Monthly Archives: March 2015

Prismata’s Arena is Coming! 2

This entry was posted in News and tagged arena Prismata on by

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

This entry was posted in Banter News and tagged PAX East Prismata SSXW on by

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

This entry was posted in Banter Game Features News on by
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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