Looking Back at Our First Community Event
Greetings Voyagers!
We’ve had quite an eventful few weeks and on the 12th of October we saw the end of our first Community Event!
Firstly, we’d like to thank everyone who joined in on the Crystal Fiend hunt! Together the community were able to defeat 1760 Fiends — a really great achievement!
As promised, everyone who defeated at least 1 Fiend during the event will get the Dark Worker Skin, however we also have some bonus prizes!
- If you defeated 4 or more Fiends, you will receive the Dark Tyro Skin
- If you joined our Discord server and gave us feedback/suggestions during the event, you will get the Dark Swordsman Skin
This means that the most active of our community will be getting three skins. Remember that we changed how our skin system works so that each unit type can now have an individual skin, making your collections much more valuable and rare.
With that announcement out of the way, we wanted to dive into the event itself and talk to you about ‘why’ we ran the event the way that we did. So, without further ado, let’s do just that!
The Event
Looking at the event itself, you may question us on why we picked a relatively hard target — after all defeating the Crystal Fiend is supposed to be the final challenge for the player in their efforts to defeat the Crystal Scourge on their planet. If the Fiend is defeated, the player can then move to the next planet, if they lose to the Fiend, well then we hope that they are prepared for the counterattack. So really, this was never going to be an easy fight or challenge.
So, why pick such a hard goal?
The reason comes down to beta testing. Though we are happy with our general game design (it has also been independently reviewed by industry experts who gave us the thumbs up), what we need to work on is the fine detail.
Questions such as the following need to be properly answered:
- Is the resistance phase concept enjoyable?
- Is reaching the Fiend a challenge?
- Is defeating the Fiend rewarding?
- Do players want to keep playing after defeating the Fiend?
We are really pleased to say that on this front, the event was a great success. Players, both new and old joined us on Discord and gave us their honest feedback. We’ve been able to take the feedback to heart and are already working to develop them for our game!
To give you a sample of the work, based on what our players have told us, the answers to the questions listed above are as follows:
- The resistance phase concept is enjoyable, however the implementation needs polishing as it becomes repetitive.
- Reaching the Fiend is a challenge that can be enjoyable. However, there are (soft) exploits that make the process a lot easier thanks to the monster’s AI being unstable.
- Defeating the Fiend itself felt lackluster (as there was no real fanfare) but the Fiend’s death animation was appreciated.
- Once it was defeated, there wasn’t much incentive for the player to continue as they’d do the same thing again on the same planet (but with harder enemies).
Naturally, we were very happy about the feedback to point 1, and, if we are totally honest, we did expect to get the feedback that we got for points 2, 3, and 4.
After all, we are aware of the weaknesses in our game as we all play Hash Rush every day. That said, we were not disappointed, but actually very pleased to receive this feedback. Furthermore, what was hugely important (and impressive) to us was the suggestions on how to improve it.
To summarize it all, we can conclude that these are the most important things that we need to work on
- Massively improve the monster AI so that the monsters stop walking into defensive building traps!
- Provide the players with a reward for defeating the Fiend.
- Add a randomizing element to the game on the planet (the planet layouts need to be different each time) and the game play itself needs some variety.
- Finally, restarting your base after completing the planet is a nice idea, but we need to have something that is permanent, and so we were told that a ‘permanent’ player base/planet should be established. This would be an entirely peaceful planet that can hold special buildings that interact with the game in a unique way, but in a different way to the rest of the galaxy planet. Think of a base in a pocket dimension!
The amazing news is that we have already pretty much agreed on these points, and using our communities suggestions our game designers are hard at work developing these points in such a way to work with Hash Rush.
We want to give a special thank you to the following people (Discord names) for going above and beyond with the extremely detailed feedback!
- Dee22
- Jirp12
- AcciDe
- BibBuddhaCheese
- Sinnch
- C0ldStorm
- Siddartha
- SytriMoldavi
- Smo
- CesarzGamer
Naturally we received much more feedback/ideas/suggestions from the community, but it would take a very long time to list them all here. That said, we will update our public trello in the coming few days with everything, so be sure to bookmark it!
Finally, a point on why we held the event. This event really had two goals, give our players something fun to do / earn, and encourage the players to enter a specific location, stress test it, and then give us their honest feedback.
So other game devs, that read this, do take note! Events are a great way to get feedback from your players, all you need to do is link what you need feedback on to an actual event and then everyone becomes willing and happy testers for you, of course there are caveats to this, but for indie devs and games that are still in development (especially alpha/beta/early access) this could be something fun for you to do.
That brings us nicely to the end of this event. We’ve learnt a lot and we do have very good reason to be happy about what we’ve got so far and the quality of feedback that we received from our community.
Lastly we’d like to say, we’re already planning our next event, and of course, we’ll be using the feedback that we got to make that one even better. So be sure to try out Hash Rush today and join our Discord community to meet the team behind the game!
