A Winner is Us! Plus Cowboy and Super Robot Skins 1
Hey, everyone!
A few things today:
- Our glorious Curse Award trophy.
- Announcement and previews of some new skins sets.
- An update on the new user interface and arena mode.
A Winner is You!
This just arrived in the mail from Curse (they’re the folks who partnered with us to help build the Prismata wiki). We took home one of their coveted awards at PAX East, and it now decorates our office next to this awesome piece of Prismata art:
If you read this blog very closely, you may recognize the stool that the award is sitting on…
A Sneak Peak at the New Prismata User Interface
One of the biggest things we’re continually working on in Prismata is the look of the game. We’re very aware of the fact that that Prismata’s current menus make the game look like it’s from 1998. The mediocre user interface (UI) was meant to be a placeholder until we got our fancy new graphics added. And ladies and gents, a major update is coming! Our devs have been hard at work creating a new UI, and it’s almost ready to be launched. The purpose of today’s post is to share a sneak preview of what it’ll look like when it goes live.
Sit back, and prepare to be amazed! (Or at the very least, maybe slightly impressed). Note that, as usual, everything you see here is a work in progress, and further changes are likely.
Let’s start off with the login page:
Exhibit A: the login panel. New, improved, and sleek. It’s everything we’re looking for in a login, and we couldn’t be happier with it.
Help Prismata get to E3! Plus Updates, Balance Changes, and Survey Results.
Hey, everyone! Lots to talk about this week! Here we go!
Help Prismata get to E3!
E3—The annual Electronic Entertainment Expo—is the biggest video game industry conference in the world, and it provides an unparalleled opportunity to meet the press and network with all kinds of platform-holders and other industry folks. Small indie games like Prismata are seldom present, but a group of folks called Indies Crash E3 has raised some funds to host an indie booth at E3.
However, there’s a catch. They can’t send everybody, so they’re having a contest to determine which indie games will get to go to E3. And it’s not a simple voting contest—the contest itself is a browser GAME called indieclicker, which is a bit like “Cookie Clicker” or other simple clicker games. Everyone who plays earns points for Prismata to help us rank up on the leaderboard.
Indieclicker. You can play it to earn points to unlock a spot at E3 for Prismata!
Indieclicker is actually kind of addictive.
New Prismata Skin Sets! 2
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!
Prismata’s Arena is Coming! 2
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!
Five Awesome Hacks for Exhibiting your Indie Game at PAX or GDC 1
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
- 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.
Unit Balance Tweaking
Celebrating Prismata’s Amazing Community 1
Hey everyone, Megan here—your Prismata community manager.
The title for this article is pretty self-explanatory. With everything that’s been going on lately, a post like this is long overdue. It’s no secret that Prismata’s community is made up of many extremely dedicated, generous, and driven people, and that Prismata wouldn’t exist as it does today without them.
We don’t want you to think for a second that we don’t notice all of the wonderful contributions each and every one of you make to growing and improving our game, whether it’s through streaming the game, making videos, sharing the game, or other means. It’s time to recognize the individual behind those contributions, which is why we’re introducing…
The Ambassador Program
As a show of gratitude, this blog marks the launch of the Prismata Ambassador Program, an initiative in which we will invite outstanding community members to become Prismata Ambassadors.
Anyone can become an ambassador. The only thing you need to do is help spread the word about Prismata or create value for the Prismata community, whether it’s by streaming the game, creating Prismata content, giving away alpha keys, or recruiting new players.
| What | Become a Prismata Ambassador |
| Responsibilities | Help build and grow the Prismata community |
| What you get | An in-game Ambassador badge, plus alpha keys to give away (if you want) |
| Where to get it | Contact me! You can email me or message me on reddit. |
The only real requirement is to be enthusiastic about Prismata, and have an idea of something you could do to help the Prismata community. For some inspiration, take a look at some existing Prismata community members who are definitely worthy of the title “Prismata Ambassador”:
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A Collection of Extremely Exciting Announcements
Hi, everybody!
We’ve got good news. No, we’ve got great news. Actually, there is so much incredible news happening that I’ve barely been able to sleep this week (which might be why this blog is so late!)
In any case, I can say that March 2015 is going to be HUGE for Prismata. Possibly the most exciting month yet.
Yes. Yes it is.
Today’s blog contains a number of exciting announcements, including TWO major convention/exhibition appearances next month. Here’s a TL;DR:
- We’ll be showcasing Prismata at PAX East next week in Boston (as part of the Indie Megabooth).
- We’ll also have a Prismata booth at SXSW Interactive the weekend after (as part of the Media Indie Exchange Humble Bundle Showcase).
- We’re also partnering with Humble to handle backer fulfillment as part of our crowdfunding initiatives.
- We have a new website up.
- Winners have been announced for our wiki and video contests.
