Town Star, a play-to-earn farming game on the Gala Games platform, is set to receive various major economic updates from July 19 and onwards. 

Starting that same day, players and Node operators will no longer be able to earn TOWN, as distribution for the coin will be temporarily paused.

The developers have also said that following this change, the game dev team for Town Star has doubled in size, and now includes industry expert Mark Skaggs, a video game producer known for being at the helm of the team that made famous Zynga games: FarmVille and CityVille. Before working on Zynga titles, Skaggs was also a vice president and Executive Producer at EA, leading EA Pacific (previously known as Westwood Studios), to work on famous real-time strategy games Red Alert 2, Command & Conquer: Generals, as well as The Lord of the Rings: The Battle for Middle-earth when the development team was relocated and merged with EA Los Angeles.

“During this temporary TOWN pause, we will focus on evolving the Town Star in-game economy, making tech improvements as well as adding features to the game. This has been discussed at length in the #townstar_discussions channel in our Discord community.”

Alongside working on economic upgrades to benefit the in-game economy long-term, the team is also switching from the PlayCanvas game engine to the increasingly-popular Godot engine, as the former is “client-side authoritative,” while the latter is “server-side authoritative”. The switch to the new game engine will prove highly beneficial in helping the team prevent various hacks and cheats in their game.

Daily challenges and competition will continue to remain, but potential changes may happen as the game devs implement new systems, with Town Points gained during this shifting period being removed at the end of each day, meaning that there won’t be any TOWN distribution. While those who operate Town Star Nodes “are under no obligation to continue to do so,” the developers say that there might end up being retroactive rewards given out to Node operators sometime in the future. These rewards will not include TOWN.

“This is a big project and it will take some time to get there, though we’re confident that this pause will allow our team to evolve the in-game economy, add more fun features, and upgrade our game engine to support an amazing future for all Town Star players.”