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.

Exhibiting Prismata: How we got screwed by PAX, blew $6500 showing our game off, and then lost our entire mailing list (PART 1 of 2) 4

This entry was posted in Banter Insight News and tagged conventions Fan Expo PAX video game cons on by

This is the complete story of the first public appearance of Prismata, our new Starcraft-meets-Hearthstone turn-based strategy game. As you may know, PAX Prime—one of the world’s largest video game festivals—happened about a week ago in Seattle, Washington. Tens of thousands of fans were treated to exciting previews, live announcements, and playable demos in the massive Washington State Convention Center. It’s always been a dream of mine to show off Prismata at PAX, and we’d been planning to have our own booth there since early spring of this year. It was going to be great!

Except, we didn’t go.

In a move that left us all extremely disappointed, PAX’s sales team left us hanging for weeks without returning our emails, and ultimately denied us the opportunity to even submit an application for floor space at the event, giving preferred treatment to AAA developers and other established exhibitors. We ended up relocating our PAX booth to Fan Expo Canada—another large convention that happened to fall on the same weekend. Despite requiring a ton of planning, effort, and upfront costs, the Fan Expo booth went really well. Thousands of people played the game, and many of them came back multiple times, often bringing their friends, or waiting in line to play a fourth, fifth, or sixth time. There was nothing more satisfying than watching newbies turn into veteran Prismata players, after which most of them happily signed up to our mailing list to receive a beta key. Everything was going great! That is, until we returned to the office and realized (to our horror) that the entire list of hundreds of emails we had collected was wiped out by a bug in Google spreadsheets. More on that later.

This article is our exhibitor post-mortem. Here, you’ll find a full description of what happened with PAX, info on how we planned and ran the booth at Fan Expo, a full listing of our expenses, and a complete description of everything that we wished we’d done differently. If you’ve ever considered presenting a game at a convention, this is a must-read!

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FAN EXPO!

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Hi everyone!

This will be a pretty quick post, as we just got back from the labour day long weekend. Most of our team spent the last 4 or 5 days in Toronto, where we showed off Prismata at Fan Expo Canada 2014. At our booth in the largest comic/anime/gaming convention in Canada, over ONE THOUSAND people tried Prismata for the first time, and their responses completely blew away my expectations. People absolutely loved the game, with many people returning to the booth to show Prismata to their friends, or coming back a day later to play for a second time (or third, or fourth…).

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The 10 questions most frequently received by Prismata’s design team 5

This entry was posted in Game Features Insight Strategy and tagged balance Design game mechanics Prismata on by

After releasing our how-to-play video two weeks ago, we’ve been getting more questions than ever about how Prismata was designed, what Prismata matches feel like, and why we made such unconventional decisions in crafting the game itself.

Prismata is unique in that it combines aspects of both card games and real-time strategy games, which led to many difficulties and challenges in its design. This article will attempt to shed some light on the design decisions that seem really bizarre to first time players, and answer other common questions.

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The Prismata Base Set

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Prismata is different from many strategy games in that when challenging an opponent, you don’t build your army from a fixed tech tree, nor do you bring a deck of cards with you to battle. Instead, the units available for purchase are randomly chosen from a set of dozens of different units, meaning that new strategies must be planned every game.

However, there is one special set of units—the Prismata base set—that is available in every single game.

In this article, we’ll be focusing on the base set, which lies at the foundation of all of Prismata. The Prismata base set contains eleven core units, providing a flexible and reliable selection of technologies that you can use as a starting point whenever you begin planning your strategy. The base set units in Prismata allow you to ramp up your economy, invest in technologies, and obtain essential offensive and defensive capabilities that can supplement the rest of your forces. (more…)

Prismata unit art and concepts 1

This entry was posted in Banter and tagged Art Design Prismata strategy units on by

In designing the combat units for the game Prismata, there are a number of important considerations relating to gameplay, narrative, and artistic style. The look and feel of the game units affects how users feel when playing the game, how they perceive the story, and how well they intuit the actual game mechanics. We began by designing the most important and difficult units: those in our base set. These are the units that users can purchase in every single game of Prismata, and they are among the first units that users encounter in the single player campaign. We needed their look and feel to be perfect.

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The Role of Luck: why competitive games like Hearthstone NEED luck, but RNG isn’t the only answer 198

This entry was posted in Insight and tagged Design development features Gamedev Hearthstone league of legends luck Poker starcraft on by

The topic of luck in competitive gaming always ruffles a lot of feathers, leading to never-ending complaints and hostility from many different types of gamers: players whining about losses caused entirely by randomness, fans whining about their favourite pros being knocked out of tournaments due to bad luck, and everyone else whining about all the whiners. The subject arises frequently in discussions surrounding card games like Hearthstone, where the issue has become a hotly debated topic in the wake of serious complaints from professional players concerning the role of randomness in the game.

In developing Prismata—a competitive turn-based strategy game sharing many features with card games—we’ve questioned whether the presence of luck was really worth all the fuss, raging, and drama. Could a game like Hearthstone still be as popular and fun if the element of luck was removed?

Over the years, we’ve talked to many professional gamers and expert game designers, including folks from Hearthstone’s design team, about the role of luck in card games. When asked whether it would be possible to design a card game without luck, they all told us the same thing:

“Bad players will never think they can win, and they will stop playing.”

“Your game can’t thrive if it doesn’t have luck.”

“You’d be fucking crazy to try and make it a commercial success.”

Challenge accepted. I guess we’re fucking crazy.

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Gameplay Videos

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With the release of the first wave of Beta keys on the horizon, we thought it would be a good idea to show off some Prismata gameplay. In the following videos, Lunarch Studios founders Elyot Grant, Will Ma, and Alex Wice commentate a few friendly games and explain their decision-making and strategy.

While much of the look and feel of the game is rapidly changing as development continues, the core gameplay remains as it has been for years.

Subscribe to us on Youtube to be notified about all the new video updates. We plan on posting new videos weekly.

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Setting the Bar: featuring comments from Prismata writer Mike Fong 2

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As the guy at Lunarch Studios who does most of the work that a producer would do at a larger studio, I get to interact with a lot of very talented people—artists, musicians, and of course our very own writer Mike Fong. Mike lives 1000 kilometers away in Boston, so I often consult with him over video calls or instant messenger to ensure that the art we commission agrees with the intended story details.

Elyot: What changes to the bar do we want the artist to make?

Mike: Make it less purple.

Elyot: I like purple.

Mike: Swade’s only friends are the demons inside his head. I just don’t think his regular hangout for drinking alone is a purple bar.

Elyot: At least it doesn’t look like a place where one goes to pick up chicks.

Mike: No, it looks like a place where one goes to pick up dudes.

Elyot: Yeah, yeah, whatever, we can mess with the hues later.

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Origins, Part 1: Why I quit my PhD at MIT to start a gaming studio 1436

This entry was posted in Origins and tagged founders Gamedev history origins on by

[This article contains actual instant message conversations from the founders’ Google chat histories]

It was 6:52 pm on Tuesday, September 28, 2010. I had just sent my good friend Will Ma the following message over Google Talk:

me: current temperature in waterloo according to weathernetwork.com. if it’s odd, I’m black.

For the next several hours, Will and I exchanged a series of cryptic alphanumeric messages resembling this:

Will: W9: hhebcy ns 13plg 3f2aw

These incomprehensible strings of characters were punctuated only by occasional, marginally less cryptic messages like the following:

me: B11: gg wp
me: re?

It was the beginning of a 4-year-long obsession with the game that would eventually be known as Prismata, though at the time, we referred to it only by the codename MCDS (in honour of 4 other strategy games that inspired its creation that we stopped playing in favour of it). Prismata was, and still is, the most addictive strategy game I have ever played. But my choice to throw away my promising academic career in favour of full-time game development wasn’t an impulsive gamble fueled by obsession. Rather, it was a calculated, market-driven decision born from a series of remarkable coincidences.

In the Origins series, we’ll share some anecdotes from the early days of Prismata: the fierce arguments we had over the game’s design, the insane development choices we made when building the game, and the highly unconventional ways we went about building our studio from scratch and funding the game’s development. This article shall give a brief overview of the game’s history, with a focus on the factors that convinced us to withdraw from our PhD studies at MIT to found a full commercial game development studio. ]

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