Rising Star is now officially up and running for 6 weeks (with some more weeks of testing with basic features before that) and it's still going hot. The developer recently released a pretty interesting article revealing some numbers about players activity in Rising Star. According to that, the minutes spent in missions each day has quadrupled since early May and is now standing at a fantastic 30,000 minutes of mission time spent! It's been about three weeks since my last post on the state of the game so it's high time I'll take you back to Rising Star and show you what happened since we last visited.
Introduction
In case you haven't heard about Rising Star yet, it's an idle game at heart but one that comes with a lot of charm. The game puts you in the shoes of an aspiring musician that's dreaming of becoming the next big show some day. You start the game with nothing but your guitar and a desire to become famous. Since stardom (usually) doesn't happen overnight you have to slowly earn it with some first baby steps. Illegally perform in the streets until the cops drive you away or go to the open mic night and give it your best. Once you've gained some fans you start to give a radio interview or perform in the local shopping mall.
The game is played one mission at a time. Each of these missions takes a different amount of time to complete, uses up more or less of your Energy, and awards you with a varying amount of Starbits. These Starbits are Rising Stars ingame currency and can be traded at Hive-Engine for Hive or other tokens. There's a healthy amount of trade going on at the moment and it's possible to earn several Hive a day just by selling all the Starbits earned in the game. That would be missing out on a lot of the fun though, as these Starbits are better invested into some of the many available cards the game has to offer.
Form a band
So far you've only played as a single Musician on its way to stardom. With the recent update it's now possible to form a whole band and tour the country (or at least the county). There's a separate mission for that: Band Auditions. Each audition takes a total of 300 minutes and every time it concludes there's a 20% to find another band member until the whole band with 4 additional members is assembled. Each musician can then be assigned an instrument from your collection. You can't go touring without means of transportation so you need to pick a Tour Bus or something better as well.
I just recently finished getting my band together and that's what it looks right now:
Not the most impressive lot yet, but I'll get there!
New Cards
At the moment there are about 50 different cards to collect in the game with new ones added almost daily. The developer is actively looking for suggestions in their Discord an we've already seen a lot of cards suggested by the community make their way into the game!
Let's have a look at some of these new cards:
The Mod is one of many potential members for your band. Like all options for your band he brings some fans of his own, has a given skill, luck and income modifier. The basic rule of thumb is: The rarer the card the better the musician will be.
I really enjoy the different art styles that are used for the different cards. Makes them really unique and everybody can assemble musicians from the genre(s) he enjoys.
Any half way decent musician obviously needs a Pink Lambo go get to his next gig in style. It's a Legendary card so chances to find it in a booster are only 1:15000 so these are really rare. Only a handful of legendary cards have been found so far!
The First Rehearsal Room is something else entirely. He doesn't give any bonuses to anything but he is needed in order to have band rehearsals. Cards like that are another cool angle to the game, giving it more depth and complexity. In the later zones Missions will have more requirements than just energy and fans to start. This might allow for some interesting decision making in later missions. Depending on how rare cards like this will be, you will have to trade for different cards depending on what kind of missions you want to do next.
New Zone
Talking about later zones - the third zone has just recently been introduced. The "County Tour" so far only features two missions but that is going to change soon.
So far there's the Band Rehearsal and the Full Band Support. The Band Rehearsal only takes 5 minutes but requires the First Rehearsal Room to start. The Full Band Support takes 15 minutes but needs 5 cans of petroleum to start. Both missions are pretty close in terms of Starbits reward with a slight advantage to the Rehearsal. The Band Rehearsal needs 15% energy per mission while the Full Band Support only needs 35% - so 10% less than you'd need to do the Band Rehearsals in the same time. I really like the way those missions are set up, offering you a real choice here: Max your Starbits output or conserve your energy?
Conclusion
All things considered I'm really pleased with how the game is developing. There's a lot of new stuff released almost daily and you can really tell the developers passion for the game. I'm looking forward to many more steps on my road to stardom!
I really enjoy playing Rising Star and I think you might too! If you join Rising Star using my referral link I'll send you a bonus of 1000 Starbits once you've finished your first 100 missions. You'll also get a free booster pack from the game once you hit that threshold and doing these missions is only going to take you 2-3 days. Joining the game is completely free as well so there really isn't much to loose if you find you don't enjoy it. Please let me know in the comments or hit me up on Discord once you've finished your 100th mission so I can send you the Starbits.
As always, thank you all for reading and please let me know in the comments what you think about the game. See you all next time!