Published: 23 August 2022
Town Star is a competitive farming game from one of the co-founders of Zynga, the company behind Farmville. Town Star is browser-based and developed by Gala Games. The goal is to build the most efficient and productive town. The top players on the Free-2-Play leaderboard will win prizes every week. On the Play-2-Earn server, NFT holders will complete daily challenges to unlock rewards in TOWN tokens.
Gala Games does not create Road Maps. This leaves the door open for adaptation during development. I’ve pieced together this unofficial Road Map based on public information:
2020
3Q-4Q: Alpha version, Town Star Watchdog Software (anticheat).
2021
1Q-2Q: Beta version, May Mayhem (CZK 20,000,000 in rewards).
3Q-4Q: Launch of the TOWN token and Play-2-Earn NFTs. Launch of GALA Power. Beta version of Town Star Nodes (IPFS), 600 units sold, cooperation with a team of economists to fix the tokenomics.
2022
1Q: Public development server to find bugs, introduction of TOWN Power, launch of dynamic difficulty on Play-2-Earn servers.
2Q: Burning unsold NFTs, selling of Play-2-Earn NFTs from Season 1 stopped, launching TOWN Points and introducing the TOWN token recovery plan. May Mayhem (CZK 40,000,000 in rewards), start of sales and release of utility NFTs without Play-2-Earn.
Building a town starts with choosing a position on the world map. Ideally, your town would be located near the capital and also near some water. The point of the game is to produce and then sell products. Selling products takes time, and the further you are from the capital, the longer it will take. Fuel costs will also increase. Ideally, you spend one gasoline unit to sell the goods you manage to produce. You need to be economical with fuel, as it takes a lot of time and a lot of products sold before you can make your own gasoline.
After choosing a location, you start in the territory you have chosen (fields, mountains, ice plains). Now it’s up to you which direction you take. You can keep animals, grow crops and make products from them, or set up and run an industry. The “simple” goal is to start producing more valuable products.
Production stops the moment you:
1) close your browser.
2) switch to another browser tab.
3) enter full screen mode, e.g. to watch a video.
In the game you have the option to activate autosell, which is necessary for both competitions and the Play-2-Earn game. When playing, you only see your own game field. You can’t see your neighbors’ and you can’t communicate with them yet.
The game sessions regularly restart after the competition period. This means seven days for the competition servers and one month for the Play-2-Earn servers.
You will need to register with Gala Games before the game starts. You will also automatically receive an ETH wallet. You can export your private key in the settings and link it to your MetaMask wallet.
As soon as you start playing, you need to think ahead about producing gasoline. After reaching this checkpoint, your town becomes self-sufficient and you can continue to play for fun, either as Play-2-Earn or to compete with other players for ranking positions.
With Free-2-Play there are several game servers to choose from. In Play-2-Earn mode, a minimum of 20 hours per month is required to reach the maximum rewards from your NFTs. However, you will need to complete daily challenges, and then click on the “claim rewards” button. When using the autosell script, you only need to have the game running in the background to complete the daily challenges. The goal is to build an efficient enough town to complete the daily challenges more easily. Each day increases the number of stars that must be earned to be eligible for Play-2-Earn rewards. However, the daily challenges will change in the future. The rewards will be more about more active play.
TOWN token was launched in 3Q 2021 and has since experienced tremendous inflationary pressure. Since 1Q 2022, Gala Games has been working with a team of economists to correct the tokenomics.
The total token supply will be one billion. In May 2022, 27% of the funds were already mined by players. The token is so far only on the ETH network. Over 90% of the volume is traded on the OKX exchange and Uniswap. TOWN has not had a presale or private sale. The team reaps the rewards of tokenomics by holding Play-2-Earn NFTs and running Nodes.
Tokens can only be created in two ways:
1) By Play-2-Earn reward.
2) By a reward from both founder and game Nodes.
The more players play Town Star, the more rewards the Nodes receive. In May, it was approximately 2.5 TOWN for founder Nodes and 23 TOWN for game Nodes.
All rewards are credited to the treasure chest in your game account. This chest will eventually be kept as a wallet on the Gala blockchain. For now, however, an ETH fee must be paid for minting from the chest in order to manage rewards on the ETH network.
Free-2-Play rewards are always credited to game accounts after the end of a competition week.
Play-2-Earn rewards are credited on a daily basis. All the values mentioned in the Google Sheets refer to the value of Town Points you can get for completing daily challenges. These points are then credited to your game account overnight in the form of $TOWN based on the current token payout rate. This was 58-60% of Town Points in May 2022.
The unofficial Town Star NFT earnings can be found using this link.
In this document, the earnings values are still kept in $TOWN, now this value applies to TOWN Points.
Play-2-Earn in Gala Games is also affected by the GALA Power limit. One GALA Power is required to earn a reward from each Play-2-Earn NFT. One GALA is enough for the first level. Subsequent levels are five thousand tokens each. So if I have 10 NFTs, ideally I should have 10 GALA Power = 45,000 GALA tokens. In 2Q 2022, the effect of TOWN tokens on GALA Power has been slowly decreasing. They originally gave power as two GALA.
This concept has been changing slowly and in the coming months the TOWN effect will gradually disappear and will be replaced by TOWN Power. This will create a limit of tokens in the wallet that will need to be held to get $TOWN from Play-2-Earn. I have attached a sample calculator showing that I will need to hold 2,703 TOWN along with 5 GALA Power in order to run five Play-2-Earn NFTs with earnings of 200 TOWN Points.
The team members are undisclosed. However, after a bit of effort, I tracked down information on T. Elliot Cannon, who is the head of development for Town Star.
In the past he has been the developer, writer and lead of AAA games such as Unreal, Unreal Tournament, Crysis, Crysis Warhead, Dungeon Defenders 2, DOOM and many more.
Elliot is a veteran with 27 years of experience in the gaming industry. He has designed and developed several game titles, of which several million copies have been sold. He is one of the original developers at Epic Games. He has since led teams in several different countries. He has also worked for the US Department of Defense developing VR training.
Source: https://www.telliotcannon.com , https://www.linkedin.com/in/telliotcannon/
You can communicate with Michelle on Discord (Discord name: pharmermichelle). She is in charge of Discord communication between the community and the Town Star team.
“Since May 2022, Play-2-Earn NFTs have no longer been sold on the official store. So Town Star will not be releasing new Play-2-Earn NFTs for a while. The first utility NFTs without a Play-2-Earn effect (not counting skins) have started to be sold. This is definitely the right move to create demand, since all purchases are made in TOWN tokens. However, without a token burning mechanism we can’t talk about visible demand in the market. This mechanism will only come after the launch of their blockchain. This was originally supposed to be in 1Q 2022, however, current information is that it should be by the end of 4Q.
I’ve seen a lot of Town Star sales since March 2021. All mostly successful, including sales of hundreds of game Nodes.
The game has been in beta for over a year and I don’t expect any major changes until their blockchain is released. They started talking about the second season of Town Star in 3Q 2021, but high fees on the ETH network made that transition impossible.
Town Star has a number of YouTube streamers and supporters, which is a good thing. This game takes a while to learn, as the official tutorials are extremely long. This can discourage newcomers or make their onboarding to the game difficult. The game is very popular in Asia.
I believe that the team’s experience and development money will ensure that the problems will be overcome and the game will reach a solid level, coupled with a sustainable in-game economy.”
Discussion No Comments