February has almost ended so we are back with a look at what we’ve been working on during this month.
In our last news blast, we looked back at what we accomplished during 2019, and what we are beginning to work on this year. Now it’s time to look at how our work has been progressing!
Working on the Crafting System
As we mentioned earlier on in the year, the crafting system is the next big feature that we are working on. This feature is a special one as, for the most part, we need to build most of it from the ground up, instead of iterating on what we had created earlier on.
With this in mind, let’s look at what we’ve been doing and how we intend for the crafting system to work.
Crafting Resources
First thing’s first, the basics. A crafting system needs resources and that’s just what we’ve created. In total we are working with 10 different resources.
You may notice that each of these resources have a specific theme, for example, snail slime has a swampy vibe, as if it were from a swamp, salt sand has a desert vibe, and so on. It’s almost as if these items will only be found on a specific planet!
Collecting the Resources
For Hash Rush we made a decision to have the resources collectible only by with a special, new unit — The Prospector.
If a player discovers a crafting resource on the planet that they are on, they will need to train a Prospector and then send the Prospector to the resource. Once the Prospector picks up the crafting resource, it is then automatically placed into the player’s inventory.
Using the Resources
Once the player has the resources, they will need a way to use them. This brings up several questions, how do players craft an item, how do they learn what to do with the item, and how is everything stored.
In logical order, this is what we’ve decided and worked on.
First, craftable items are created through the use of Blueprints. Think of these as schematics for the item. Blueprints are then divided into rarity subgroups, such as common blueprints, rare blueprints, unique blueprints, and so on.
These blueprints are acquired by leveling your account up (yes, for the crafting system, we are finally going to make use of an account level), however these blueprints will simply be the common ones. Rarer, more valuable/powerful blueprints can be gained from Bounty Campaigns, special events, purchasing from other players, or directly from the in-game store.
Our implementation of the blueprint and blueprint storage system is very rudimentary, however it allows us to already begin testing how things work.
In order to see what the item looks like, what it does, and the description, when the player selects it, all of the information will be displayed in the large rectangle on the right hand side.
Our designers mocked it up like this — you can easily compare it to the in-game screenshot shown above and understand what our intentions are.
Once the player knows what item they want to craft, they open the blueprint and will be shown a screen like this.
This simple screen has a lot of information that is sure to excite the Hash Rush community as it shows the first game use case of our in-game RUSH currency.
Players will be able to spend some RUSH Coin to enhance the crafted item — if they so wish to do so. We’ll go into more detail of how this will work at a later date as it is a big feature that needs a good explanation!
For the experienced F2P crowd that are surely getting a sinking feeling in their stomach, do not worry, the crafted items will be fully tradable.
One situation that we have envisioned that excites us are guilds that have specialized players to craft the best items, and other players that would gather the crafting resources as they play through the game.
This brings us nicely to the end of this progress report. It really has been a fun experience for us to get back to building new features from the ground up, and we are not even halfway done yet.
What you can see here is simply part 1 of the development of the crafting system, the underlying mechanics. Part 2 of the crafting system development would involve designing and balancing the actual craftable items, and finally, part 3 (probably the most exciting) would be adding in the heroic characters who would be able to use the crafted items!
Keep checking back for more updates as we work on Hash Rush!
