Over the last few months we released the first wave of the first epic set of Town Star skins. With a charming Middle Ages feel, these Mirandus-themed skins are the perfect way to remodel your town… but there’s more!
We recently announced that once all 10 skin packs are released (as they are now), exclusive boosts for deploying them would become available in Town Star. We’re happy to say that the time has come! As today’s new weekly Town Star competition begins, all players who deploy Mirandus-themed skins will receive awesome bonuses to both speed and crafting!
Many gamers have come to think of skins as a less useful product, simply because of their tendency to be aesthetic in nature. Gamers tend to want something that will affect not only the look of their gaming, but the experience as well.
Shake off your preconceived notions of non-utility skins as we shake up the industry by adding multiple layers of value to our inaugural skin set. Rather than purchasing a value-less in-game item, you are purchasing NFT skins that you actually own. Yes, ownership means that you can sell them any time you want on the Opensea marketplace. Rather than skins that do nothing, our skins will give you real in-game bonuses just for owning and deploying them.
Don’t forget that every Mirandus-Themed Skin Pack comes with a 1/10 Dragon Voucher. Collect all 10, and you’ll get a Dragon Familiar in Mirandus to help you in your adventures.
Blockchain-backed ownership and NFTs bring a whole new world of possibilities to in-game assets, and these skins are just one example of some of those possibilities.
Details of the Boost
Players who deploy Mirandus-themed skins will receive bonuses to a) worker movement speed and b) goods production time. The bonus is based on how many different skin packs are represented.
Movement Speed Increase — 2.5% for each pack used Craft Time Reduction — 1% for each pack used
If you deploy only 1 skin from each of the 10 packs, you will still receive the maximum possible bonus of 25% faster workers and 10% faster crafting.
While we highly recommend that you buy the complete packs, it is not necessary to get the maximum bonus. Each skin can also be found on Opensea for those who wish to buy individually.
We have several exciting releases coming up, including new in-game units and new high-powered NFT drops! Keep your eyes on the Discord announcements, because there’s always great stuff happening throughout the Gala Games ecosystem. We hope you enjoy the addition of in-game utility to the inaugural set of Town Star skins. Good luck in this week’s competition!
The final pack in the epic Mirandus-Themed Town Star Skin set was just released in the Town Star store. This means several things for the Town Star community beyond the obvious that there will be a lot more Mirandus-Themed towns on the Town Star globe.
After months of waiting, players will finally know for certain that one of the Dragon Familiars in Mirandus will be theirs. The task of collecting each of the 10 Dragon Vouchers is no easy one, and we salute each of you who have accomplished it.
2. In-Game Boosts are coming soon!
As announced a few weeks ago, deploying these Town Star skins in your game will soon come with never-before-seen boosts to character movement and production speed.
You don’t even need to have the building constructed in your town to get the bonus. As long as the skin is deployed, you’ll get a 2.5% speed bonus for each pack used. That means the minimum requirement to get the full 25% bonus is to use one skin from each pack. Get ready for some speedy little townies!
Town Star’s Celebration of Wood
You may have noticed there is a lot of wood in Pack 10. Wood has always been one of the most important construction materials for humans, and we like to think that if people in the Middle Ages had been using robot helpers, those robots would have been made of wood.
As a way of bringing it all together, we’re raising the roof on the wood business in this week’s Town Star game. We’re also messing with the laws of nature (in a good way) by making all trees grow twice as fast. As you’re growing Town Star trees for profit and marveling at your new wooden Mr. Puddles skin, take a moment to be thankful for trees. Maybe even consider planting a tree or two, since they do so much for us.
All week long, wood and wood related products will fetch 5x higher prices and point values when shipped. Trees will regrow twice as fast. Jimmy is still out on vacation. Check the Town Star Discord channels to see if he’s recently made contact!
Also stay on the lookout for a shocking new Town Star release that will change the energy game.
There is a LOT more coming for the Gala Games ecosystem, so make sure to keep in touch, watch the Discord community and get ready for more interesting news! Follow Gala Games on Twitter, Facebook, and Instagram. Join at Gala.Games!
The newest Town Star NFT helper drops Thursday, August 12th!
TL;DR
Mr. Puddles drops tomorrow 8/12 @ 5pm PST in the Town Star Store
Early Access (1st 24 hours): 50% OFF!
Have you played Town Star lately? The weekly competition game of town and city builders is the flagship game from Gala Games, but it’s also a brilliantly designed challenge of strategy and competition from some of the same people who brought the world Farmville 2.
The beauty of being a blockchain gaming platform is in the freedom we can provide to gamers everywhere. The game is free to play, but players are also free to give themselves advantages by partaking in the various NFT items of the ecosystem. In Town Star alone, you can buy stands to continuously produce wheat and sugar, or you can buy a Water Tower or Fountain to provide passive water to your crops. You can earn an in-game boost to your whole town’s speed by deploying Mirandus-Themed Town Star skins. By owning helper bots such as ElfBot and SaltyBot, you can even raise the bar for labor in your town.
The newest bot to join the cast of Town Star characters is Mr. Puddles, the Waterbot. He operates similarly to the ElfBot and the SaltyBot, taking a particular interest in one resource: Water. Mr. Puddles emerges from his home as soon as there’s water to be delivered and a place to deliver it. He’ll take water to your fields, building sites, livestock ranches and industrial buildings, and he’ll do it much faster than the farmers, builders and workers on your land.
Mr. Puddles carries water faster than his uncle, Buggy Mr. Puddles.
Thousands of Buggy Mr. Puddles NFTs were recently distributed to players who experienced tech problems during the first week of the May Mayhem tournament earlier this year. Now it’s time for a new NFT sale event for the squeaky clean, shiny and new Mr. Puddles.
Thursday, August 12th at 5pm PST.
Total Supply: 15,000 Distributed to node operators: 5%
Early Access — 50% off!
The first 24 hours of the sale will be considered early access, with all Mr. Puddles NFTs available for half price. After the 24 hour early access window, the price will increase to full retail for the remaining Mr. Puddles supply.
Early access is 5pm PST August 12 to 5 pm August 13.
The lower-than expected price of Mr. Puddles may come as a pleasant surprise to many of our players who may have missed NFT opportunities in the past. After receiving and responding to customer feedback, the team felt that it was time for a more affordable Town Star NFT. Mr. Puddles provides that without sacrificing incredible usefulness and an easy in-game advantage to those who use him. He is a helpful fellow.
Remember of course that Mr. Puddles (like all our NFTs) is a player-owned asset that can be traded between players or listed on Opensea. You can get your very own Mr. Puddles for half price starting tomorrow at 5pm EST. You can even pick up more than one, ensuring that you’ll have a dedicated robot water workforce in all your future Town Star towns. Talk about a game changer! Here’s a sneak peak at the Mr. Puddles Mirandus-themed character skin, which will be included in next week’s release of Pack 10!
Be on the lookout for a hot new Town Star surprise item drop coming very soon. This one will give new meaning to the phrase “player empowerment.”
There is a LOT more coming for the Gala Games ecosystem, so make sure to keep in touch, watch the Discord community and get ready for more interesting news! Follow Gala Games on Twitter, Facebook, and Instagram. Join at Gala.Games!
We hope you’re all as excited as we are about the arrival of our new water-bearing friend, Mr. Puddles, even if he is a little bit buggy.
For those of you who have joined us more recently, Buggy Mr. Puddles is commemorative of a bug that shut down Week 1 of May Mayhem a day into the competition. Every player involved was told they would get a special “bug” NFT, and Buggy Mr. Puddles is our fulfillment of that promise.
At this point, Buggy Mr. Puddles has been distributed to some node operators and 10,684 additional player accounts. Anyone who was playing at the end of May Mayhem Week 1 should have received one in their Treasure Chests.
Mr. Puddles Coming Soon
We’re excited to announce that next week, Mr. Puddles (Buggy Mr. Puddles’ non-buggy friend) will be dropped as an NFT in the Town Star store. Mr. Puddles may be the answer to your water needs. He will be…
Faster than Buggy Mr. Puddles
Available for 50% off during the first 24 hours
One of the most affordable Town Star NFTs yet
Keep an eye on Discord for the time and date of next week’s Mr. Puddles release!
Take it away, Warren Marshall, with a quick lesson in designing a Waterbot!
Hi there! My name is Warren Marshall and I’m the Art Director for Town Star. I‘d like to offer some little insights into how we design things and how the art process works for those who are curious about game design.
In this article we’ll be talking about the newly designed and completed Waterbot unit, Mr. Puddles. This unit was interesting because it needed to have a regular version and a variant that represented it being buggy.
The initial pitch for the bot was something like: “Needs to be able to carry water from A to B.” Great! Let’s get started!
Initial Ideas
The first step in designing anything is to turn the concept artists loose on it. I give them some high level directives and ideas like “the head could maybe be a bucket”. Then we wait while the real magic happens, and after awhile we get some ideas back like these…
Nice! Now we have a starting point to begin iterating. I really like that middle design as it fits in nicely with our other bot designs with a highly functional feel. It also has a bucket for a head, which is great.
Design Iteration
I wanted to push the design a little farther with some more water based details. Why not some ridges around the sides of the head, like you see on galvanized steel buckets? Also, let’s try changing the arms into hoses with different attachments. He IS a water bot after all. Oh, and I wanted to get a little unique with his locomotion, so let’s swap out that wheel for a triangular tank tread apparatus. It’ll be cool, I promise…
Fantastic! But I kept thinking — what ELSE can we do? Adding a little spout to his head would give the implication of a baseball cap, which I thought was fun. We also solved the mystery of where the hoses are connected by giving him some metal sleeve pieces.
I still wasn’t totally excited about the overalls. Design wise they looked a little weak , and I wanted something with more character. So I thought, “he’s a water bot, why not some sort of bathing suit?” But nothing modern would do, and certainly nothing like a speedo. Inappropriate.
Remember those old photos you’ve seen of people at the beach? I know you’re already picturing them in your head. Yep, like that!
There we go, our Waterbot is all designed!
Buggy Bot
OK, so we have the functional bot. That was the easy part. But how do we convey a buggy version of that bot? We want him to be functional while clearly not firing on all cylinders — but he’s trying!
As I thought of ideas for this, my mind drifted to Futurama and the Malfunctioning Eddie character. He’s a bot, like so many others in that universe, but he’s not quite right. Perfect!
Those triangular treads look familiar, right?
I think it’s important for artists to have large mental libraries that they draw upon when designing things. These libraries can be built from many things — books, tv shows, travel, whatever! The important thing is to fill your brain with new experiences so it has that network of data to draw on when the time comes.
At any rate, back to concepting!
Concept Art — Again
The initial artist versions of the buggy bot came back as follows.
There’s our guy, looking a little worse for wear, but still in the game! I wasn’t crazy about the longer arm designs as they would cause issues with animation and general gameplay. I chose the portions I liked from the various ideas and we pieced a buggy bot together.
Another round of feedback with my usual chicken scratches. Really, we’re just refining at this point but it’s important to get the details right. When you do, the design just feels right. You know it when you see it.
Final Design
In the end, we arrived at a fun looking bot design that is functional but still has that buggy, funky vibe we were looking for. He’s perfect for commemorating that buggy day from our biggest Town Star tournament yet!
Wrapping Up
I hope you enjoyed seeing a little of the design process. I love this job as it offers lots of opportunities like this to be creative and really dig into some fun art collaboration.
It’s time for another look at some behind-the-scenes pieces of the creation and design process. There’s no better time to show of Pack 9 than on the same day of the Mirandus-Themed Skin Pack 9 release!
Bonuses are Around the Corner
As announced in THIS POST, there will soon be reliable in-game bonuses for those who deploy Mirandus-themed skins in the game. The more different packs you deploy, the greater your cumulative speed bonus will be (up to 25%)!
This in-game utility for skins will go live shortly after Pack 10 of 10 is released. Remember, every Mirandus-Themed Skin Pack also comes with a 1/10 Dragon Voucher. Collect all 10 and a Mirandus Dragon Familiar will be yours!
A Look at Pack 9
Some of your towns are taking on an authentic Middle Ages fantasy look thanks to these skins. We’re all excited about Mirandus, and playing Town Star with Mirandus-themed skins is the perfect way to tide you over while you wait.
This pack contains some of the most beloved characters of Town Star, characters like Jimmy the Neighbor Delivery guy and the Trucker, characters whose positive attitudes and determination can inspire us all.
Winery
A couple different main styles were presented by the art team for the Winery building. Art Director Warren Marshall thought the second option above was a much better choice, mainly because the first option was too similar to the previous modern version of the building. One additional request was that more barrels were added to the outside of the building, so the barrels got bigger and more plentiful.
Winemaking is an ancient trade, going back far beyond the Middle Ages. One of the most interesting things about winemaking is how little has changed about it through many generations. A winemaker is called a Vintner, and our Mirandus-Themed Vintner has an extremely authentic style. Check out the initial inspiration board created by our art team for this character.
Most art from the period depicts vintners wearing flowing robes and almost always holding a glass of wine. There were a few details needing ironed out regarding things like sleeves, footwear and the monocle. A combination of features from 2 and 4 were eventually decided upon.
Water Facility
The cone-roof concept was more popular, but the blue roof gave it a more contemporary industrial feel. It was decided to use that style of roof, but entirely made of wood. Since the main player angle is from above, special attention must always be placed on the roofs of these buildings. Typically, 4 or 5 different roofs may be submitted and considered before the proper one is found for the desired look.
There can also be large, sudden changes, like with the Water Worker below. It is important for designers and artists to be flexible, always going for what works and not necessarily just settling for what’s already done.
Warren Marshall could tell that the there was something more to be done with the Water Worker’s tool: His handtruck. It took the inspiration of seeing the wrong tool to be able to easily spot the right one.
Now THIS guy knows how to haul water!
Trade Pier
The ship and pier were fairly simple to imagine for the Mirandus theme, but there were clearly several different directions that could have been taken for the Captain. The open-chest vest of top #1 was combined with the beard look, the book was made bigger and presto! There was the medieval Trade Pier Captain.
Trade Depot
It’s hard to tell whether it’s his winning smile, the bulging arm muscles resting on the open window, the big rig or his awesome trucker hat, but the Trade Depot Trucker is one Town Star character with swagger to spare.
Rumor has it that the idea for this truck driver was originally inspired by Kurt Russel’s Jack Burton character in an awesome eighties movie called Big Trouble in Little China. We can neither confirm nor deny that rumor. You be the judge. The first step was for the artists to take a look at cart drivers and merchants of the Middle Ages.
One they had an idea of what our driver would be wearing, it was time to prepare some options.
We were starting to get a good feel for the medieval Truck Driver, but there was still a major question to ask: What was his truck? The easy choice was the amazing load-bearing ox that has been used widely by farmers and merchants for many centuries.
This was a perfect fit, but to control a beast that strong, the medieval Truck Driver needed one more tool: A riding crop. All in all, this building and unit was one of the most fun to reimagine in a fantasy Mirandus style.
Neighbor Delivery
Recognize this guy? It’s your handy little buddy, Jimmy the Neighbor Delivery guy… and a goat. Thanks to the Tractor Farmer, we now know that if you need to get around fast using Mirandus-Themed Town Star skins, you ride a goat.
This first arrangement of Jimmy’s home base was a little too unbalanced and crowded. After a slight rearrange request, the final form of the medieval Neighbor Delivery appeared.
The final Jimmy chosen was the backpack satchel mullet version…
and here is Jimmy’s fearless steed, his companion and delivery vehicle: A goat. Like Jimmy always says, “Riding a goat beats walking!”
Proof-of-Goat
Week-to-Week Rule Changes
Be on the lookout for Town Star changes on a more regular basis as the team makes adjustments almost every week. For this week’s competition, it was decided (by popular community vote) in Discord that Jimmy would take a much needed vacation. For all you collaborators, that means solo play only. Neighbor Delivery will not be available.
On Thursday, look for a new vote in the #Town_Star_Announcements channel of the Discord community, making a new choice about next week’s rule-bending adventure.
Now only one Mirandus-Themed Skin Pack remains to be released, and you can look forward to that within the next couple weeks. Remember that shortly after Pack 10 is released, the in-game bonuses to speed and production will begin for anyone deploying these skins.
On Thursday, look out for a post all about Mr. Puddles, the Waterbot, along with an announcement of a new upcoming NFT sale!
