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.

Happy New Year! Updates, an exciting announcement, and a PUZZLE CONTEST!

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Hi everyone!

I know it’s been a bit quiet lately since Kickstarter ended! We’ve all been taking a much needed holiday break, which for me has meant catching up on sleep, and playing tons of video games with my family. Everyone here at Lunarch will be back to work next Monday, eager to start building in all the new Prismata features that we’ve been dreaming about over the break. I’m excited!

This blog will be a random dump of updates, thoughts, and answers to some questions we’ve been getting often. I’ll also be announcing a new funding milestone, plus a mini PUZZLE CONTEST that I’ll be running this weekend!

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Prismata pretty much owes its entire existence to reddit. And here are the numbers to prove it…

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I’ve mentioned before that Prismata would be completely dead in the water without reddit. And it’s 100% true. But until now, I’ve never divulged any actual statistics on just how much of an effect reddit truly had.

To be honest, it’s because I’m pretty embarrassed about it.

For one thing, the Prismata Kickstarter just hit 100% funding with about 35 hours to go. We *barely* made it. And as it turns out, every single splke in our Kickstarter pledge activity actually coincides with a day we did well on reddit, meaning that we literally wouldn’t even have come close to our goal without the support of redditors. I feel bad admitting it, but reddit pretty much saved my career as a game developer. I truly have no words to express how grateful I am.

Let’s start with the worst… this graphic really puts a knot in my throat:

Screenshot from Prismata's page on kicktraq.com

Prismata’s Kickstarter pledges over time. Like most Kickstarters, we got an initial bump of funding when our campaign first went live. But every single subsequent bump has coincided with a reddit-related event.

Outside of the initial spike when we first went live, the day-to-day interest in our Kickstarter was actually pretty terrible (more on that later). This graph highlights the fact that we were way too ambitious in setting a goal of $140,000; take away those big green reddit spkies, and we’d be tens of thousands of dollars short. The fact that we hit $140k feels miraculous.

But actually, this wasn’t the first time reddit came to our aid.

 

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Removing RNG: how eliminating luck can benefit strategy card games 1

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This article originally appeared as a guest feature on continue-play.com

 

What if a card game like Magic: The Gathering or Hearthstone had no luck? Would it be playable? Exciting? Balanced? Skill-testing? When I ask people this question, most of them seem to think that it would introduce a huge number of problems, crippling the experience for players. But I’m here to make a bold counter-claim: If done right, removing randomness can actually make a card game better.

 

My justification for this statement is effectively a case in point. For many years, I’ve been working on a game called Prismata with a group of friends from MIT. Prismata is, effectively, an online competitive card game without randomness—a seemingly impossible game that shouldn’t exist. In reality, Prismata borrows a lot of ideas from real-time strategy games and tabletop board games to make the concept work. However, blending these ideas in a usable way was no simple task; Prismata required years of testing and iteration, and the entire project was scrapped and restarted from scratch over a dozen times.

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This is it, guys. The Prismata Kickstarter Campaign Launches in UNDER 24 HOURS!

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EDIT: KICKSTARTER IS NOW LIVE.

If you’ve been keeping up with what’s going on over here at Lunarch Studios, you might have heard that our Kickstarter campaign is launching tomorrow.  

For the first time since I decided quit my PhD at MIT to found Lunarch Studios, I’m scared.

Not because I’m afraid that we won’t meet our goal (given the size and growth rate of our fan base, we’ll demolish it), or because I’m worried about our ability to fulfill the rewards (many of them are already ready to go).

I’m nervous because at long last, we’re taking the key step that will begin the transformation of Prismata from a small, niche game into a massive online experience of epic proportions. There’s no limit to how big this thing can get.

 

Your help matters now. More than you think it does.

This is the part where I’m going to ask all of you for help.

What you may not realize is that by helping us early, on the very first day, you can amplify the effects of your efforts by tenfold or more. If we get a massive surge of funding on Day 1, it can lead to increased organic traffic on Kickstarter itself, increased media attention, and even result in us getting featured on Kickstarter’s front page. If that happens, it’s possible for our campaign to snowball like crazy. It’s happened before with other games. Let’s make it happen with Prismata.

To help convince you, we’ll have some amazing early-bird deals for early project backers, so be sure to get them while you still can! Backer rewards will include things like immediate game access, unlimited arena access, in-game avatars, unit skins, legendary emotes, bonus mission packs, puzzle packs, multi-tabling, and more.

Of course, you can lower or cancel your pledge at any time, and you won’t pay a cent unless the goal is met.

There is a second way you can help us, which in many cases can be even more beneficial than supporting us directly: HELP SPREAD THE WORD! We’ll be sharing a link to our Kickstarter around noon tomorrow on facebook, and many times throughout the next month. Facebook responds really positively to people liking, commenting, and sharing our posts, causing them to be exposed to even more people. Helping us go viral on Facebook will make a huge difference!

 

It’s happening!

The next month is going to be insane. Throughout the campaign (and beyond), we’ll work to bring you updates almost every day, as well as amazing events like our Pro Alpha Tourney (with Reynad, Kripp, Trump and more). We’ll also be sharing some exciting new unit skins. Here’s a preview:

sdg

Want to spice up your Drones and Tarsiers? We have tons of skins in development – get early access through Kickstarter!

Our launch video is looking really awesome. Here are a couple of preview shots. It goes live tomorrow as well!

dgs

Some images from the filming of the kickstarter video.

If you believe in our vision for Prismata, please check out the Kickstarter campaign tomorrow!

The Prismata Alpha Tourney, this Thursday, Nov 20th: Pros and streamers face off in a contest of pure skill 2

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Reynad, Kripparrian, Trump, Kolento, TidesofTime and SjoW have all been confirmed for the Prismata Alpha Tourney November 20th.

Reynad, Kripparrian, Trump, Kolento, TidesofTime and SjoW will be competing in the first ever Prismata tournament, held this Thursday, November 20th.

We’ve seen these players compete at high levels in games like Hearthstone, StarCraft 2, and WoW. Now, they’ve been invited to compete in the first ever pro invitational Prismata tournament. Sparks will fly as these talented players square off in Prismata—a fast-paced card game with no decks and no RNG. Only the skilled will survive.

Event: The Prismata Alpha Tourney

 

Date: Thursday, November 20th

Time: 6:30pm EST

 

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How we added tournaments to Prismata in 30 hours: a hackathon post-mortem 21

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One week ago we ran our Prismata tourney hackathon, in which we attempted to develop a tournament feature for our online game Prismata in only 30 hours. Overall, it was an excellent experience for us in which we were highly productive. In this article, we’re going to describe how things went, what we accomplished, and what we learned.

But first, here’s the highlight reel:

[youtube=http://youtu.be/hQE39nDg4RM&w=880&h=495]

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Coding huge multiplayer tournaments in 30 hours: the Prismata hackathon 12

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Edit: stream and publicly viewable docs are up, and we’ve blown up over at /r/gamedev.

This is a post about a game development hackathon that we’ll be live-streaming for much of the next two days. But this is no ordinary hackathon. We’re upping the ante by setting a hard deadline that could result in extreme embarrassment if things go horribly wrong. Allow me to explain.

Organized tournaments are a favourite aspect of many of the games we know and love, and Prismata is no different, being an excellent candidate for compelling and competitive tourneys. After the success of events like Alex’s Prismata Cup Hearthstone tournament, our fans have been begging us to host an actual Prismata tournament. So, at long last, we’re doing it. The first ever Prismata Open Tourney will happen tomorrow, Thursday October 16th, at 7pm Eastern time. We’ve recruited a slew of Hearthstone and poker pros to participate, including millionaire poker superstar Mike ‘Timex’ McDonald and Hearthstone number one Americas legend Jeffrey ‘Tarei’ Liu. The tournament is going to be epic.

There is just one problem.

Prismata currently doesn’t support tournaments. At all. There is literally no tournament feature in Prismata, and we’ve never worked on one before.

That’s why we’re adding tournaments, today. We’ll be designing, coding, and refining Prismata’s tournament features in a 30-hour hackathon that starts 1pm EST Wednesday and ends at 7pm Thursday—when the first Prismata tournament will begin.

Oops. We just did.

 

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What’s in a name? The 5 steps that led to “Prismata” 20

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Prismata is the gaming love of my life. My obsession with Prismata is so great that I literally dropped out of school to work on it. In this article, at long last, I’m going to address a question that I’ve received countless times, but have never spoken publicly about:

Why is the game called “Prismata?”

Honestly, there is no short answer. Naming Prismata was probably the hardest decision we ever had to make. I imagine that it might feel similar to naming a first child, except there are lawyers involved.

I’m pretty embarassed to post this; it was a doodle I made in MS Paint (mostly for comic relief purposes) during one of many stressful “name the game” meetings with other devs. I was really hoping something would just “feel right”. Nothing did. That red one in the middle was close, though.

It took us almost 4 years to name our game. The process had me adding the US Patent and Trademark Search to my browser bar, and murmuring awful name ideas like “Savant Horizon” in my sleep. I don’t know the optimal way to name a video game, or how to decide which of the million options suck the least, but these are the steps that led us to choose the name “Prismata”:

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Prismata’s soundtrack is radically different from most video game soundtracks. Here’s why. 115

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Fun fact: for more than 3-and-a-half of the 4 years that Prismata has been in development, the game had no sound or music at all.

After the break: something you *can* hear!

It was about five months ago when that finally needed to change, and we began the process of acquiring a proper soundtrack together for Prismata. We produced our soundtrack in a manner that’s quite a bit different from what most game studios do, and the results have been brilliant. At long last, we’re ready to give you a sneak peak.

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Exhibiting Prismata: How we got screwed by PAX, blew $6500 showing our game off, and then lost our entire mailing list (PART 2 of 2) 8

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This is a continuation of Part 1 from last week. Read that first, as it explains how we ended up at Fan Expo in the first place.

Fan Expo Preparation

Fan Expo for us practically began after the first week of August, when we finally got confirmation that we’d have a booth. It was exciting, especially after the disappointing news from PAX, but there was a lot to be done and we didn’t have much time.

Most important of all was figuring out the booth. We provided our own tables, seats, and computers, so we had to determine the exact dimensions of the space to ensure that our equipment would fit in the booth. Acquiring this information was more difficult than expected; Will had to make a huge number of phone calls to receive an answer, since the plans weren’t terribly well-organized and no one was completely sure how much booth space we actually would be getting.

Mock Prismata booth

We’re not losing our sanity! We’re just planning out a booth!

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