Hi all,
One quick announcement, plus some random Q&A!
You may have noticed that we’ve modified several prices in Prismata:
Like many competitive online games, Prismata has a variety of unlockable in-game collectible cosmetic items: unit skins, equippable emotes, and more. However, Prismata differs from many other games in that these items are not obtained randomly through pack-opening. Instead, players complete minigames in the Armory and Black Lab, where they have a choice of a number of different prizes. A consequence of this design is that by examining the choices that players make in these minigames, we can actually determine the most and least desirable cosmetic items.
Want to know what the most popular Prismata skins are? Read on…
In my last post, I discussed how it’s essential that we lock down a number of core Prismata unit designs for the purposes of developing our single player content, and called out to everyone in our community to help point out any remaining sore points in unit design that are deserving of our attention. The response was great, and a ton of suggestions popped up in our inbox.
Most of the discussion thus far has focused on a small set of 5-10 units. In many cases, these were units that we already had an eye on; nevertheless, hearing the community’s input is very important as we decide which actions to take.
You can read many of my responses regarding specific units in this reddit thread, which contains dozens of posts on the topic. (I will be continuing to monitor and respond to this and other threads on the Prismata subreddit if you have anything to add.)
Today, I want to discuss a different facet of ranked play balance—all of the other Prismata gameplay aspects we’ve been investigating, beyond individual unit designs.
This post contains an announcement that may have some big implications for ranked play!
All will be explained today.
With Prismata entering beta soon, we’re looking to soon complete the rebalancing of our Ranked Play mode. In this article, I’ll be providing an update on how that’s going and what remains to be done.
This mysterious item of questionable value made its appearance in the last few events. Will it be explained today…?
Sometimes, in large software projects, bugs appear for seemingly no reason, and efforts to fix them go absolutely nowhere.
This is a tale of one such bug. It’s an ugly one.
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:
Hi everyone!
First, a small item: We have a brand new Prismata unit balance survey available. If you’re interested in providing feedback on the latest Prismata unit balance changes, we’d really appreciate it! It should only take about 5-10 minutes, though you could spend more time on it if you want.
On with today’s topic: I figured it was about time that I explain one of the design concepts that has existed in Prismata since very early on in its development—the so-called “Shalev’s Rule”. There have been a number of questions posted on the topic (such as this one) and there’s actually quite a bit of misinformation floating around on the definitions involved. So I’m here to set the record straight, and explain a little about why the design rule exists, and how it influences our decisions in creating new Prismata units.
Truth be told, we’ve never really discussed Shalev’s Rule much in public. Public knowledge has mostly leaked out through small mentionings here and there, which led to gradual (and rather incomplete) dissemination of the concept through the Prismata community. The rough idea is essentially “stuff that’s supposed to be good is never bad”, but the rule actually goes much deeper than that, and its implications in Prismata’s design induce a lot of really cool emergent properties.
Obligatory random image that has nothing to do with the article’s contents… but it’s pretty awesome, agree? Coming soon!
Hi all,
Just a quick note: I have a guest post up on /u/evanisvinks14‘s new web site, prismata.xyz. The site hopes to host a ton of community-written Prismata articles on a wide range of topics, and Evan is still accepting submissions. We’re very supportive of these types of community initiatives, so I’ve contributed myself by authoring a strategy article on Trinity Drone there. It’s here if you’d like to have a look.
I look forward to lots of other great content on Evan’s blog. Evan’s been one of our greatest ambassadors, moderating our subreddit and giving out tons of keys. We owe him tremendous thanks!
Hi folks!
I apologize for not blogging much lately; the Canadian Media Fund deadline is coming up so I’ve been slaving away on an application for government support that will help pay for the giant advertising and PR campaigns that will be accompanying Prismata’s release. (Exciting, I know….)
In the interim, I have two small things for you:
(1) A quick survey on what we should do with the “Good Game” emote, which has recently been removed from Prismata. It should take less than two minutes to complete.
(2) I want to run a quick little “Guess who wins” contest, inspired by a few recent threads on our subreddit.
Hello everyone!
I’m back again today to drone on some more about Prismata openings. Specifically, I’ll be focusing on how the Prismata design team investigates claims of busted Prismata unit combos, and how this has led to the creation of the secret opening book that I mentioned all the way back in part 1.
But first… OBLIGATORY INTERLUDE FOR SKIN SPOILERS! We just got finished with a few skins from our Medieval theme, check them out:
