Hello there everyone,
This summer we are finally going to transition our game from an alpha to a beta, ushering in a new era for Hash Rush.
The journey to this point has been an interesting one — especially 2019 — but it’s also one that we’ve not really spoken about so far. We’re going to change that in this article as we go over everything that we went through in 2019.
Early 2019 (January to March)
The early parts of 2019 were an interesting time for us, 2018 saw the great crypto crash which as you may know, affected us quite a bit as well. This meant that at the end of 2018 we had to take special precautions to ensure that we could keep on existing, which saw the development of Hash Rush dramatically slow down.
With that said, though 2018 ended on a bit of a low point, the start of 2019 began in the best way possible as an investor named Yang Bin Kwok came forward and helped to steady the ship.
With us entering a slightly more stable period, we began to talk about the gaming side of Hash Rush in more detail, bringing to you popular articles that covered the game lore, and also a (mostly) regular progress update article.
The Lore Spotlight Articles
- The Raken
- The Crystal Titan
- The Crypto Crystal Storm
- An Introduction to the Ernack Heroes (1/3)
- The second part of the Ernack Heroes
- The final part of the Ernack Heroes
- The History of the Troggs
- The Scrapbot
- Madame Violet
- The Highborn of Eldaria and the Crypto Crystals
- The Fischer
- The Teribis
If you are new here, be sure to check these articles out as they go into the story of Hash Rush in quite a lot of detail. Don’t be fooled by our cute game, the story of Hash Rush is in fact quite dark!
On the game development front, our Chief Creative Officer, Rob Nicholls, was hard at work re-designing the combat system to suit the many changes that we made to the game, and also polished up our designs for how the Crystal Scourge (the main enemy of the game) worked.
Mid 2019 (April-June)
This was one of the most exciting periods of our story. While our developers were hard at work on the designs that Rob had created earlier on, we were actively in discussions to secure further funding, a breakthrough came when we began talking with Consensys thanks to an introduction to them by DapperLabs.
It is at this point that we’d like to give special thanks to our community member, Siddartha. It was due to his tireless support for Hash Rush that Consensys had heard previously about us which helped us in our early communications.
As always, before anything, Consensys had to do their own due diligence. This involved code reviews of the game, an analysis of our game design, a general look at how we worked, and a lot of back and forth regarding potential improvements to Hash Rush — you’ll see some of these things in the upcoming beta!
Ultimately, Consensys were impressed with what they saw and were happy to contribute to the future of Hash Rush.
Mid 2019 (July — September)
July started with a bang as it was update time!
This update was a major one that saw us add-in:
- Formations for the units to march in
- Behaviors for the units such as stand ground, target units, target buildings, and so on.
- Improved animations for combat
- An AI for the enemy!
- A reworked combat system
If you’re interested in looking back at what we added in full, check out our announcement post.
What’s more, we also held a quick interview with our team, giving you an insight into what we were doing and what we thought. Check it out here.
Late 2019 (October — December)
Keeping up the momentum from the previous period, we once again prepared another major update that was, if anything even larger and more important than the previous one. This was the Rise of the Crystal Titan!
This update saw us introduce the phases of resistance, a special feature that controlled the Crystal Scourge (the AI) making it attack the player with increasing power based on how strong the player had become.
What’s more, this update saw us introduce the final game boss ‘the Crystal Titan’ and also a second planet, the desert planet, for the players to conquer if they successfully mastered the forest one. Be sure to check out the full details in our announcement post.
That brings us to the end of 2019, and though some things were repeated from older news, a few things were new (like who have been funding us until now), so we hope that you enjoyed reading this summary.
We’ll end this article with 2 important pieces of information for you. First, we’re aiming to release the beta in July and second, we’re working on our next article that will go over what we are doing NOW and another that will go over what we are going to do during our game’s beta, so be sure to stay turned in.
