It was a glorious playtest, adventurers! The rolling hills were alive with exemplars crafting, hunting and exploring this great land!
The test was fun, but brutal. Wolves were waiting to devour unwitting exemplars who got too focused on chasing the golden rabbit… but that’s how it goes in Mirandus. This land is as dangerous as it is enchanting.
Adventure carefully. Keep your wits about you and Mirandus will lead you to the prosperity it offers!
So Much Fun. So Much Death
937 brave adventurers took part in this playtest over the course of four days. Each and every one of you will receive “A Terrifying Sight” – an all-new commemorative NFT unique to this playtest.
Players crafted a total of 403k items during the event… Including 347k arrows, many of which could be seen stuck in various objects around the zone.
Players died a total of 5696 times ☠️, with four exceptionally squishy players dying over 100 times each!
104 players successfully looted the golden rabbit. Each of these victorious adventurers will receive the exclusive “The Covenant of the Wild” commemorative NFT.
All participants will receive their commemorative NFTs before the end of September.
The Future of Mirandus
The future of Mirandus is nothing but potential, and this is but an early foreword to the much greater story coming.
Development continues to race ahead, and in our next playtest we’ll have more than ever before to show off to players taking their first steps in this mysterious land.
Expect to hear more updates before too long, and don’t let the adventure stray too far from your mind – soon it will be time once again to sail to the shores of Mirandus together.
The Walking Dead: Empires is a survival MMO game set in the thrilling and dangerous world of AMC’s The Walking Dead. Players can download and play the game for free on PC or Mac through Gala Games, then take on walkers and hostile survivors alike in an open-world strategic challenge for survival.
If you haven’t played The Walking Dead: Empires yet, follow this simple guide from the development team. It will take you through essentials like crafting, shelter, leveling and food gathering, as well as the added advantages of NFT item ownership.
To fully experience The Walking Dead: Empires, follow these key steps:
1. Hero Selection
Once you’ve installed the game, choose a hero. You’ll find beloved characters from the show, along with some new game-exclusive heroes you haven’t met yet! The variety of characters’ weapons and skill sets provides for unique gameplay experiences with every character you have available.
2. Early Game
Start your journey in an apocalyptic world crawling with walkers and all sorts of other dangers. Your primary objective is to gather materials, then use them for crafting to survive the challenges and enemies you encounter.
Tool and Weapon Crafting: Use the materials you’ve gathered to create tools and weapons. Crafting enhances your hero’s abilities and opens up a progression to higher-quality items. This is crucial for facing the increasingly difficult threats of the wasteland.
Shelter Construction: Collect resources like wood and metal to build and upgrade your shelter. A higher-level HQ offers stronger defenses, additional crafting stations, and improved facilities that provide key advantages.
Build HQ
Food Gathering and Preparations: Search and hunt for food to keep your hero in good condition. As you improve your culinary skills, you can craft meals that boost your hero’s recovery, which is vital for surviving tough battles.
NFTs: Owning and activating NFTs offers significant advantages that can enhance your gameplay experience. Player-owned items may include unique heroes, advanced crafting stations that allow you to create higher-quality tools, weapons, and other items. However, it is important to note that players who do not own NFTs can still enjoy the same gameplay experience. The core gameplay experience—focused on survival, combat, and shelter building—is accessible and equal for all players.
3. Leveling Up and Masteries:
Hero leveling: As you complete missions or explore the world while eliminating walkers, your hero gains experience (XP). Once you have enough XP, your character will level up. With each level, new skills and upgrades are unlocked, increasing your combat effectiveness and survival capabilities. Each level-up comes with specific requirements or conditions:
Mission and Exploration: Actively participating in missions and exploring new areas is key to earning XP. The more you engage in these activities, the faster you will level up.
Elimination of Walkers: Defeating enemies is also an important source of XP. Each enemy defeated contributes to your progress toward the next level.
Resource Gathering: While not directly related to leveling up, resource gathering is essential for keeping your character in good condition, allowing you to continue facing missions and battles.
HQ leveling: Upgrading your HQ is essential, as it directly affects your survival capabilities and shelter efficiency. A higher-level HQ unlocks more advanced interior structures, crafting stations, and stronger defensive structures, giving you a significant advantage against walkers. To level up your HQ, you need to collect specific resources such as wood and other valuable materials. The amount and type of resources required will increase with each upgrade level.
A higher-level HQ also improves the defense of your shelter, making your survival more sustainable. Additionally, as you progress in the game, walker herds become stronger and more numerous. A high-level HQ is crucial for withstanding attacks from these herds, protecting your hero and defending your resources.
Masteries: Specializations in different skill disciplines are known as masteries. By mastering a particular skill, you can craft high quality weapons, tools, and equipment that provide an edge in combat, exploration and defense. For example, tool crafting mastery can be leveled up by simply crafting more tools.
4. Gameplay Choices: Cooperative or Solo
The Walking Dead: Empires allows you to decide how to face this horrific new world. While you can choose to play solo, relying on your own skills alone to survive, there comes a point in the game where joining an alliance becomes almost essential. As you level up your HQ to higher levels, the herds of enemies attacking your base will become increasingly challenging, defending it alone nearly impossible. Working with other players in an alliance lets you share resources, overcome tough challenges, and effectively protect your base. This cooperative approach is key to surviving and thriving in the world of The Walking Dead.
Screenshots from game
Inventory: The snapshot shows the moment when the player collects supplies from an abandoned military truck and stores them in their inventory.Combat 1 and 2: Combat between the players and herds of walkers.Police station interior: Player inside the building in combat against mid-level enemies.Collect resources: Player using a crafted weapon to cut down a tree and collect wood.
Happy Monday, builders! Who’s ready for an exciting new Common Ground World competition?
This week’s competition begins at 10am PT tomorrow, Tuesday September 10th and ends on Friday, September 13th. Yep, that means you’ve got three days to build the best possible town with the meta details listed below and get the highest leaderboard spot you can reach! Finish high enough and you’ll be in the winnings for some $GALA!!
If you’ve never played Common Ground World before, don’t fret! There’s nothing to be lost and competition is fun even for first timers. But there are two other gameplay modes to enjoy: Common Ground and Casual mode.
Join us this Friday for a new live Common Ground World Town Hall event on Gala Games’ Youtube channel. If you haven’t watched the last episode yet from August 30th, check out the replay now.
Town Halls are a fantastic way to stay informed about the latest goings on around town!
This Week’s Competition🍄
Time to dig deep and fungify your farms! Harvest mushrooms and bake up some delicious Mushroom Pizza to get a pizza the action! 🍕🍄
Fungi Feast
Goal: Sell Mushroom Pizza Trade Time: 20s and 1 Gasoline Biome: Plains S Edges: Ocean N, River E, Plains S, Plains W
New Mushroom-related Crops/Crafts
Mushroom Farm
Specializes in cultivating mushrooms that flourish in low light, growing faster in the shade.
This Rare NFT delivers 1 passive Mushroom to nearby tiles, making it a must-have for any serious chef! Boost your Mushroom Pizza production or prep for the Risotto recipe update coming mid-October. Keep your farm thriving with fresh fungi!
“Stand” NFTs like this one are essentially a magical source of their specialty resource, saving the player valuable time and energy when properly placed on the playing field.
We hope y’all enjoy this week’s competition! Make sure you tune into Friday morning’s Town Hall for all the latest news and updates from Common Ground World!
Why not get away and catch some rays this September? We’re going to work on our tan… but not at the beach!
No, this time we’re headed for adventure! Pack your bedroll and plenty of water, because you’re heading to where summer lingers long and is as hot as it comes – the desert!
VOX Land Rebate Sale
This beautiful slice of dunefront property could easily be yours in our rare land sale starting today! This sale won’t leave you high and dry though – you’ll get the full value of what you spend back in $GALA!
Buy a Rare Desert Land for $100, get $100 bucks of $GALA back. Buy two Rare Desert Lands, get $200 bucks of $GALA back. You get the idea, right?
Stock up on your sand and cacti supply before the launch of our game while also stocking up on some extra $GALA!
Remember, all land can be combined into better plots following a future update in Project Cerberus. If you end up with three Rare Deserts you can slap them together into one Epic Desert!
This sale just started, but who knows how long it will continue! Bolts McWhiffles seems to have taken full control over the VOX Store… and who could possibly guess what that squirrel is thinking!? Better get them before she gets distracted by crafting new upgraded nuts or something.
Prepare for the VOX to Be Unleashed!
Project Cerberus is chomping its way through some of the last critical steps before it’s ready to grow into its v2 form. We couldn’t stop it if we wanted at this point… how do you stop a dog with three heads!?!
It’s coming one way or the other. Have you hopped into Project Cerberus and actually put your VOX to work?
Well, you’ll be a lot more ready for what’s coming next if you get yourself some nice prime real estate next to that tumbleweed over there! Come on… this sale won’t last long!
The Gala Games tApp ecosystem of games is growing all the time, and the web3 world has made one thing clear– they love tapping into rewards!
We’re thrilled to announce that more than 3 million users are now playing our tapper games, and we’re excited to welcome millions more in the future!
Over last weekend, we launched our 4th Telegram mini app tap-for-rewards game with GALACoin, a new game geared especially toward acquisition of new accounts to the Gala ecosystem. The new game is set apart by its simple referral style reward mechanics. Players receive $GALA when their referred users create Gala accounts, then more $GALA when those users verify their accounts by making a purchase of at least $1 from Gala.
Other than GALACoin alone (which rewards players only in $GALA), each of our tapper games gives players opportunities to collect $TREZ, the upcoming official token of the Gala tApp ecosystem.
An outline of the $TREZ plans was recently released with the $TREZ Litepaper, describing an ongoing system of rewards with both seasonal and daily distribution of $TREZ once the token is initially created in the near future.
With each seasonal distribution, players will receive an amount of $TREZ proportional to their gameplay activity across participating titles. At the time of publication, these titles include Treasure Tapper, Music Coin and Dogs for the Founder.
In addition to the $TREZ rewards determined by gameplay, players can also collect $GALA from each game’s referral reward pool while supply lasts, further enhancing their gameplay rewards.
We’re incredibly excited about the upcoming launch of $TREZ, leveling up the user base of our rapidly growing GalaChain ecosystem. We are as committed as ever to the empowerment of users and developers with the benefit of web3 tech.
Strategy Advice
We understand that you only have so many fingers and devices, so you can’t possibly play all the tapper games at once. But there are plenty of ways to maximize your passive rewards in each game.
Complete your tasks – These games are all about bringing new attention to our ecosystem, tapping into the nearly 1 billion Telegram users in the world. Check into each game’s instant reward tasks for quick and easy accumulation of coinage.
Upgrade your Quests – While they may start small, your upgradeable Quests are the best possible way to collect rewards even when you’re not tapping. We suggest using your collected coins to upgrade your passive in-game profit per hour. Then every time you launch the app you’ll have new juicy rewards waiting for you!
Challenge your friends – Be on the lookout for ways to play with your friends and get more rewards. With gameplay modes like Challenge and Steal, there’s always a little something extra!
Share on social media – Help us spread the word and be sure to use your in-game referral link when you do! Even people who aren’t tapping yet like rewards!
We’re so excited for the 3 million user milestone, even before a $TREZ Season 1 date has been announced! Keep an eye on the official Gala announcement channels and keep your fingers tapping that phone!
Common Ground World is a cornerstone of the Gala Games ecosystem, a truly remarkable and memorable game and always a great time to play.
With a constant flow of new features and updates, regular competitions to win $GALA, NFTs given to active players just for playing the game each month, and an amazing community of players from all over the world, it really pays to become part of the CGW community.
This game was created by some of the most experienced pioneering developers in the social gaming industry, some of the same brilliant minds behind famous titles like Farmville 2, Zynga Poker and Words with Friends.
Originally called Town Star (and renamed alongside a strategic partnership with award winning film project and generative agriculture project “Common Ground”), Common Ground World represents the intersection of one of the world’s most beloved gaming genres with web3 empowerment. In fact, the game was one of the earliest titles in the world to integrate web3 functions with features like real item ownership and crypto rewards for competitive gameplay.
Launching the Game
When you launch Common Ground World (directly in your browser with no need for an app download), you’ll be cheerfully greeted by the Farmer hero and presented with three different gameplay modes:
Common Ground mode
Casual mode
Events
Common Ground
In Common Ground mode, your mission is to dig into a heavily damaged plot of land and create something that thrives and grows. Capturing the essence of regenerative agriculture and the Common Ground movement, this gameplay mode is not for the faint of heart.
When you first begin, reinvigorating the earth will be a daunting task. You’ll only find a small workable corner of land that can be teased into growing anything. The rest must be carefully worked one tile at a time, restoring the proper biomes that will make soil and vegetation thrive.
Think of Common Ground Mode as a long-term and advanced form of gameplay. If you can turn the situation around and unlock the true potential of the land, you may consider yourself a Common Ground World expert, no matter how long it takes to accomplish your goals.
Casual Mode
Relax into CGW’s beautiful 3D gameplay!
In Casual Mode, you’ll get a taste of core gameplay with a prebuilt town whose structure varies week to week. The starting formats of these towns are designed to give you well-rounded examples of CGW gameplay, giving you a chance to see what you’re in for as you construct a town from scratch in the game’s core Competition mode.
You’ll start off with a fresh town, which may already have Wind Turbines that produce Electricity, an industrial water supply ready for more advanced production, a Windmill capable of making Flour, Sugar and Salt, and much more.
You’ll first notice that the workers from each of their houses are already hard at it – The Lumberjack is heading out to harvest wood from natural trees on your land, and the Farmer is fetching water from the well to bring it to your Brine fields where a crucial ingredient for salt is grown. Once you have ingredients to mill, select your Windmill to choose a craft and the Miller will also get to work.
Events
The Events category is where you’ll find the weekly competition server, as well as any other competitions that might be happening.
A typical weekly competition takes place over the course of 72 hours, beginning at 10am PT on Tuesday and ending at 10am PT on Friday.
Starting from scratch with a new town, each competitor must build the most efficiently functioning town possible as quickly as they can. Leaderboard positions come down to stars – The more stars, the higher your position on the leaderboard. When the competition ends, the top places on the leaderboard win $GALA prizes, and sometimes additional rewards such as Blueprint NFTs.
The weekly competition event always observes a special meta that gives favor to a single craft or family of crafts, keeping players on their toes and exploring a more focused strategic aspect of the game. Additionally, each weekly competition comes with a new biome combination (type of land and surrounding land) that each player must work into their build.
To ensure you’re ready for the next weekly competition, watch the Common Ground channels of the Gala Discord community. There you’ll find all necessary details of the upcoming competition as early as the previous Wednesday.
COMING SOON – Daily Challenges for Greater Rewards
A new Daily Challenge feature is coming soon that will unlock additional reward opportunities for owners of specific NFTs. These challenges will offer rewards in $SOIL, the upcoming reward token of Common Ground World. Daily Challenges will update every 24 hours, creating a new dimension of strategy for NFT owners!
For the latest info on this exciting new feature as it gets closer to launch, be sure to watch the bi-weekly Common Ground World Town Halls on Youtube (every other Friday at 8am PT) and keep your eyes on the Common Ground World Discord channels!
Play and Win with Free Monthly NFTs
Each month, all Common Ground World players are rewarded with a free NFT in either Common or Rare rarity, depending on how much they played the game.
To receive the Common free NFT, play for 10 days within a calendar month, making at least one in-game trade each day and a minimum of 25 trades for the whole month.
To receive the Rare free NFT, play for 25 days within the month, making at least 1 trade per day and no less than 75 trades for the whole month.
Free monthly NFTs are a great way to start a Gala digital item collection for nothing more than playing an awesome game each day!
Getting Started Strategies
Common Ground World is most enjoyable as you discover tactics for yourself. Strategically speaking, it’s a deceptively complex game, especially for its simple and charming farm town appeal. For a skilled player, a CGW town is a robust ecosystem of timing, resource and workforce management and competitive strategy.
The Gasoline Challenge
The first (and many would say the most important) challenge of Common Ground World is producing a supply of Gasoline that can keep up with the Gasoline expenses of delivering your chosen crafts to neighboring towns. In normal gameplay, you’ll always start a fresh town with 40 units of Gasoline. At first it may seem like a lot, but sooner or later it will dwindle, so start right away working on a way to create Gasoline within your town.
Wages
Your town’s workers won’t get out of bed for free. Literally, they’ll return to their homes and go to sleep if you don’t have any work for them (or worse) if you don’t have anything to pay them! This is why as more workers and more specialized workers enter your town and start earning a living, you’ll need to continue elevating your production tiers to bring in more money with new deliveries.
Selling for More
It takes 10 units of any crop or craft to sell, and with each successful sale delivery, you’ll receive cash and stars based on the difficulty and resources required for the production. For example, Wheat is a low-tier crop – It can be grown simply by watering a field and carrying the harvested wheat to a Silo. So you can expect Wheat to earn a significantly lower haul of cash and stars than a load of Flour, which is a next-tier product crafted from Wheat.
Basically, the more generations of refinement that your raw resources go through, the more money and stars you’ll get for them in the end when it’s time to deliver. And that’s the name of the game.
Build Balanced
The key to Common Ground World is building a balanced town where the various workers and buildings work perfectly together in carefully orchestrated detail.
If you’re producing a certain resource too quickly and don’t have anywhere to store it, then some of the energy spent producing that resource will be wasted.
Layout Matters
IRL towns employ city planners for a reason. Functional towns and cities don’t just build themselves or fall together from a bunch of coincidences. Early on, you’ll want to imagine the expanded vision of your town in the future. Think in long term goals, even when you may be several steps away from their completion.
Because of proximity effects given off by certain types of structures, you’ll want to create designated areas for different types of operation in your town. For example, you don’t want the pollution of a Gasoline operation interfering with your ability to grow crops, nor would you like your Warehouses to cast shade and negatively affect your fields’ access to the sun’s rays.
Most buildings require adjacent Roads, and the placement of Roads is not to be taken lightly. Your workforce will move much faster on Roads
Learn Your Passives
Passive production is one of the keys to becoming a successful builder in Common Ground World. Basically, passive production means creating a situation where resources are automatically provided to a unit or structure that needs them. The simplest example is placing a Wheat Field next to a pond, where it will receive the passive water it needs to grow. If placed where it can get water naturally from the ground, the Farmer will not need to bring buckets of water, effectively eliminating the need for a well in that instance.
Playing with NFTs
Common Ground World is a web3 game with real player ownership of certain in-game items. Items owned as NFTs carry several advantages compared to their in-game counterparts, and some NFT items provide benefits that cannot be found through any standard in-game item.
NFTs can be transferred and traded
NFTs can be instantly placed and removed for no additional cost
Earlier in 2024, Guilds were first introduced to Common Ground World gameplay, bringing a new level of cooperative strategy and team competition. Spend some time in the Common Ground World Discord community and you may get invited to join a Guild, unlocking greater potential rewards and access to new types of competition.
Guilds are led by owners of Common Ground World Nodes. Each Guild comes with a unique feature called the Guild Library, which allows Guild members to check out NFTs from the Guild Leader’s collection for use in the latest competitive events.
Guild membership is controlled entirely by the Guild Leader (invite only), but there’s a good chance that you’ll find actively recruiting Guild Leaders in Common Ground World’s Discord community!
We’re excited to introduce you to this charming farm sim game. Hopefully you’ve found some helpful information in this getting started blog. We look forward to playing with you and seeing you rise up the leaderboard in the weekly competition.
