Prismata Blog - Page 10 of 16 - Insights and Updates

Balancing Prismata Openings Through Unit Design – part 3: Variable Rush Timings

Hi everyone!

Continuing from where we left off last time, we’re going to talk about one of my favourite Prismata topics—rush timings. Every Prismata player has been in a situation where they’ve been caught off guard and lost to their opponent’s early Redeemer, Shadowfangs, or Tia Thurnax. But when do these rushes work, when do they fail, and how do we modify our unit designs to ensure that that they don’t lead to autowins?

Sick of fighting, this Redeemer took up a new career.

The answer is a bit complex, and requires a deep understanding of when rushes themselves are strongest. Get ready for a somewhat theoretical (but fun) discussion!

(more…)

Welcome David! Thanks for making Prismata run 7x faster! Here’s how he did it.

Hi everyone!

This is a bit of a cop-out of a blog article, because I’m ridiculously sleep-deprived and have been way too busy over the last few days to do a satisfactory job with part 3 of the “Balancing Prismata Openings Through Unit Design” series. So it will have to go up a little later.

I hope you’ll forgive me, especially considering that you folks got a bonus article last week when I discussed Prismata’s performance rating formula (incidentally, if you’ve been following that discussion, it seems we’ll be going with the “Netzero” system, which was both my personal favourite solution, as well as the most popular on reddit.)

In any case, today’s article will focus on some of the amazing work that one of our devs has been doing to improve Prismata’s performance.

(more…)

Prismata’s performance rating formula 1

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.

(more…)

Balancing Prismata Openings Through Unit Design – part 2: Tempo and Initiative

Hey guys!

A quick news update before we get on with the rest of today’s article: in celebration of our new balance patch, we’ve posted a Kickstarter update highlighting some of our recent accomplishments and previewing a few more new skins. If you haven’t yet claimed your supporter badge, instructions are provided there!

Did you know that blog articles containing pictures are 82% more likely to be read and shared, and that 63% of statistics are actually made up on the spot?

Today, we’re going to be continuing our discussion on how Prismata openings influence our decisions regarding unit balance. Last week, we discussed how our goal in designing each Prismata unit is to find the best, most balanced, and most interesting version of that unit, and showed how specific opening timings can create design challenges because certain unit designs can favour certain players or certain strategies too much.

Like last time, I’ll be sharing a few pages from our developer-exclusive secret opening book. To understand how to analyze some of the rushes and timings that exist in these openings, we first need to discuss two important strategy game concepts: Tempo and Initiative.

(more…)

Our Largest Balance Patch Ever 1

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 – 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.

(more…)

Balancing Prismata Openings Through Unit Design – part 1 1

Hello everyone!

In today’s article, I’m going to reveal a few Prismata secrets that we’ve never shared with the public: we’ll be showing off some pages from our secret opening book (yes, we have one!)

Before I do that, I have two announcements to make:

(1) A huge balance patch is happening this weekend, and it will go live at noon EST on Saturday, May 23rd. We’ll be tweaking a total of 13 different Prismata units. Just for fun, the tweaks are being revealed one at a time on our Twitter page. Be sure to follow us to receive every update as it arrives.

(2) Our AI Mastermind Dave is conducting a Prismata AI survey. We’re really interested in how people think we’re doing with respect to the Prismata bots, so if you haven’t filled out the survey yet, we’d really appreciate it!

Prismata’s robot overlords will be taking over soon.

Now, let’s get to the meat of the article. I apologize in advance for the fact that this is a bit rambly, geeky, and somewhat technical. But revealing secret openings is serious business!

(more…)

Introducing National Flag Drones in Prismata

Just a quick little tease-post to show you something we’ve been working on.

Take a look at these:

Prototypes of a new skin set: national flag Drones!

We’ll be making quite a few of these in preparation for the launch of skins in Prismata… (Which is happening soon! We promise!)

Being Excellent to One Another 1

Hey everyone! Happy Tuesday!

Before we get to today’s article, I want to introduce our latest new summer intern, Jordan Verasamy!

As you can see in the background, Jordan uses a mechanical keyboard with no letters printed on it. And yes, he looks this smug in real life. Like our other co-ops, Jordan was temporarily granted access to sunlight for this photograph.

Jordan will be working on various roles in support, QA, and automation. He’ll be catching bugs, making our server more secure, and simulating thousands of users on our system to help pinpoint scalability bottlenecks. He’s also a Tier 8 Prismata player.

(more…)