Hi all,
Mark here again with a brief look at a small part of the Hash Rush game design. What’s more, to go with this look, I’ll be active in the Hash Rush Discord server on Thursday at 19:00 to host an AMA regarding the topics that I’ve covered here.
So, read on to discover more about Hash Rush, how certain features are currently designed and I hope that you will be able to give me your feedback and ask questions about them.
I hope this will keep the AMA focused, allowing you to get the answers you want, and let me hear your early thoughts and feedback on the designs.
Accelerated Play
The game is going to have a lot of depth, because of this, players who have a lot of time will make more progress than those who don’t. To try to ensure that even those with limited amounts of playtime can make good progress we will have the concept of “Accelerated Playtime”
While you are inside this accelerated playtime period, you will progress faster. After that, you will progress at the usual rates.
Why do we have this? Well, we don’t want to have an energy-based system or other hard barriers to play, if you want Hash Rush to be your game that you play constantly, you can do that! However, most players won’t be able to do that, and we want the whole community to progress, rather than a few with lots of time.
How are we going to do this? — There will be a few different systems but the main one will be a series of weekly missions. These Missions will require you to play all areas of the game but will give large rewards on completion.
Hero Trading
Now, I know a lot of you have been asking about this one and I’ll be honest, we did not have a good initial solution and didn’t want to tell you things that might change later.
Now that we’ve had some time to dig into it, here’s how it’s going to work:
- Heroes will have levels, initially, the max level will be 40 but this will increase over time.
- Every 10 levels, there is a milestone. To bypass the milestone, the Hero must be upgraded with various items from the game.
- These milestones control all the upgrades a Hero can receive.
- The higher levels require materials from the higher difficulties of the game.
- A Hero can be traded at level 1 or at any of these milestones i.e: at 10,20,30 or 40 as long as they are fully upgraded for that milestone.
The reason for this is so when you search for a Hero, you know exactly what you’re going to get. Without this, every time you search for a Hero, you would have to consider its level as well as all the upgrades which would make pricing it and understanding its value very complicated.
Now, when you go to sell a Hero, you’re pricing it against every other Player with a Hero at the same progress point.
Ultimate Abilities
Currently, Heroes only have 2 abilities, we are considering adding a 3rd, ultimate ability.
The current abilities have relatively short cooldowns and should be able to be used in every fight, usually more than once.
Ultimate abilities, as they are currently designed, would have very long cooldowns such that you might only be able to use them a few times in a whole match. They would, however, be considerably more powerful and could help turn the tide of a losing battle.
Progress Requires High Difficulties
There are several areas of the game that can be progressed, currently, we’ve told you about Equipment and Heroes. Each of these areas can be progressed multiple times and each time will require different materials or items.
The highest levels of progression will require materials that can only be obtained from the hardest difficulty of the game.
This means that if you don’t do the hardest difficulties, you’ll have to trade for the other Materials or Items if you want to progress your Heroes or Equipment to the highest levels.
Keyboard Hotkeys
Initially, our design for hotkeys included using WASD for controlling the camera. However, by doing that, we significantly reduced the number of buttons that were available for typical RTS controls, the most noticeable being attack move with the A button.
One of the main design goals we have is to make everything accessible, so that means things like only using the left side of the keyboard for hotkeys so you don’t have to look down at your keyboard to find the P key for patrol or the H key to move back to your Bastion.
As such, our current plan is for the default hotkey layout to NOT include WASD to control the camera and instead rely on other camera movement options such as the usual mouse movements, double pressing a control group to move to it and space bar to move to the most recent notification.
Thank you for reading all of that, I tried to keep things brief for the sake of this post. Please post all your questions in the AMA questions and feedback in the AMA channel over in the Hash Rush Discord Server, and I look forward to seeing you all in the AMA.
