; feel free to use it as a model for your own articles, or even improve it! (more…)


The Future of Prismata’s Art 1

 

Zenith_Gate2(1024x600-Watermarked)

Hey, guys!

I’m going to jump straight into this post. It’s going to be about Prismata’s overall graphical look, and how we’ll be upgrading it as time goes on. We get a lot of questions along the lines of “Why don’t you have good art like Game X?”, where Game X is typically a work by a AAA developer with a budget in the millions. Even though these types of questions may be a bit tongue-in-cheek, we do intend to improve our graphics to the point where we are competing with the best-looking strategy games and card games out there. In the next year, you’ll be seeing big updates to our user interface, look and feel, animations, unit art, and tons of other aspects of Prismata’s appearance. Today, I’m going to explain our plans.

Before I get to that, let’s first take a look at the competition.

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The “What Should We Work On” Survey (Plus Kickstarter Final Results and Other News) 2

Hey guys!

Athough the weather outside is frightful (an “Extreme Cold Warning” in is effect with wind chills below -30 here in Waterloo), we’ve been huddled in the office getting tons of stuff done! We’re working hard on the Prismata campaign, new social and expressiveness features, improvements to graphics and sound, and all kinds of other stuff.

To help us determine how to best focus our efforts, we’ve prepared a quick survey. We want to know what you think, where our weak areas are, and what to prioritize. Your input is invaluable to us and we’ll be personally reading every single response. Take the survey now!

 

New Faces at Lunarch

The break has ended, we’ve all had a great vacation, and the Lunarch office is again filled with people busy working on Prismata. Our last interns, Whinnie and Rachel, have returned to school, and their shoes have been filled by two new faces—Tom (returning developer co-op from last summer) and Megan (who will be helping grow our community).

Please give a warm welcome to Tom and Megan, who will be  getting us lunch and making our coffee for the next four months.

Please give a warm welcome to Tom and Megan, who will be getting us lunch and making our coffee for the next four months.

More news and updates below…

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