Hitting 10,000 players and Updating Hash Rush
Greetings Voyagers!
Since the launch of the Hash Rush BETA, we have not been sitting on our laurels, but rather we’ve been closely monitoring the community’s reaction to the game, hunting down pesky bugs, and expanding the game with new features.
What’s more, with the game in a (relatively) stable state, we decided that it would be the perfect time to begin to work on our blockchain integration. After releasing our plans to the community we once again listened to what the community had to say and identified one area that we had misjudged — the point of selling RUSH directly in the game. To fix that, we quickly changed the plans, you can read about what the new RUSH plans are here.
Before we go into the details of the past updates, we want to share some amazing news! We recently hit 10,000 accounts created in Hash Rush! This is an amazing milestone and we are really excited to see the new players try out and enjoy our game!
Updates to Hash Rush
Looking back at what we’ve been publishing in our articles, we noticed that we did not really keep track of the various changes that we’ve made to the game (beyond the big feature updates) so we’re going to fix that with this article.
In no particular order, we are going to go over the main changes that we’ve made to the game since our soft beta launch.
Removing Colony Levels
Our original plan was to have the players unlock new buildings as they gathered Galaxy Points. They would have tier 1 buildings unlocked by default, but then they would need to reach a specific colony level to unlock tier 2 and tier 3 buildings.
Though this idea was fun on paper, practically speaking, we noticed that this became somewhat of a pain point as the progression was rather slow.
To fix this, we’ve decided to go into more mainstream RTS functionalities. The Colony levels have been removed entirely and to replace it, players can now upgrade their Voyagers Bastion from level 1 (default) to level 3.
Don’t worry, Galaxy Points are still vital as they form the highscore table in Hash Rush!
Changing the Functionality of Crystals
This ties very nicely with the Colony Levels. If you think back to the start of Hash Rush, Crystals (or Crypto Crystals as we called them) were used as points to show the player’s position in the Bounty Challenges, then with the beta, we changed it so that Crystals were converted into Galaxy Points in the Silo.
However, looking at the data since the launch of the beta, we have realized that tying a competitive element to the Crystals was not a good idea as it had the potential to (and in some cases already did) skewer the high scores somewhat negatively. What’s more, it also defeated the point of the Galaxy Points as we wanted them to be used as a measure of the player’s ability to tackle the Crystal Scourge.
With that in mind, it shouldn’t be much of a surprise to know that we’ve removed the ability to convert Crystals to Galaxy Points. In the game as it is (at the time of writing) Crystals do not have a use case, however we are committed to having Crystals as a valuable resource so we are working on updating the Crafting system so that it uses Crystals as resource needed to craft the items.
New Planet Difficulties
This was one of the first changes that we made to the game. It’s always been our intention to have multiple planets and that a player would need to jump from planet to planet to keep progressing in the game. In fact, if you played the latter stages of our alpha, you may have even found your way to an early version of a desert based planet.
For the beta, we did remove the desert planet as we wanted to develop it further (visually making it better), so that left us with a bit of an empty hole to fill.
Our solution was to have variants of the same planet that players can jump to when they complete their first planet. Each planet has specific debuffs/buffs, and they get progressively harder with different looking enemies
However, after the launch of the beta, we realized that there was a small issue with the path-finding — all the enemies came from a single direction (even though there are 3 entries to the base). We agreed that this was a great way for new players to start, but also that the more experienced players would want something more. So we changed the planet layouts for the harder planets to force the monsters of the Crystal Scourge to attack the player from multiple directions!
Resource Gathering
One of the big complaints of the alpha was that the workers would travel to the next resource spot once their location depleted. Normally this would not be a problem, but thanks to the Crystal Fog and the patrolling monsters, this led to players losing almost all of their workers if they did not constantly monitor them.
When the beta launched, we entirely disabled the automatic movement from locations. However, proved to be a bit of an extreme reaction as with this solution players had to once again micromanage their workers (but at least they didn’t lose the workers entirely). To fix this, we recently implemented a 3m rule so if a resource point is depleted, if there is another resource source (of the same type) within 3m of the worker, they will automatically move to it.
Highlighting the Orders
This was actually a big one. One of the biggest early issues was the lack of feedback for the players when they ordered a unit to gather resources or to attack a monster. This lead to a lot of frustrated players as they would regularly send their units ‘next’ to the target instead of activating the ability (be it attack or gather).
To fix this, we recently added a much needed highlight that triggers when the player sends their unit to either attack (all units) or gather resources (workers/prospectors).
Re-balancing the Combat
Getting the combat system is a big task and we knew that it wouldn’t be perfect from day one. So we paid special attention to what players wrote about the combat and made specific changes.
- Ursara HP increased
The Ursara is in-fact a mini-boss and the hp was too low. - Stump Root Tentacle HP increased
The stump root tentacle is a rare enemy, and so needed to be a bit more challenging than it was - Fisher HP increased
The Fisher’s HP was too close to the Slasher (a glass cannon unit) so increasing the HP put the Fisher in line with it’s bulkier size. - Fisher Damage Decrease
To balance the HP changes, the Fishers attack power needed to come down a bit. - Terribis HP increased
We saw that the Terribis died too quickly, so a slight bump in HP helped it to be a better challenge. - Crystal Fiend HP increased
This is the end of planet boss and so needed to be a lot stronger
What’s more, we also changed the Watchtower so that the range was increase, but the power was decreased. This particular balance change was made in preparation for an upcoming change to the Terribis that will see it change from a melee unit to a ranged unit.
So that is it for this news update, we hope that you enjoyed reading it! Hash Rush is free to play so all you need to do is register an account on our website and download the game. If you are interested in learning more about the game, join us on Discord or Telegram and you’ll get to meet the game developers!
