Photo Finish™ LIVE | New Advisory Board, Horse Model Revealed!
Hello fellow horse racing and crypto enthusiasts! Today is a special day for us as we officially reveal some of the latest and greatest updates to our 3D Horse & Jockey Model!
Full reveal of 3D model was at 1 PM EST today. This is all captured in-engine.
To anyone just now finding out about our team or this game, we encourage you to take a look at our Official Roadmap to learn more details about our project, team and more. We are a veteran game development team with multiple released horse racing games and a production quality simulation engine utilized on Triple Crown races by NBC Sports.
Today we wanted to give a quick update on two things!
- Behind the scenes look at our horse and jockey model
- Advisory board reveal
Horse & Jockey Model
In 2015, we released the original version of Photo Finish Horse Racing for iOS and Android. 6 years ago, the most critical thing as developers for us was to get a model that animated well and looked good but didn’t tax the hardware. We have gotten a lot of mileage out of this model…come to think of it, this horse has probably run a trillion miles at this point across all of our games.
However now that we are in 2021, we have a lot more horsepower (no pun intended) with our devices and so it’s time for an upgrade.
Our new horse model has triple the amount of triangles, and many more bones in the rig for animating things like the ears, saddle, and tail much more realistically. The proportions have also been improved as our previous model was almost a little bit closer to a quarter horse than a thoroughbred. Our jockey also has the addition of many more parts including a bendable whip, racing goggles, and arm patch with his number.
behind the scenes!
The coat color of the horse is derived from 100% accurate true-life genetics. We created the exact mapping of the genes as described in detail here so that parents hold actual genes of Agouti, Silver, Appaloosa, etc and pass them to their offspring. There are almost infinite combinations of genes that procedurally create the coat color of our horses when they are born. In our live mobile game Horse Racing Manager, which utilizes this system, there are newly bred horses with coats that have yet to appear in the game ever before. And this is over 3 years since the game has released, with hundreds of millions horses bred so far!
Powering the performance of the virtual horse itself is an advanced set of attributes, also powered by genetics. We will go into much more depth in future updates, but the top level attributes are as follows:
- Overall Quality
- Start
- Speed
- Burst
- Heart
- Stamina
- Temper
- Direction Preference
- Track Preference
- Condition Preference
Every one of these attributes has a major impact on the simulation and how your horse performs. Though there is some amount of randomness that can occur because, well, this is horse racing, improving your bloodline and using your skill to breed intelligently will build clear advantages for your horse on the track.
Advisory Board
Lastly, we wanted to share the exciting news that we have signed agreements with 4 of our 5 upcoming advisory board members (just waiting for a signature on the 5th!). This team is an absolute powerhouse and provides decades and decades of experience in games, crypto, finance, and the actual sport of horse racing! Introducing…
Tom Goedde brings decades of top tier marketing experience to the table. He and founder Ian Cummings worked together for years at EA Sports, and for the past decade he has been driving convergence of sports, real money gaming, and video gaming.
Jerome has spent 15+ years in the game industry at EA, Digital Chocolate, Zynga, and Glu Mobile. He and his team were responsible for building the MLB Tap Sports Baseball franchise from a prototype to a $100M yearly business. Recently he has just founded a venture backed crypto gaming startup – SuperTeam Games.
Walt has been a friend of Third Time Games for many years, but just recently officially joined the advisory board. He brings a wealth of experience in entrepreneurial, finance, and the crypto space, as well as countless contacts within horse racing world.
Sabah was originally a player of our Horse Racing Manager game, and over time we formed a relationship (via Discord) eventually learning he was a very experienced horse owner and breeder in real life! He is an avid supporter of racehorses and has been an owner since 2008, starting his career racing horses in Kuwait. Sabah concentrates primarily on buying and breeding horses in Ireland, as well as keeping performing racehorses in the UK with trainers such as Marco Botti, Amy Murphy, George Scott, and Roger Fell. Sabah advises the team on many of the finer details of the sport to ensure an accurate simulation of racing and breeding.
We have at least one official crypto advisor we plan on announcing soon. Just waiting on the ink to dry!
Summary
We hope you have enjoyed this update. As always, reach out on Twitter or Discord and join the fun. It is very early and we have so much more amazing news to share in the coming months!
