Hi Gamers! Welcome back to another “Games From The Block” Podcast.
Today, It’s all about Hash Rush and I’m happy to discuss with Alexander Benitez, CMO of Vorto Gaming (Hash Rush) and Tenzin Chiodak, Community Manager of the popular game.
Listen to the podcast on Spotify below, iTunes, and Google Podcasts. Below you can find the written interview.
Apply for the closed testing of Hash Rush 2.0.
Vorto Gaming Taking Over Hash Rush.
Alex:
We got to know Chris and his talented team over a VZ Games, who was developing Hash Rush in 2020. We soon realized that we shared a vision regarding building a platform and a community-owned economy. We decided to merge both companies and purchased VZ games.
We’re excited about getting Hash Rush into the hands of a lot of people this summer. We’re onboarding more and more gamers as we speak.
We want to make a dent in the gaming industry and democratize how people monetize games overall.
Is this the first blockchain-based title by Vorto Gaming?
Alex:
This is our first approach when it comes to blockchain and crypto. We have a senior team in the gaming industry, both mobile and triple-A gaming publishing industry. So we know what we shouldn’t do. And we know all the struggle for monetizing players who have invested both time and money.
We want to lead with a great experience when it comes to the part of the game. The blockchain and NFT will be a layer that will enable us to let our gamers monetize and earn. I mean, earn money from it at the end of the day. So that’s super exciting in my book.
APPLY FOR HASH RUSH 2.0 TESTING
APPLYWhat kind of game is Hash Rush?
Tenzin:
At its core, Hash Rush is an RTS game. So when you say RTS game, it means real-time strategy.
Classical games for that would be like Age of Empires, or Starcraft, or Empire Earth.
So what you do, it’s done right in front of you, you set a unit, you move it, and it does it straightaway.
Two co-founders of VZ Games (merged with Vorto Gaming) are big Starcraft players. You can see quite many influences from that game in Hash Rush, but obviously in the hacker style. You like something, and you want to take inspiration from it, not copy it.
The thing with Hash Rush is that we’re aiming to make it more of a PvE-based game. We know if there will need to be some competitive PvP side eventually. Getting overly competitive right from the start is not the best idea because you want to have a community hooked on the game first.
The Development of Hash Rush 2.0
Tenzin:
There is a dev version we have been working on, and if you follow Hash Rush on social media or in the discord channel, you see that I’m sharing snapshot videos showing what the game looks like.
We think it’s that the ideas are great, but there have been some development difficulties, primarily focused on pathfinding, which has been our bugbear.
In the current game, you play on a planetoid. So it’s a full-sphere, and you can walk from one pole to the other and all-around a place. We noticed that the pathfinding we use has considerable difficulty working with elevation.
The pathfinding got very confused when considering all of the extra axes around the movements, which led to some funny situations where combat units wouldn’t fight. They would dance quite, walk towards each other, bump into each other, walk backward, and then walk around in circles.
It leads to a joke that our units don’t want to fight. They want to learn to dance instead.
We realized that our initial plan was too complex in specific zones. You start with this great plan, and you think, yes, you can do this. But then, as you get into the actual development, you start coding and realize this is much harder than you’d think to implement.
So we went to a whole redesign of the game. But the important part is that it’s still Gash Rush. So if you play the pre-alpha, the alpha, the current version, and then you play the new version, you see that this is the same game, on flat sections.
Flast Surface & New Units.
Tenzin:
Now with a flat surface. We can have flying units very easily. We’ve already planning to work on some flying sort of units.
Alex:
I’m coming back to the kind of game-centric experience. So that always needs to be justified with what the game experience at the end will be. We need to ensure that when you go into the game, it needs to be seamless, it needs to be fun, it needs to be something that you can enjoy.
So the flying units or other kinds of vehicles can potentially appear. It’s something that we can add now.
Play To Earn in Hash Rush?
Tenzin:
Quite a few of us have worked for loads of games in the past. I worked on mobile games, MMO games, browser games. I’ve seen the free-to-play markets, and while some ideas are great, I got tired of the entire pay-to-win ecosystem.
Whenever we have discussions with our game designer, one of the points that come up by the game design is “we don’t want to do this” because it makes pay-to-win environments.
We have in-game items, some others you can craft, and then there are events.
About The RUSH Coin.
Tenzin:
I gave the community some first information about the RUSH coin and how you’re going to use that in the game. For those who do not know, the RUSH coin is the token we are using for Hash Rush. It powers the game itself.
The RUSH token was offered back in 2018 through an ICO, and then we had a second ICO because we had to swap the RC to the new RUSH Coin. That was entirely for security reasons because the old contracts had some issues we were not happy with.
We have a proper store for the RUSH coin, where we can sell items. But the idea is that every single thing you buy from the store can trade with anyone. They are NFTs.
We plan to do a 60 Million supply burn of RUSH this June and we’re going to do a small community event with that as well. We’re going to have a certain amount of rush, which we say, send your RUSH to this address. And you’ll get this NFT. So once it’s finished, there’ll be no more of this NFT. And obviously, any rush that you send to the address will be burnt as well.