Banter

Prismata Highlight Reel: “What the f*** is going on in this game?”

This entry was posted in Banter Highlights and tagged casting highlights replay replays stream on by

Welcome to the Prismata Highlight Reel—a new series showing off some of the most epic games we’ve played! These matches test the limits of what’s possible in Prismata, and show some of the most out-of-the-box play that we’ve ever seen. For our first instalment, we’ll count down the top three craziest games played by Elyot during the Twitch stream (be sure to follow us if you want to catch the stream live!)

3. “I have a 9-turn time limit to get something going!”

This was the very last game played at the tail end of a 7-hour-long stream by Elyot. He was up against poker legend Mike “Timex” McDonald in Blitz Mode (12 seconds per turn), but the game lasted more than 20 turns. What ensued was one of the most cutthroat games in Prismata history, with an absolutely unpredictable ending. (Hint: one player lost all of his Drones 10 turns before the game ended.) Watch the replay, and catch the #1 and #2 highlights below.

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Four reasons you MUST watch the Prismata Cup 2 FINALS, airing this Sunday Sep 21 1pm Eastern Time 1

This entry was posted in Banter and tagged Hearthstone prismata cup tournament on by

The stage is set as 64 of the best players in Hearthstone will play to a winner in the Prismata Cup 2—probably the most hyped Hearthstone tournament ever. Following the success of the original Prismata Cup, which saw a peak of 40k concurrent viewers and was the strongest Hearthstone tournament to date, this event is already promising to be even bigger.

 

Stream: twitch.tv/lunarchstudios

Date: Sunday, September 21st, 2014

Time: 1:00pm Eastern Time

Casters: Frodan and Reynad

Produced by m1lkcast LIVE

 

If you watch one Hearthstone tournament this year, watch the Prismata Cup 2 finals.  Below are four reasons why this event will be even better than last time:

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

This entry was posted in Banter Game Features and tagged music on by

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

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

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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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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How to win at Hearthstone by playing dirty: 5 deceptive tactics inspired by online poker 38

This entry was posted in Banter Insight and tagged Hearthstone Poker strategy tricks on by

As a veteran of online poker, with over a million dollars in profit, I’ve learned that in turn-based online games, there’s a great amount of value in concealing information and deceiving your opponent. Poker players need not look far to find lengthy articles on how to profit from timing tells and deceive opponents through timings.

Such tactics really shine in Hearthstone because there are an incredible number of interesting ways to abuse Hearthstone’s user interface to hide information, cause confusion, and lure your opponents into making sub-optimal plays. Whether or not you decide to use these tactics, I hope you’ll find them interesting.

Before we begin, a couple of disclaimers:

Disclaimer 1: These tactics will irritate your opponents. These tactics are controversial. Many of them involve completely unnecessary stalling. People will think you’re an asshole if you employ them. Using them on your friends (assuming you want to keep them) is not recommended.

Disclaimer 2: These tactics aren’t for everyday laddering. They’re not gonna help you climb fast from rank 20 to rank 10. They’re not gonna help you grind faster to earn gold and unlock heroes. These tricks are for tournament matches and legend-level ladder games that you really want to win.

Disclaimer 3: These tactics are not for everyone. These tips are for the soulless masochists among us—those willing to sacrifice our integrity to squeeze out every last advantage possible in every match. They’re not fun. They may waste your time, and may encourage your opponents to grief you. But if you crave every possible edge you can possibly get, these tips are for you!

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Tempo Storm Gaara: “The best matches ever recorded in Hearthstone history.” Why you should watch the Prismata Cup finals 8

This entry was posted in Banter Uncategorized and tagged Hearthstone prismata cup pros tournament on by

The matches have been played, the VODs are in the casters’ hands, and the stage is set.  In roughly 7 hours from the time I post this, the Prismata Cup finals will be aired.

Stream: twitch.tv/itshafu
Date: Sunday, August 3rd, 2014
Time: 6:00pm EDT
Casters: Trump and Hafu

The Prismata Cup is a merit-based tournament open only to high-rank legends. 32 incredibly good players—likely the strongest field of any Hearthstone tournament that has taken place thus far—competed in a competitive 5-round Swiss format, with those having 4-0 or 4-1 records advancing to the single elimination finals that will be broadcast today.

Tempo Storm Gaara, one of the finalists, claims that this tournament produced the best matches ever recorded in Hearthstone history. Having taken a peek at the VODs myself, I couldn’t agree more. If you watch one Hearthstone tournament this year, watch the Prismata Cup finals. Below are five reasons why:

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The Prismata Cup: Why it happened, how it went down, and what Blizzard can do to improve Organized Play 1

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Last weekend, we ran the Prismata Cup—a merit-based Hearthstone tournament open to high-ranking players. It featured 32 of Hearthstone’s top Legend-rank players, and likely had the strongest field of any Hearthstone tournament that has taken place thus far.

 

“The best matches ever recorded in Hearthstone history.”

“Everyone who plays Hearthstone has to watch these games.”

-Two of the six finalists from the Prismata Cup

 

The playoff rounds of the Prismata Cup, featuring the top 6 players from the tournament, will be broadcast this Sunday, August 3rd, with Trump and Hafu commentating.

You should watch them. Because the games are unbelievable.

The Prismata Cup wasn’t the first competitive tournament that I’ve directed. But it was the first time we’ve run a Hearthstone tournament of this scale. Though things generally went well, some hiccups inevitably had to be dealt with on competition day. In this article, we’ll discuss some of the more amusing things that happened, along with some of the problems that arose, and what Blizzard could change to help organized tournaments run more smoothly.

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

This entry was posted in Banter and tagged Design Gamedev writing on by

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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