Hydro Development Updates 01 Dec 2022
Hey Hydrofam!
It’s been quite the chaotic month lately with some of the worst crises the blockchain industry has yet to see. With the collapse of the behemoth that was FTX & Alameda research, and the utter chaos that ensued in the ecosystems they were invested in. Our hearts go out to anyone that was affected by the irresponsible and borderline criminal actions which have left the crypto industry devastated.
In times like these it is important to remember the fundamental basics of blockchain and rejoice in its decentralised nature as it leaves no room for nothing but the truth.
We at Project Hydro, hereby renew our commitment to building decentralised products, where the users of those products — always and without exception — will hold control over their own keys where on chain data is law.
With all the turmoil and doubt that has been floating around, we deemed it absolutely necessary to make our stance absolutely clear in that matter.
Now let’s talk a little bit about the SEC situation with Hydrogen. There isn’t that much we can comment on to be quite frank — we have no association with Hydrogen but after analysing the documents that SEC has released there are certain conclusions that we can draw.
This has absolutely no effect on Project Hydro in the long run. Project Hydro is decentralised in its nature and Hydro Tokens are utility tokens used within its ecosystem. Anyone can build on top of Hydro and use the Hydro Tokens for its utility.
Hydrogen was but a developer building on top of its protocols that is now facing the SEC for actions they have taken and the outcome of that will have to stand for Hydrogen and Hydrogen alone.
So there we have it, now let’s move on to what has been going on within Project Hydro lately.
First let’s briefly talk a little bit about the make over and new website that is on the way for Project Hydro. 2023 looms around the corner, and with all of the negativity we have been through during 2022 with all of the blackswan events, wars and a recession looming we wanted to give the community a small surprise to lighten the mood and bring some colours back to Hydro. We also wanted to take the opportunity to revise our roadmap and FAQ to match all of the recent updates.
So the community can expect the new website to go live in December as it is being custom built using Svelte which will be a significant upgrade to our current WordPress site.
Moving forward towards our flagship — the Keresverse where we have a lot to go through since a lot has happened since the last update.
We have conducted Alpha tests within our community now for several weeks, after feedback passing back and forth and new builds being produced on a weekly basis for alpha testers to test. After much feedback and honing, we have now begun a full overhaul to optimise our codebase in preparation for the Beta stage. This will improve the overall gameplay experience in terms of both graphics and frame rates, add a fully capable AI for the bots in practice modes, overhaul the settings menus while implementing an array of new functionality for the menu system. Multiplayer mode will also receive a significant upgrade which will allow it to work as intended.
These updates will be faced out in two major updates of Keresverse, the first one is scheduled to be released 1st of December and will feature all of the quality enhancements to the Keresverse. The second update is scheduled to go live on December 25th and will feature the whole multiplayer upgrade.
Once these two releases have been deployed and tested by the Alpha Squad, we will evaluate if it’s time to release this as the first Public Beta to gain a wider spectrum of feedback.
Moving on to the Keresverse Website, which will house most of the heavier tokenomics functions of Keresverse such as the Marketplace, all of the staking contracts etc.
Our lead dev Briws has made great progress during the last few months and we are happy to say that it’s shaping up and drawing nearer to its Alpha stage.
We are right now in the process of planning for its Alpha release which will also include the deployments of the first arches of the Keresian Diamond on testnet to connect everything to the frontend so that the Alpha squad can begin the initial testing before we release it publicly to the community.
Now let’s talk about our character line up, which is now close to being fully completed. Let us introduce four new agents to our lineup: Weda, Alta, Ira and Nuria!
And now we will explore the agents in depth.
Weda
Abilities:
Dash — fast movement allowing for quick peaks and escape.
Trip concussion mines — cast a tripwire mine that explodes causing damage and concussion when an enemy crosses the tripwire while alerting Weda of their position.
Grenade Launcher — Agent draws out a grenade launcher with 5 grenades that explode within 2 sec from when they are shot.
Weda has a tragic and dark backstory, which has moulded her into a fearsome mercenary.
Lore:
“Discarded, forgotten. From an early age — Weda remembers nothing but vile transgression against both her body and mind. Weda was left at an overpopulated orphanage where the children were mostly left to fend for themselves in the light of the corruption the warden practised.
The warden held clandestine fighting rings where he pitted children against each other with the promise of a better future to the winner. Needless to say, this brutal practice led to many horrible fates as hundreds of children were killed in those rings. Weda was a survivor of one such match, where she had killed a larger boy by gauging his eyes out and with her nails when he tried to strangle her. She then ripped his throat out with her teeth.
The promise of a better future was false, the warden proceeded to drug and rape her for weeks — until she was but a shell of her former self or so the warden thought. He began to place trust in her. One day she slit his throat in his sleep with a scissor and ran, vowing to herself to purge her emotions from her mind, to never feel neither fear, anger nor love again. Weda is nothing but a stone cold killer, forged in the misery of her youth.”
Alta
Abilities:
Automated turret — Place an automated turret with 100hp that fires on enemies in sight until it is destroyed.
Molotov Cocktail — Throw an incendiary grenade that detonates as it hits the floor, creating a lingering fire zone that damages players within the zone.
RPG Madness — Alta draws out an RPG with 2 shots that are extremely powerful.
Alta acts first and never asks any questions later, pray you never find yourself on his target list.
Lore:
“Alta Used to be a Slave toiling for a Mining Company manually mining ore down in the depths of a unnamed planetary moon.
After getting into a fight with some other miners which resulted in their death, Alta had to flee. On the run, Alta met Weda who brought him in and taught him how to be a mercenary while installing his cybernetic augments. However his right shoulder still has a Barcode tattoo from his mining days, he keeps it there to remind him of his past life.”
Ira
Abilities:
Protective Healing Orb — Encapsulate a team member for 3 sec in a healing orb that heals 50 HP while also stopping enemy fire while
Armour Regeneration — Ira calls upon surrounding elements to fully regenerate a team member’s Armour.
Healing Fountain — Establish a healing fountain that can heal multiple Team mates with a maximum of 50 hp for 10 seconds.
Ira draws upon the forces of nature and the elemental forces that surround us and bends them to her benevolent will. Ira might be kind but she is a force of nature.
Lore:
“Ira is a pure creation of nature born without parents from the fruits of an ancient tree deep within the boreal forests of the Taiga.
She blossoms with her faith in the fauna that surrounds her — from the depths of the lakes to the height of the mountains each notion of her surroundings is an empowering flame within her.
After roaming the boreal forests through many seasons, growing wise with her age, she sought the stars to pursue her ancestry.
This led her closer and closer to what wretched civilisation that remained on the outskirts of Davborir — a small settlement that remained of the fallen Russian empire.
In Davborir, Ira came to know the depths of human depravity through unspeakable sights and horrors which brought terror, fear and insanity to her mind. Ira lost the touches of nature in her psychotic state and was captured to work as a slave for one of the local crime lords.
Countless weeks turned into months and Ira slipped yet further into her psychosis until one day when the doors of the crime lord’s castle sprang open — and there she was.
Her brilliance shined through the misery, Her name was Serah.
Once their eyes met, everything just fell into place and the rest is history.
Ira and Serah remain inseparable to this day.”
Nuria
Abilities:
Fire Wall — a protective wall made out of fire that can curve around angles and stand for 30 secs.
Fire Vortex — A vortex of fire that draws opponents to the centre of it while drawing a small amount of health simultaneously for approx 5–10 sec.
Fire Rain — Raining orbs of burning gasoline from the sky around a certain area that Nuria defines through a gadget on her wrist when activating the ultimate.
Lore:
“Nuria comes from a district in what once was Portugal named Aglogata which is densely populated with wexterite refineries and enrichment facilities for nuclear ores.
It also houses a significant portion of its human work force in metallic pylons reaching for the skies. These pylons are hermetically sealed from the outside environment and supplied with oxygen so that the management can subjugate their population at will by simply turning off oxygen in parts of or entire pylons resulting in scores of life withering away.
Aglogata is the property of a wealthy industrial family, Narvaxun, that made its fortune spanning the multiple keresian conquests by supplying the keresian overlords with valuable resources to aid their enslavement of the human population.
Within this industrial misery, Nuria grew to resent the strict order the Narvaxuns practised over its subjugates. She sought to escape reality through designer drugs and technical implants to access other realities, in one of these realities, she met a doctor, doctor Vox. He promised to empower her and give her life purpose in what seemed a meaningless abyss. So she gave in, and allowed him to corrupt her into a being that could wield fire and see beyond to practise her power.”
With the addition of these 4 new Agents and their skillset — the Keresverse default agent lineup is nearing its completion with just one agent still being crafted.
We believe this wide range of skill sets in the agent’s abilities will give a well rounded and yet interesting meta that will cater to a wide range of play styles and tastes.
Now it’s time to talk briefly about our new Map in the making, The Wexterite Cave!
The second map of Keresverse is set to take place within a Wexterite Cave.
What is a Wexterite you might ask? Well, the Wexterite cave is an artificially enhanced cave that has been configured to produce sentient wexterite — A certain type of Crystal that the Keres use for many different purposes. Wexterite can be crafted into Wextrizig through a demanding process known in human tongue as stone scorching.
The Wexterite Cave is therefore set to showcase some of the fundamental sciences behind the keresian empire — with its beautiful design, verticality and multiple routes to the main bombsites — we believe the Wexterite cave will make a fine addition to the Keresverse and tie some of its lore into the actual gameplay which we are very excited about.
Currently, the Wexterite cave is about 30–40% done so the community will still have to wait before they can wander its vast halls but the aim is to release it in the beginning of next year but here is a small sneak peak of what the Wexterite Cave will look like.
So as you can probably guess by now, we are extremely excited for all of these developments within the Keresverse and we are working non stop to bring all of this to our community as soon as possible. We have seen a recent influx of Hydro to the HydroSwap that has been locked in stakes in order to farm Keres Vouchers which motivates us to work even harder to birth Keresverse into this world.
Speaking of the HydroSwap and the Aegir Wallet — i bet you would like to hear some updates on that front to right?
Let’s start with the Hydroswap, where the main focus of our devs right now is to first and foremost comply with the new style guide and branding of Project Hydro 2023. The developers in charge of the Hydroswap are working on an internal roadmap for 2023 so the community can expect some new features to go live during 2023 but the details of those features will be saved for an upcoming developmental update.
Onwards to the AegirWallet, which is basically in the same phase — it’s getting a full makeover to comply with the new style guide and branding of Project Hydro 2023 which is the first priority. The developers in charge of the AegirWallet are also working on an internal roadmap for 2023 as the AegirWallet is scheduled to receive a few pretty heavy upgrades during 2023 in order to basically become THE wallet to use in conjunction with the Keresverse.
To give you an idea of what to expect, the NFT functionalities of Aegir Wallet will be getting a new feature set that will allow the Aegir Wallet to display Keresverse NFTs in unique ways.
Lets round off this Development update with a short statement from our Vice President — Carl Ulvinen:
“2022 has been quite the year for Project Hydro — we have had significant hardships to push through but as always we have kept our heads down and continued building relentlessly in our research and pursuit of the Keresverse.
Even though things have been quite frankly excruciating at times, our resolve and commitment to Web3 is stronger than ever before as we head into 2023 and beyond”
And with that, we have reached the end of this development update.
We here at Project Hydro would like to wish everyone the happiest and loveliest of holidays, spent in peace with family and friends, and we would like to wish everyone a fantastic new year.
