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.

A Message from Will Ma

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Prismata co-founder Will Ma has provided us this week’s update, but he’s posted it on the Prismata subreddit instead of the blog. You can check it out here, alongside some comments from me and many other Prismata community members.

As well, if you’re feeling that things have been a bit too quiet lately, rest assured that we have TWO exciting new Prismata patches/updates coming very soon:

  • A game patch that will provide a few small balance tweaks, complete reworkings of some units (Deadeye Operative and Corpus), and a few new units.
  • A content patch that will add animated skins, some new in-game graphics, and more collectibles.

We’re also making a lot of progress on our “new user experience” (NUE) project, which includes a level-up system, tutorial content, and rewards for new players. I’ve posted some comments on the subject here, and we’ll be revealing more in future blog updates, so check back next week and later this month!

New update is live!

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Hi everyone,

We’ve just deployed a new Prismata alpha update, featuring changes to Ranked Play, a new Streak Bonus, and additional play options for games against friends and bots.

The full changelog is here.

Additionally, we’ve uploaded a video showing off some of the new features and other recent changes:

We hope you like the new features, and look forward to your feedback!

 

 

 

 

Mini-update

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Just wanted to post a quick update on a few things.

It’s been a hectic week as we’ve been dealing with a number of bug reports and other minor issues lately. We’ve received a lot of questions, so I’m just gonna dump a few quick answers here…

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Some Downtime Expected Today/Tomorrow

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Hi all!

EDIT: downtime has already happened, new Black Lab is live!

[[Obligatory link to our January 2016 survey, which focuses exclusively on unit balance.]]

My apologies that it’s been a bit quiet lately; many of us have been taking some time off for the holidays, but things are back into full swing this week. For now, I’m just posting a quick update; we’ll be posting a longer video update on Youtube and Kickstarter later this week.

Still working on new skins and plenty of other surprises.

Expect Downtime for the new Black Lab and Arena Launch

One of our first plans for the new year is the deployment of a series of major changes to the Arena (which will now be called “Ranked Play”) as well as the Armory and the Black Lab. These changes are fully ready and will go live in the next 24 hours. A few notes of caution:

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Happy holidays!

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Happy holidays from all of us here at Lunarch!

Santa Drone

Today’s Friday event on the Prismata alpha server will be a little different than usual. This time, you’ll get a chance to buy a special Prismata unit: ROBO SANTA!

Robo Santa will bring you gifts galore, regardless of whether you’ve been naughty or nice. The event goes live at 4pm EST. As usual, there will be an encore next Tuesday.

 

 

 

Prismata’s Sound Design

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Hi everyone!

If things have seemed a little quiet lately on the Prismata front, fear not! We’ve been diligently working behind the scenes on a number of important projects that are essential for Prismata’s release—scaling up our back end architecture, building a great tutorial, enhancing Prismata’s graphics, and designing a riveting single-player campaign.

One additional project (which has stood mostly neglected until now) is Prismata’s sound design. Indeed, the current alpha sound effects in the game are all temporary audio clips that we put together with a very low level of effort. Now that Prismata itself is much further along, we’ve begun the process of implementing actual sound design for the game. Helping us with this undertaking is my good friend Arnej Secerkadic.

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Prismata December Balance Patch – full details

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Hi everyone.

Today we’re revealing the rest of the changes that we’ll be deploying in our upcoming Prismata balance patch. Part one was posted here.

Before I get to the changes themselves, I want to announce a new Prismata alpha survey that has just gone live. We want as much feedback as possible on events, as well as any suggestions you might have concerning anything else in Prismata.

 

The December 2015 Balance Patch

In addition to a boatload of buffs, nerfs, and other small rebalances, we’ve also somewhat modified our approach to balancing some of the more extreme units in Prismata (Zemora, Savior, Thunderhead, and so on). We’ve added a lot of crazier units over the last few months, and many players told us that they felt that the influence of these units on Prismata games was a bit too strong, so we’re making some conscious efforts to reduce their overall impact on the game—not by nerfing them, but by making it more necessary to mix in other strategies and tactics when going for them.

This patch has taken a little more effort than usual to put together as there are a lot of changes, and many of our intended tweaks required a lot of testing, iteration, and refinement. In particular, units like Savior have been overhauled quite a lot, and these changes required many many hours of testing (we probably experimented with over a dozen Savior variants).

Thanks to everyone for being patient for this one. Below is the complete list of changes.

The patch will go live sometime in the next 24 hours.

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Prismata December Balance Patch – part 1 1

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Hi all,

I’ve been eager to formally reveal the changes we’ll be pushing in our upcoming December balance patch, but that list of changes has grown quite long, so I’m going to be breaking things up across a couple of articles.

Today, I want to go in-depth on a couple of units that have proven really tricky for us in design, and talk about some of the experimentation we’ve been doing to improve them. The units in question are Vivid Drone and Trinity Drone:

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Prismata AI Developer Dave Churchill wins Best Student Paper at AIIDE

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I have some exciting news to report today!

Our very own AI developer and University of Alberta PhD student Dave Churchill has just won the Best Student Paper award at the Eleventh Annual AAAI Conference on Artificial Intelligence and Interactive Digital Entertainment (AIIDE 2015) for a research publication concerning his work on the Prismata AI.

Dave presenting Prismata at AIIDE 2015

Dave’s paper is entitled Hierarchical Portfolio Search: Prismata’s Robust AI Architecture for Games with Large Search Spaces. In it, Dave presents some of the techniques he has employed in developing Prismata’s state-of-the-art bots, and describes novel methods for overcoming the challenges of Prismata’s massive search space while avoiding the types of hard-coded heuristics that would make the bot inflexible to changes applied during balance patches.

Dave’s award is a pretty big deal as far as video game AI research is concerned, as AIIDE is one of the most important conferences in the field. AIIDE describes itself as “the definitive point of interaction between entertainment software developers interested in AI and academic and industrial AI researchers”.

Dave is also well-known in the video game AI community for his work on StarCraft AI. His very own UAlbertaBot took first prize in the 2013 StarCraft AI Competition.

Congrats, Dave!