2025 Yearly Recap

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Crypto Shots — 2025 Yearly Recap

INDEX

 TL;DR
 2025 DEV UPDATES
   1) PvP Shooter Game
        - New Features & Improvements
        - Bug Fixes
        - Cross-Platform Plans
   2) PvE Shooter Game
   3) Chess
   4) Infrastructure & Servers
        - Improvements
        - DePin
  Other products - Crypto Shots Ecosystem
  Design
    - Deliverables
    - Eye Candy
    - Sneak Peek: graphics improvements
  Tokenomics
    - v2.0
    - Cross-Chain
    - Sustainability
  Marketing
    - Marketing Updates
    - Youtube Clips
    - Event Calendar
    - Sponsors
    - Project Pitch
  Join Us

TL;DR

Crypto Shots had a huge year of development. A massive wave of bug fixes, tweaks, and gameplay improvements was shipped across the entire PvP Shooter experience.
Four new game modes were introduced: Elimination, Covert Point, Kill Confirmed, and Gun Race, alongside better onboarding with Web2 login, a balanced life boost for struggling players, a stronger anti-cheat detection system, and the release of the PC build.

Competitive play was expanded with daily themed tournaments, a fairer Tournament Rewards System, and full match customization — letting streamers and hosts control formats like shields on/off, life recharge on/off, healthshot-only modes, and much more.
UI/UX improvements were delivered in key areas like the Lobby, Match Details, and Scoreboards — with more upgrades coming in the future.

Beyond the PvP shooter, the Crypto Shots ecosystem continued to grow: ongoing development of a new game mode for PvE, improving the NFT Marketplace (stability, security, UX), shipping updates for Crypto Chess and the Karina tipping bot, releasing automated earning reports as open-source, and making cross-chain integrations easier — with the ImmutableX integration now live. Efforts also went into infrastructure, DePIN adoption, and the adoption of agentic AI workflows to speed up development.

On the growth side, Crypto Shots represented Hive through initiatives like NFtopia, the SPS Burnathon Marathon, and a new partnership with Splinterlands and the SPS DAO to onboard players from defunct web3 games onto Hive.
Thank you to our community for the support — the next two years are going to be fire! 😎

Weekly/periodic updates:

peakd.com/@cryptoshots.nft/snaps

2024 summary post:
peakd.com/hive-190697/@cryptoshots.nft/annual-recap

Previous Years:
crypto-shots.com/development

2025 DEV UPDATES

1) PvP Shooter Game

The PvP version of the game was the main focus in 2025. The game received numerous gameplay improvements, new features, and extensive bug fixes and stability improvements.

New Features & Improvements

4 new Game Modes:
- Elimination - Full team wipe mode: when you die, you spectate until the next round (of 3).
- Covert Point - Teams fight to capture and control points on the map.
- Kill Confirmed - Kills only count if you capture the player's tag after the kill.
- Gun Race - Get a new weapon after each kill, and win by getting a kill with the final weapon.

Fully Customizable Matches
- Headshots-only mode
- “No Healing” mode (no medkits, no regen, no healing items)
- Shields on/off
- Locator Devices on/off
- Single weapon/loadout format

Room creation improvements (for streamers / tournament host)
- Better defaults and auto-toggle behavior
- Custom match remembers the last used settings
- Start Match button with random settings

Daily Custom Tournaments
- Monday - legacy loadout only, Tuesday - modern loadout only, Wednesday - single weapon only, Thursday - headshots only.

Life boost
- Struggling players in tournaments get a temporary life boost based on their performance

Tournament Reward System Improvements
- Better sorting of players' results (based on multiple factors)
- Better tie-break rules:
  - “Most Kills” now uses average KDR for ties
  - “Most Wins” now uses win percentage for ties
- Added support for distribution of pack tokens (e.g., WOO’s packs)

Anti-cheat system
- Detection for speed hacks, wall hacks, injections, and more
- Better auto-report and forced shutdown when hacks are detected

Improved UI
- Upgraded: Lobby UI, Match Summary, Scoreboards, ..
- New room info UI (ESC button during matches)
- Settings improvements (including toggles for kill streak sounds/animations)
- Match info pop-up on first spawn
- Tournament name; next Tournament info.

Web2 Login
- Player stats persisted in a database
- Match History
- Referral Codes

Misc
- Damage Indicators
- Name Tags Improvements (teammate, enemy, deceased)
- Crouch + prone ability
- Locator Device / Alien Rays
- Grenades trigger mechanism improved
- Knife tuning
- Intermittently activated teleports
- Win logic improved for various game modes
- Shield improvements
  - Spawn Shield (red), Pickable Shields (yellow)
  - New shield settings

Bug Fixes

This year we shipped a huge amount of bug fixes across gameplay, game modes, UI, and matchmaking.

Health bugs
- Rare immortality bug
- Life recharge stuck
- Minor damage not recorded when HP was full

Game Modes fixes
- CTF Bugs
  - Dropped/stuck/invisible flag issues fixed
- Elimination match timing and score issues
- FFA and Gun Race win logic bug fixes

Team and score fixes
- Friendly fire kills now counted correctly
- Team auto-balancing improvements
- Late joiners joining the wrong team fixed

Shield bugs
- Red shield sometimes not appearing
- Yellow shield timing issues fixed
- On-demand shield bugs

Weapon and kill attribution fixes
- Molotov kill owner fixed
- Theta lava kill attribution fixed
- Explosion damage fixes
- Frozen rays damage improved
- Supernova projectile and sound fixes

Crash and stability fixes
- Random freezes on joining rooms fixed
- Frozen create room screen fixed
- Better reconnect logic when automatch fails
- Many defensive code and error handling improvements

UI bugs
- Match scoreboard fixes
- Menu auto-close on death
- Room list issues
- Loadout / Single Weapon UI logic

Cross-Platform Plans

Web: LIVE on all browsers supporting WebGPU technology

PC build - LIVE
- Alpha Release
- PC-only customizations
- Improved defaults settings
- Improved tournament tracking

Coming Soon (2026/2027):

iOS/Android
Game Stores
?

2) PvE Shooter Game

PvE was not the primary focus this year, but some development occurred in the background.

PvE Improvements

Time Survival Game Mode
- Lootboxes respawning logic
- Gas zones (with UI)

3) Chess

Features & Improvements

New board + chess pieces design
- Full update of visuals (sci-fi)

Move indicators
- Preview of available moves
- Highlight of opponent’s origin square
- Visual improvements to last move display

Mobile support improved
- e.g., can tap on pieces instead of dragging them
- Bug fixes

Full-screen mode
- Full-screen button added (and fixed)

4) Infrastructure / Servers

A lot of work went into making the Crypto Shots ecosystem more stable, faster, cheaper, and easier to maintain and scale.

Improvements

Node rotation + health checks (Hive + Hive Engine + Wax - game and marketplace)
- Reduced NFT loading issues caused by relying on a single node

Web portal build process improved
- Huge improvement: site deployment size reduced from 550MB to 29MB
- Much faster uploads and releases (CI/CD)
- Improved load times, performance, security

Version management improvements
- Automatic cache cleaning during updates
- Automatic issue detection during updates, and automatic cleanup

Security fixes

Ops / Maintenance / DePin

Server maintenance work
Witness node maintenance work
Hive witness experiments using DePIN and container tests
- Flux (DePin) PoC:
  - Wrote a decentralized instance controller leveraging the Hive chain
  - Tested on AWS EC2 large instances
  - Solved Hived compatibility issue

Other products - Crypto Shots Ecosystem

NFT Marketplace
- Stability, Security, minor UI tweaks
- Tweaks to our image server to allow listing on the new "Hive NFTs" marketplace

Karina tipping bot
- Ability to list secondary tokens
  in Discord servers

Swap Bridge
- Wax/Hive bridge maintenance
- v2.0 rewrite in progress

OSS Contributions
- https://github.com/Crypto-Shots
- Hive Rewards - Automated Earning Reports

Others:
- Agentic AI adoption for development

Undisclosed:
- AIL
- W2B

Design

Deliverables

Health Shot

Map Improvements and New Map Design

Life Crystal improvements

Others:

Project website update
Animations for PvE
_{(e.g., https://x.com/i/status/1881272400991429114)}

EYE CANDY

SNEAK PEEK: Graphics Improvement

Tokenomics

The DOOM token is getting rebranded into BOOM. Once the migration is complete land owners will receive missing distributions.
The DOOM pool on Hive is currently under maintenance as we upgrade our tokenomics and create a new (bigger) pool for BOOM.

ETA for Tokenomics 2.0 completeness: 2027

CROSS-CHAIN

Integrating new chains is now significantly easier, thanks to the maturity of our system and the use of AI agents to streamline the process.

MEANING: Thanks to the swap bridge that I'm rewriting using a better cross-chain approach (WASPS), users from any chain will be able to play and claim rewards seamlessly in any token they want, including Bitcoin.

SUSTAINABILITY

Currently, the players' rewards are derived from $ 20,000 in staking and various sponsorships. The pool will expand futher over time thanks to various pool refill mechanisms under development.

PLAN: more users attracted by balanced rewards -> more players competition and fun -> monetization and sustainability

Marketing

Marketing was selective in 2025 because development was the priority - but we still delivered key events and partnerships.

Marketing Updates

AMA and booth at NFTopia

SPS Burnathon Event
- Crypto Shots took part in the SPS Burnathon event by sponsoring the stream and supporting the Splinterlands community.

Crypto Shots joined the Web3 Gaming Recovery Fund
- Partnership with Splinterlands and the SPS DAO, to help bring more gamers to the Hive ecosystem.

https://x.com/cryptoshots_nft/status/1987404177094418543?s=20

Other Initiatives
- Discussions with sponsors around a quarterly self-organized tournament/event (we dropped Mazer)
- Planning/design of onboarding features