Hi everyone,

We’ve just deployed a new Prismata alpha update, featuring changes to Ranked Play, a new Streak Bonus, and additional play options for games against friends and bots.

The full changelog is here.

Additionally, we’ve uploaded a video showing off some of the new features and other recent changes:

We hope you like the new features, and look forward to your feedback!

Hi all!

EDIT: downtime has already happened, new Black Lab is live!

[[Obligatory link to our January 2016 survey, which focuses exclusively on unit balance.]]

My apologies that it’s been a bit quiet lately; many of us have been taking some time off for the holidays, but things are back into full swing this week. For now, I’m just posting a quick update; we’ll be posting a longer video update on Youtube and Kickstarter later this week.

Still working on new skins and plenty of other surprises.

Expect Downtime for the new Black Lab and Arena Launch

One of our first plans for the new year is the deployment of a series of major changes to the Arena (which will now be called “Ranked Play”) as well as the Armory and the Black Lab. These changes are fully ready and will go live in the next 24 hours. A few notes of caution:

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Hi everyone!

If things have seemed a little quiet lately on the Prismata front, fear not! We’ve been diligently working behind the scenes on a number of important projects that are essential for Prismata’s release—scaling up our back end architecture, building a great tutorial, enhancing Prismata’s graphics, and designing a riveting single-player campaign.

One additional project (which has stood mostly neglected until now) is Prismata’s sound design. Indeed, the current alpha sound effects in the game are all temporary audio clips that we put together with a very low level of effort. Now that Prismata itself is much further along, we’ve begun the process of implementing actual sound design for the game. Helping us with this undertaking is my good friend Arnej Secerkadic.

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Hi everyone.

Today we’re revealing the rest of the changes that we’ll be deploying in our upcoming Prismata balance patch. Part one was posted here.

Before I get to the changes themselves, I want to announce a new Prismata alpha survey that has just gone live. We want as much feedback as possible on events, as well as any suggestions you might have concerning anything else in Prismata.

The December 2015 Balance Patch

In addition to a boatload of buffs, nerfs, and other small rebalances, we’ve also somewhat modified our approach to balancing some of the more extreme units in Prismata (Zemora, Savior, Thunderhead, and so on). We’ve added a lot of crazier units over the last few months, and many players told us that they felt that the influence of these units on Prismata games was a bit too strong, so we’re making some conscious efforts to reduce their overall impact on the game—not by nerfing them, but by making it more necessary to mix in other strategies and tactics when going for them.

This patch has taken a little more effort than usual to put together as there are a lot of changes, and many of our intended tweaks required a lot of testing, iteration, and refinement. In particular, units like Savior have been overhauled quite a lot, and these changes required many many hours of testing (we probably experimented with over a dozen Savior variants).

Thanks to everyone for being patient for this one. Below is the complete list of changes.

The patch will go live sometime in the next 24 hours.

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I have some exciting news to report today!

Our very own AI developer and University of Alberta PhD student Dave Churchill has just won the Best Student Paper award at the Eleventh Annual AAAI Conference on Artificial Intelligence and Interactive Digital Entertainment (AIIDE 2015) for a research publication concerning his work on the Prismata AI.

Dave presenting Prismata at AIIDE 2015

Dave’s paper is entitled Hierarchical Portfolio Search: Prismata’s Robust AI Architecture for Games with Large Search Spaces. In it, Dave presents some of the techniques he has employed in developing Prismata’s state-of-the-art bots, and describes novel methods for overcoming the challenges of Prismata’s massive search space while avoiding the types of hard-coded heuristics that would make the bot inflexible to changes applied during balance patches.

Dave’s award is a pretty big deal as far as video game AI research is concerned, as AIIDE is one of the most important conferences in the field. AIIDE describes itself as “the definitive point of interaction between entertainment software developers interested in AI and academic and industrial AI researchers”.

Dave is also well-known in the video game AI community for his work on StarCraft AI. His very own UAlbertaBot took first prize in the 2013 StarCraft AI Competition.

Congrats, Dave!