Game Features

Server reset happening on Monday! 1

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Hi everyone. I have an important announcement to make!

We’ll be doing a reset of player rewards on Monday!

At 3:00am EDT on Monday, August 31, we’ll be taking the Prismata server offline to deploy a pretty large software update and reset player collections. Accordingly:

  • The Prismata server will be down for approximately 30-60 minutes.
  • Players will lose all skins/emotes they have collected so far (but will keep those unlocked using Kickstarter/Paypal reward codes).
  • Players’ current arena/armory status will be wiped.
  • Players will receive a rebate of Power Cores, Omnipower Cores, and Shards commensurate with how many have been earned so far.
A preview of some of the new features arriving with next week's update!

A preview of some of the new features arriving with next week’s update!

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Let’s talk COLLECTIBLES! 1

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Hello everyone!

Until now, there have been only two types of unlockable content in Prismata: badges—given to our crowdfunding supporters, ambassadors, and tourney winners—and equippable emotes, the tool of choice for congratulating (or BMing) your opponent after a game. However, we’ll soon be massively expanding the availability of unlockable (and collectible!) items in Prismata. Today, I’m going to outline some of our plans.

The eventual plan is to have five different kinds of unlockable collectibles in Prismata:

  1. Skins – equippable alternate art for each Prismata unit
  2. Emotes – both graphical and text-based in-game emotes
  3. Badges – to display status or commemorate outstanding in-game achievements
  4. Avatars – selectable display portraits
  5. ****** – (something secret that we have not announced yet)

Details on each of these are provided below. As usual, none of our plans are completely final, but we’d love to hear your feedback on what we have in mind!

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Prismata’s performance rating formula 1

This entry was posted in Game Features Insight on by

Hi guys,

Just a quick update regarding another change that will be going in soon.

Since deploying the first version of Arena mode, the “temporary arena results screen” has had a line in it called “Performance” that’s supposed to provide an indication of how well you played during your arena run (a “performance rating”.) It currently looks like this:

The temporary arena results screen. Performance rating has been highlighted.

The temporary arena results screen. Performance rating has been highlighted.

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Our Largest Balance Patch Ever 1

This entry was posted in Game Features Strategy Uncategorized on by

Today at 12 noon EST, we deployed our largest Prismata balance patch thus far. A total of 14 units have received changes. In this article, I’m going to provide an explanation for each change, explaining our thought processes, and what we’ll be looking toward doing with future units and balance changes.

Militia

Militia – health has been increased from 2 health to 4 health.

This is a simple change that will hopefully make some Militia games a bit more interesting. We found that, while players often bought Militias during the opening to take advantage of their gold-producing ability while the opponent constructed early defenses, Militias had little use in the late game, often being simply worse than Steelsplitters. Now, with higher HP, the decision between Militias and Steelsplitters will be more interesting later in the game.

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New Prismata Skin Sets! 2

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Greetings, everyone!

With all the excitement surrounding our upcoming Arena Mode, we thought that it would be a great time to unveil some of the new skins that players will be able to unlock as rewards for completing sets of matches in The Arena. You’ve already seen some skins from our Pirate Set, our Natural Set, and our Military Set, but today we’re unveiling two brand new skin sets that will be available as soon as The Arena is released.

Let’s take a look!

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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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Custom Prismata Sets, Badges, Top Games, and More!

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For today’s blog, I wanted to unveil a few new Prismata features that will be going live this week. Rather than write a big article about them, I’ve made a video. Have a look:

In addition, here are the three new units that will also be going live:

Here are their exact stats and final costs (and yes, Rectifier’s text is a little funny with the whole “does not heal” bit… we’ll fix it later):

Arka Sodara

Arka Sodara – Supply 1

 

Mahar Rectifier - Supply 10

Mahar Rectifier – Supply 10

Redeemer - Supply 4

Redeemer – Supply 4

 

 

The Future of Prismata’s Art 1

This entry was posted in Game Features Highlights Insight News and tagged Art graphics Prismata on by

 

Zenith_Gate2(1024x600-Watermarked)

Hey, guys!

I’m going to jump straight into this post. It’s going to be about Prismata’s overall graphical look, and how we’ll be upgrading it as time goes on. We get a lot of questions along the lines of “Why don’t you have good art like Game X?”, where Game X is typically a work by a AAA developer with a budget in the millions. Even though these types of questions may be a bit tongue-in-cheek, we do intend to improve our graphics to the point where we are competing with the best-looking strategy games and card games out there. In the next year, you’ll be seeing big updates to our user interface, look and feel, animations, unit art, and tons of other aspects of Prismata’s appearance. Today, I’m going to explain our plans.

Before I get to that, let’s first take a look at the competition.

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The Prismata AI: How I learned to stop worrying and love the bots 1

This entry was posted in Game Features Insight and tagged AI artificial intelligence bots on by

Hey Everyone! I’m Dave Churchill, lead AI programmer on Prismata. While working for Lunarch I’m also finishing up my PhD in video game AI at the University of Alberta. In 2013 my StarCraft AI bot UAlbertaBot won the AIIDE StarCraft AI Competition, which we have been hosting at UofA since 2010. There are a lot of similarities between the AI for StarCraft and for Prismata, and we’ve been able to use some state-of-the-art RTS AI research techniques with new twists. For those not familiar with it, Prismata is a hybrid strategy game that combines ideas from RTS games, card games, and tabletop strategy games. A “how to play” video is available here. Some people describe Prismata as a “real-time strategy game without the real-time”. However, Prismata presents many new and unique challenges that make it different from a traditional RTS in terms of AI design. Let’s dive into an overview of the AI in Prismata: from initial motivations all the way to implementation details. (more…)