TL;DR & Key Takeaways:
- On Tuesday Jul 26 2022, Coins held our first ever livestream Coins Plays & AMA with Gala Games.
- The livestream was co-hosted by Jason Brink, President of Gala Games’ Blockchain, and Myrtle Anne, Founder of Blocktides.
- Coins and the Gala Games team played Town Star directly together with our Coinmunity, where they asked questions about Town Star and Gala Games’ future roadmap.
- Jason also leaked upcoming Gala’s developments 😉
Lunch Hour Livestream & Highlights
Gala Games and Coins share the same ethos of being user-focused and community-focused so we were delighted to hold our first ever livestream of Coins Plays & AMA with Jason Brink, President of Gala Games’ Blockchain, and Myrtle Anne, Founder of Blocktides.
Watch full livestream recording on Coins Youtube
Note: Details and phrases have been edited based on author’s discretion to make them suitable for text.
4:00 - 5:22 - What is Town Star?
Jason: Town Star is a farming simulation that's created by the same people who made Farmville. The team at Farmville, who is currently run by Mark Skaggs, won a game design award for Farmville back in the day so the actual OG Farmville team are currently working on Town Star.
5:22 - We believe in player ownership of assets and right now, if you have one of these Fountain NFTs you can place it in game and it can help level up your gameplay. In the future, it will also become functional in part of our play and earn economy as it will be an NFT with earning potential.
6:12 - 7:58 - What is Gala Games?
38:42 - 40:21 - How does Gala Games work? (In details)
Jason: Gala Games was founded by a group of people who have very deep experience in the Web 2.0 gaming space. Our CEO is Eric Schermeier and he's one of the co-founders of Zynga. A lot of our executive leadership were originally from Zynga. We have people from EA and other giant gaming companies.
Gala Games was originally founded based on the idea that we want players to have ownership of their in-game assets. We feel that it's an important thing where if you're paying for something or if you're buying an NFT or an upgrade or something like that, you should have the ability to do whatever you want with it and so this is where we started.
I was employee number eight. I joined back in 2020 and have been working with the company ever since and for me it has been wonderfully interesting watching the evolution of Gala, from being an 8 person team to almost 400 people right now.
11:07 - 12:47 - What are the types of Town Star NFTs?
Jason: There is a way you can earn $GALA in Town Star. $GALA token is the central token of the entire ecosystem and each game has its own token. The reason why we created separate tokens was if you tie them all together with a single token, a singular game could have the ability to impact all of the other games which is not what we want right now.
Most Town Star NFTs have some sort of in-game functionality from serving as storage for particular commodities such as wheat storage. For example, a sugar stand is a very popular thing, where you have the ability to have different NFTs that remove effects or add effects.
One of the in-game concepts is pollution and if you have factories, they produce pollution. Pollution affects the growth of crops in Town Star and you can place an NFT which will remove pollution for a surrounding area. This in-game asset and NFT is pretty powerful because it speeds up your crops’ growth and makes the entire game easier for you. In addition, the players have complete ownership of these assets and you can sell them in an Ethereum supported marketplace.
14:06 - 15:06 - How to convert PHP to GALA
Step 1: Log in to your Coins account then make a cash in. You can use bank transfer and e-wallet options to top up your PHP wallet. Read this tutorial on “How to Cash In Online to your Coins.ph Wallet”
Step 2: Tap Crypto and select “GALA” from the drop-down menu to convert your PHP.
Learn more here at “What is Gala?”
22:09 - 36:51 - Town Star Demo
47:04 - 48:57 - What other games is Gala planning to launch?
Jason: We currently have 28 games in active development right now and they cover all sorts of different areas. We've got 4X games. We've got some strategy games, we've got some first-person shooters and we've got a dance game. Uhm which I probably won't be playing because I'm not exactly the dancing type, it's just embarrassing for everybody.
We also have The Last Expedition and we've got Mirandus which is a MMORPG. Basically, we have games in just about every major category right now and it's gonna be pretty cool to see how all of this unfolds.
"We have been doing this now for a couple years and games take a long time to build. One of the problems with Web 3.0 blockchain gaming space is that people have very unrealistic expectations about how long it takes something to build."
We have been doing this now for a couple years and games take a long time to build. One of the problems with Web 3.0 blockchain gaming space is that people have very unrealistic expectations about how long it takes something to build because so many of the projects they see are these tiny, low quality, fake games which are just trying to vomit NFT assets onto a game.
That's something that we don't do and we've been building some of this stuff for a long time and a lot of the games are about ready to go live and I’m very excited. You should check out the artwork for Mirandus, it looks amazing and I really want to play it. So guys, stay tuned. It's a roleplaying game (RPG).
Myrtle: You know when it comes to games, I really appreciate that Gala Games is doing this because they understand that not all gamers have the same niche when it comes to playing games.
"You cannot just love one game at the same time because every gamer are all different and have their own personal choices."
51:05 - 51:30 - Are you planning to have Gala Games events in the Philippines?
Jason: We would love to have Gala Games events in the Philippines and I may be coming to the Philippines here pretty soon. If I do come, we would host a small event of community members coming together. But we would like to do bigger events as we are big fans of the Philippines.
51:33 - 53:49 - Can I close my farm and come back later and transition to a new server?
Jason: Town Star is based on something called Play Canvas and Play Canvas is a client authoritative which in simple terms, means that it actually runs the whole game inside your browser.
So what happens is when you close your browser, it's not running and your farm closes. However, we’re moving it to another game engine called Godot and what Godot does is called server authoritative which means that it runs on a server and your computer just connects to it.
This is super important because with client authoritative structures it's very difficult to stop people from cheating.
- With client authoritative structures, the game thinks that whatever happens in that browser is okay.
- With a server authoritative model that's not the case and so this is why we're beginning this port over and right now, it's moving along nicely.
I am super excited about it because it will make it possible for gamers to minimize disruptions and still have your town run because it's still going to be running on the server and that's something that we think is really important for gameplay purposes. But to answer your question, right now if you close your farm, it's closed and it's not running anymore.
54:03 - 54:27 - Can I play for free?
Jason: You can play for free right now and you don't have to pay for anything to play. It's not like Axie where you have to own a certain number of Axies in order to play. You can start up Town Star now and just play as a game and play for fun and it's totally free.
56:21 - 58:14 - What is Gala Gold?
Jason: Gala Gold is a smaller, more exclusive group of people who have joined our Discord and they are given the Gala Gold and there's a bunch of us that hang out there on a regular basis myself included and actually talk to the community.
One of the things that I think really makes us special is the degree of engagement that we have with our community. For example, you will see us at any given time like shoulder to shoulder in Gala Gold on Twitter & Discord and in general making sure that people understand what we're building as a project and how important the things that we're building are.
As a user, you have very good access to us as a member of Gala Gold. So if that's something you're interested in check it out and come into our discord. We are more than happy to talk to you guys about games, about community, about everything that Gala is doing and Gala Gold is a wonderful place for that.
1:06:36 - 1:10:22 - What else is Gala doing aside from Games?
Jason: Gala is also doing movies besides games and music and yes, we're doing some amazing stuff. Unfortunately I don't know how much I'm allowed to say but what I can tell you is one of the things that I'm most excited about is we're doing a bunch of stuff and I don’t know if you guys are familiar with Ai & Aiko.
I freaking love what they're doing. Peter Draw is absolutely amazing and it's such a wholesome uplifting message. We are doing some stuff with them and we're doing some other really cool things.
We have got some animated stuff and some feature length stuff and some stuff with names that are oh god, this is so alpha. But let's just say we've got some upcoming alpha and news and you will not believe it if I told you because it's huge. So in nutshell, I am incredibly excited about what’s upcoming for our community but my lips are sealed. In the meanwhile, keep your eyes out for them.
Thanks everyone, thank you so much guys, see you again.
#Coinmunity signing off
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Campaign duration: Jul 10, 2022 - Jul 31, 2022
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