Indie Calendar - Prismata

Prismata is a strategy game from Canadian outfit Lunarch Studios that's currently engaged in a Kickstarter campaign to fund their game and we thought we'd reach out to learn more as part of our Indie Calendar.

When asked for the traditional pitch or description of the project, and this is what came back:

"Prismata originally started out as an attempt to achieve many of the design goals achieved by our favourite strategy games, while removing the features we didn't like. Originally, the codename for Prismata was "MCDS", in honour of four other games that deeply inspired us while we were designing it (the games are Magic: The Gathering, Chess, Dominion, and StarCraft).

"Prismata ended up being something that's unlike any of them, and actually a bit hard to describe. It's easier to say what Prismata lacks: it's a turn-based strategy game with no map, no decks, no randomness, no fog of war, no opening book, and a combat system that (as far as I know) is completely unique. Prismata is a bit like a real-time strategy game without the real-time, a card game without RNG, and a deckbuilding game without decks.You can play a match in less than ten minutes (or even faster, if you want to try blitz mode!).

"What I think says the most about the game is to describe the experience of playing. You get matched to an opponent and Prismata reveals a randomly chosen set of units that you and your opponent will be able to purchase during the current game. You start with a few basic worker units and you spend a few moments thinking about your strategy: "Do I want to buy a ton of workers and go for a huge economy? Do I want to rush out an army of attackers right away? Do I want to invest heavily into one of the three possible technology branches?" Your build order depends entirely on that random set of units and what your opponent chooses, since some units may counter others.

"Maybe you buy a few workers and wait to see what your opponent gets. He grabs an Animus. You think maybe he's going for Shadowfangs-powerful but fragile attackers-but if you get a Conduit, you can get Cryo Rays, which will allow you to freeze his defenses and slaughter his Shadowfangs easily. You lay down the Conduit, but then your opponent uses his Animus to get Rhinos instead. As the turns pass back and forth, the game transitions from a tricky strategic dance to an intense tactical battle in which the first person to let their guard down will get slaughtered. You start falling behind, but then your Zemora Voidbringer (which has been under construction for the past six turns) finally enters play, turning the tide of battle completely by allowing you to breach your opponent's defenses and wipe out his economy. Your opponent targets your Conduits, knocking out your Voidbringer's power for a turn and crippling your attack. You save some resources and fire another volley the following turn, devastating your opponent's remaining forces and sealing your victory."

After all that explaining, maybe you'll get a better idea simply by watching the video below that explains the basic principles:

As the employee profiles over on the website reads a bit like fiction, maybe it's not, but it sure has the Hollywood flair. We asked for a bit of background on the studio, and even without the flair there might be a movie script there if Prismata becomes a breakaway success.

"This is gonna sound really nerdy, but the core Prismata dev team actually met at math camp in high school, over 10 years ago. We were all top performing students on national math contests, and some of us (myself included) went on to compete at competitions such as the International Math Olympiad (IMO). David Rhee was Canadian Math Olympiad champion in 2006. Will Ma got the first ever perfect score on the national high school math contest. We were all ridiculously competitive. Somehow we all ended up studying math/CS at the University of Waterloo which is where we first started working on Prismata."

"Summer of 2010 was when it all began; it was the first summer I'd had off since high school as I was in between my undergrad and masters. I remember that Will and Alex and I had just come back from a trip to Vegas to play at the World Series of Poker, and I had recently broken up with my long-term girlfriend (who decided to cheat on me while we were in Vegas). We a group of super smart, ruthlessly competitive, and somewhat bored single guys, and we spent the rest of the summer doing a ridiculous amount of competitive gaming, which included a lot of StarCraft 2 (which had just come out) and Dominion (which we were all crazy about at the time). It was a pretty hardcore 2-month-long degenerate gaming binge, and getting bored with the games we were playing, we spent a lot of time playing games that we made up ourselves. One of those games ended up becoming Prismata."

"Most of the rest of the crucial details are in the blog post... maybe some other things you might want to know concern what's happened in the last year. Will and I submitted our forms to withdraw from MIT in the summer of 2013, and we moved back to Canada in September of 2013 (for a variety of reasons... Canada is our home, fewer immigration issues, better tax exemptions for running a company here, etc.) We pooled some of our own funds to create a company (Lunarch Studios), and we hired our first developers and one artist the following January. We moved into a small office last April, and we've been working hard on Prismata all year. We first showed off Prismata publicly in late August 2013 which is when we gave a demo at FanExpo Canada (which is where I famously lost the entire list of emails we gathered due to a bug in Google Docs), which ended up becoming the most upvoted "bestof" reddit post of all time."

"I think the other important thing about us is that we're a very player focused company. We understand that our particular game absolutely must be a free-to-play game if it's going to succeed, but we've consciously decided to step back from a lot of the exploitative monetization schemes that many free-to-play games employ. We've created something called the "Prismata Promise" that basically states that no part of our game will ever be pay-to-win or "pay to avoid grinding", and we'll never put any paywalls between the player and the game itself. We want to be as player-focused as possible because our goal isn't really to make the most profit we can off of Prismata, but to grow the game as much as possible (sustainably, of course). Many of us have worked at Google or given up other high-paying jobs in software/finance/etc. to work on Prismata because we're very passionate about gaming."

So what's ahead for 2015 - obviously with 12 days remaining on the Kickstarter campaign that's the most immediate focus, but that's just the beginning.

"Single player is a huge focus for us in order to allow new players to have a good experience learning the game and exploring the game's mechanics, so we've placed a really heavy emphasis on having a solid campaign with an engaging story and a really good pedagogical framework. We've actually spent so much time user testing the first few missions, and we're still not even close to happy with them. Prismata looks simple at first, but it gets ridiculously addictive once you get to a certain level of understanding of the game's mechanics, because you start to see all kinds of possibilities of different strategies you could try and different ways you could play. It's a real challenge to ignite that spark in new players as fast as possible, and it's something I'm hoping we'll be really good at by the time next summer rolls around."

"E-sports is also huge for us. Many of us have an E-sports background: Alex has been ranked incredibly highly among Hearthstone players, and I've had some success in winning the Reddit StarCraft Tournament some time ago. We really want Prismata to be a game that draws a big e-sports audience, so we can run tournaments for top players with cash prizes, sponsors, you name it. Prismata's a really great game for high-level competitive play, so it's just about cultivating that interest. So far, things look very promising."

"We're also planning on doing is constantly updating Prismata with new content all the time. One thing we've been secretly working on for many years is a PvE Raid mode for the game. Raids are essentially just challenges where you team up with friends to defeat bosses, but in testing, we found that people really enjoyed them; some folks enjoyed them more than the regular competitive Prismata format. We look to release them sometime next year. We're also planning on adding an arena mode, lots of collectible rewards, and new units at regular intervals."

If you're interested in this game that aims to change the rules of card and strategy games by merging and stripping them down to some core components - you may want to give the free offline demo a try. There's still a few days left before the Kickstarter campaign finishes, so if you like the demo you can still help push the game over the line.

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