Derby Stars Mania 🏇
Written by speicherx
In high-school, I’ve spent a good fraction of my time chasing animes & completing video games series like the Dead or Alive franchise. One particular adaption I seriously loved throughout my gaming period was when the role-playing games incorporated animals into it — be it dragons or horses. The epic feeling of riding them into battle in the game is akin to completing the popular Far Cry 3 weed-burning mission. IYKYK.
However, I haven’t really came across any proper anime-styled horse racing games, (well… if you seriously count Uma Musume as one).
That being said, I basically freaked out when Derby Stars was announced on Terra and am now very much insanely bullish over them.
In this article below, I will cover the following topics:
- What is Derby Stars and who are the talents behind it?
- The game storyline, attributes and mechanics
- Expected launch & platform details
- The team’s visionary goals & whitelist alpha
- A whole lotta memes
What is Derby Stars ❓
Derby Stars is a metaverse game on the blockchain and the first grade AAA Play-2-Earn on Terra. The gameplay will include features such as a Player vs Environment mode or Player vs Player mode. To further elaborate, this means that players can cross-breed horses, level and compete in races with their peers in the game. They are also introducing other metaplay factors outside of just racing, which likely points to incorporating a town village environment as far as I know — something RPG gamers truly appreciate.
Imagine bartering with your local stablemen in the game over how much you should actually be paying for their crappy carrots!
Who are the brains behind this amazing venture? 🧠
The project is incubated by UNOPND, a startup studio strongly backed by Hashed (global early-stage venture fund). Other partners include, Terra and NodGames. UNOPND is a company builder focused on blockchain games, NFTs and anything related to the metaverse. About Hashed, uhh… they basically never sold a f**king LUNA during the May Massacre.
Derby Stars has been in development for a couple of months now, and the current team consists of 15 talented team members. From what I’ve gotten, most of their backgrounds are from major gaming studios in Korea; Nexon, NCSoft, and Net Marble, to name a few. The main producer for Derby Stars was involved in building a game called Derby Days, which we can refer to as a earmark for the quality we can expect looking forward.
Derby Days was a mobile game launched by Com2uS 10 years ago and had 3 million downloads within just the first 7 months(!) Their daily active users reached over ~200k users and they also achieved Top 10 in Korea in terms of revenue generated. ⅔ of revenue came from outside of Korea, showing good reception from both NA and SEA regions.
The concept is similar to what Derby Stars will be about, alas with way better graphics and more complex integrations.
I also took a quick look at their Youtube video featuring Derby Days gameplay. Even up till now, there are people still missing the game as seen in the comments below here (most recent was 2 months ago):
I can personally relate to how they’re feeling, because I still reminiscent my times playing games like Pet Society or Beyond Good and Evil despite these games having come out when I was like 10. (I’m now 21). Revolutionary games leave a lasting impact, and it is nice to see how Derby Days have achieved that for many.
Now imagine this: 10 years ago, given the nascency of mobile games and the development of blockchain —what will Derby Stars be when technology is leveraged with it? Another point to note is delivering games be it on the blockchain or not, are often lofty goals. Games usually don’t last in the market for a long time and they usually require intense talent & adaptation to keep up with the trends. The background profile of UNOPND and the avenues provided by their partners make this a good bet in seeing how they will progress.
Now, let’s move on the actual Derby Stars GAME itself!
There will be two main modes.
Player vs Environment (PvE): Training Mode 🏋️
My understanding is that you are rewarded through the time effort in training your horse in-game. You will be able to level up your horses horses so they can gain better statistics and eventually be more competent in races. TLDR: The higher your level, the higher the value of your horse.
It seems like Derby Horses will get different trait attributes upon levelling up. Just going to plug it a similar Pokemon concept, just because Rapidash.
Aside for training your horses, there will also be elements of managing your land. In the previous game Derby Days, buildings were extremely important to have on the side of your ranch. They helped you to gather loots, experience and energy to keep your ranch moving. Thus, safe to say that the ultimate goal we can expect from the Derby Stars is that the more time and effort that you invest in the game, the more likely you are to get better results in the horse racing competition. The accrue in value investments on land are intertwined with your racing performance.
Player vs Player (PvP): Competition Mode ⚔️
In this mode, you will be playing the game against other players in horseracing competitions to win rewards. For example, you can be challenging against 6 other horses to reach the goal line first. There will be different formats of racing, for example: maybe different map layouts or even varying distances to goalpost.
With the Play-2-Earn element, there will be more economic benefits you can reap by smashing other noobs in the game who obviously can’t W-A-S-D. One thing to note though: the team wants to make it less about grinding through, but more about having fun and having an entertaining experience. It’s like how most of us want to attain 100% Playstation trophies as a personal accomplishment even when we don’t get payouts.
Derby Stars will be far beyond in terms of visual aesthetics and elements, given they now have the budget and tools to try and perfect the game. The team behind Derby Stars are primarily game designers and developers before they are blockchain developers, so they would want to ensure first and foremost game caters to the gaming and entertainment industry.
WAIFUs in game! Wait sorry, ( ͡° ͜ʖ ͡° ) — I meant Avatars. 👧
Derby Stars will introduce a conceptual mock up of avatars so that every single user in game will have their own avatars. They will be customizable from the get-go, and in the long run will have many extra additions to add in more special features.
Additional elements to the avatars will correlate with different synergies across horses. This means that there will be a certain bonding to make it more intriguing on how you interact with the game. I mean think about it, how cool would it be if a gothic-styled Avatar with a black hood rode her flaming jet-black horse?
Moving onwards to the main champion in the game: HORSES 🐴
There will be different looks and feels of horses: Parts will consist of different tiers composed together to form an entire horse. The rarity tiers are grouped into: unique, rare, and normal. The rarer the horse, the more appealing it will be in terms of appearance and may also spill-over positive performance in races.
While the rarer components DOES NOT necessarily mean that the horse would be more powerful & faster, there can be a relationship we can expect from that of course.
Horses can be starkly different, so it is really subjective to the community players on what variants and parts appeal to them; particularly those who want a specific look and feel.
There will also be a breeding system that will result new unique combinations of horses. In order to breed a horse, you need a pair of horses obviously. You would not need to directly own 2 horses in your inventory to breed an offspring colt horse, you can cross-breed with other players’ horses.
Here’s where it gets interesting: if you own a horse that everyone wants to breed with due to statistics or appearance, this leads to more people attempting to breed with your horse (LOL). This builds up the value of the horse that is accrued with that horse owner, so while people may slut-shame your horse — the truth is your horse is a valuable haven for many talented offsprings in-game.
Of course, there must be compensation. For breedings, fees are collected by the breeder. The person who is paying the fee, will be allocated the offspring colt for him/her to play with the cute little pony. I expect that this will be super fun, I am personally looking forward to this element in the game. You get to bond with a new horse and watch it grow to become your next breadwinner.
MUTATIONS: Horses will not necessarily have a female or male distinction. The way a trait is passed on is also not just by pure random. Depending on what kind of traits will be available, the team will assign different percentages on how likely those traits can be passed on. So, even if you are breeding horses of same class, the offspring colts can belong to a lower/higher tier as well.
BETTING and BORROWING for you degens out there 🎲
The team wants to focus on Play-2-Earn aspects, so the game won’t natively support betting for now. That’s not to say that other projects like LoTerra or BeTerra can’t take advantage over horse-betting here. It was mentioned that on-chain data that stores race results can be used to create a horse betting platform.
They are currently not in any talks with the platforms, so any of such developments would only be a byproduct.
The team also wants to make sure that Barriers-To-Entry for the game does not keep going up over time; but remain accessible as long as possible.
They will be introducing parts of the game where one would not need to have an upfront investment to participate. For example, in training mode — they can borrow a horse and level them up for the busy owners, then get rewarded for spending time to do that.
Similarly to AxieInfinity, communities have set up social contracts in other P2E games where users can borrow from one another — UNOPND will try to iterate and internalize that natively into the game.
DUAL CURRENCIES IN GAME 💸
There will be a dual token structure: Governance & Utility tokens.
Governance Tokens: Derby Star Token $DST ⭐
Rewarded through PvP horse racing and achievements. Contributed from how well you do in races. Governance tokens can be used for governance, staking, and payments for horse breeding.
It will also serve as a defacto currency for trading on the horses, albeit not all the tiers. Depending on the different tiers, some may also be tradable for LUNA.
Utility Tokens: Carrot Token $CRT 🥕
Rewarded through training mode or building on the land. Contributed from how much time and effort you spend on training and investing on your stables. Utility tokens can also be used for horse breeding or crafting items such clothes.
TLDR: You race to earn Derby Star Tokens, and train to earn Utility Tokens.
NOW FOR YOU IMPATIENT PEOPLE: WEN LAUNCH? 🥳
The launches will be a phased approach where the team plans to release NFT horses first in the format of pre-sales and then playable builds where you can actually do the P2E gameplay and participate in the races after.
- Pre-Sales NFT horses (November 2021)
- Playable Builds for P2E Gameplay (early next year in 2022)
- Race Mode launch (early next year in 2022)
In addition, they are also planning to release a personal NFT marketplace within the next few months. This is conceptually what they have in mind:
The team has yet to finalize whether they are releasing their NFT pre-sales by partnering up with NFT marketplaces e.g RandomEarth, Knowhere, Talis or simply using their own native platform. Flex and trade your horses soon!
They will be releasing 10,000 horses in total first, releasing all 3 tiers of horses. Unique rarity levels will be hard capped, but with no limits on commons after game launch so as not to limit the amount of players that can experience the game. Some tiers will be minted randomly, while some tiers can expect some kind of option minting format.
Game will set to be launched on PC, through both web browser and it’s own desktop client. Team also wants to bring it on mobile for both IOS and Android devices.
IDO:
They have decided that the IDO allocations for the Derby Star Token $DST will not be held at same time with the NFT pre-sales — so more information will be relayed further over time.
They are currently in active discussions with both Pylon and StarTerra.
WHITELIST 📝
Firstly, there will be no KYC restrictions.
Most of these contests listed down below for you to earn Whitelist Spots will have the winners announced today at Oct 25, 12pm UTC, please join their discord to find out more.
- Invite Contests 20 Tickets
- Discord Raffle Giveaways 260 Tickets
- Twitter Giveaways 40 Tickets
- Meme Contest 42 Tickets
- Fan-Art Contest 42 Tickets
- ETC: Partnerships/PR/Channel Moderation 96 Tickets
Another note: Derby Stars did mention that they may be creating a validator node. This means that their stakers may get special access to NFTs or a bonus $DST airdrop allocation.
MY FAVORITE SECTION: MEMES
Credits to /tunglam
Credits to /Killaa
Credits to /Herotom6187
THIS IS MY PERSONAL FAVORITE, ALAS I CANNOT ATTACH IT HERE:
CoinKimchi’s Submission
Watch Do Kwon morph into Gandalf as he leads the Terra crew into war with his ‘Cosmoooooooooooos’ and ‘UST UST UST’ chants.
FINAL THOUGHTS 👋
I expect to see Derby Stars go a long way forward.
The UNOPND team does not seem to be lacking in any technical or funding aspects give the major support by one of the biggest blockchain investment firm in Korea (Hashed). The people leading the project also seem to be filled with many aspiring talents who share a strong vision in building gamification onto the blockchain, alongside their credible backgrounds. I was impressed with how well KiHo presented the projects during the TerraBites interview — he made it easy to understand the whole process and the development stages seem to be going at a great pace.
I am an avid fan of the idea of metaverses, and believe Play-2-Earn Models will be a key driver in attracting mainstream adoption (even without the people realising it)!
I cannot wait to train my own horse and try my best to rekt everyone on the racing field. Till the launch then, my fellow #lunatics!
Twitter: https://twitter.com/DerbyStars_HQ
Telegram: https://t.me/DerbyStars
Discord: https://discord.com/invite/8DyhTSDcuf
Website: https://derbystars.com/
