Your Ticket To Racing!

Third Time Dev
6 min readFeb 10, 2022

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The Photo Finish Breeding Tool is LIVE!

After months of building and testing the tool, it is finally ready. We thank everyone for their patience. Since this is THE tool which creates the first generation of in-game horses, it was hugely important for us to have the tool working as flawlessly as possible.

We are so excited to see all the wallets out there filling up with Virtual Horse Tickets!

Wait, breeding what? What tool?

If you’re new to Photo Finish, you may be wondering just what in the world is going on! In a nutshell, any player that wants to create a virtual race horse for our upcoming game can do so by “breeding” a Stylish Stud NFT and Fine Filly NFT. The ticket will be how you enter the racing ecosystem and get your very own horse that will race for real money, breed new generations, and become your best friend!*

* we take no responsibility if the horse does not become your best friend.

So, how does it work?

It should be fairly easy to use! First, go to the website — https://photofinish.live/pfpbreeding/ — and you will be greeted with a tutorial!

Once you click through the tutorial (of course, after reading and understanding every word of it), here’s what the page will look like:

PFP Breeding Tool: make sure you only access from https://photofinish.live/pfpbreeding/

Make sure you connect your wallet as the first step.

NOTE: LEDGER WALLETS ARE NOT SUPPORTED AS THEY DON’T ALLOW YOU TO SIGN THE TRANSACTIONS NEEDED TO MINT. YOU’LL NEED TO TRANSFER YOUR STUDS / FILLIES TO PHANTOM FIRST.

Then, you’ll simply type the ID numbers of your Stylish Stud and Fine Filly you want to ‘mate’, or you can also tap on the little pencil icons and choose them out of your wallet.

Each minting transaction costs a little under .025 SOL in Solana transaction fees. Make sure you have enough in your account to cover this before minting!

Once you are 100% sure this is the horse you want to mint, tap the Mint Ticket button and the magic will begin! Remember, this action is not reversible!

WARNING: THIS PROCESS CAN TAKE QUITE SOME TIME!

Depending on the speed of the Solana network processing these transactions, this can take upwards of three minutes. Be patient!

DO NOT REFRESH OR LEAVE THE PAGE!

You will be prompted with 3 different “Approval” popups in your wallet during the minting process. Just so you know what each of these transactions are doing:

Transaction #1 — fee for creation of an associated token account for the Fine Filly transfer
Transaction #2: fee for cost of minting the ticket and transferring the Filly to Third Time
Transaction #3: The confirmation required from the user to mint the ticket on their behalf.
Success!

Once the process is completed successfully, 3 things will have happened:

  1. Your “Fine Filly” will be gone from your wallet
  2. You will have a “Marvelous Mare” replacement (identical to your Filly but has a golden MM ticket emblem and is in a separate collection). This is so no one can breed with a Fine Filly more than once.
A “Marvelous Mare” — she’s a 1–1 replacement for a “Fine Filly” except now she’s a proud parent! Look at her glow!

3. A Generation Zero ticket for your race horse will appear in your wallet

4. The “Breed Count” of the Stylish Stud used in the breeding transaction will have increased by one.

All of this information and more can be found in the HelpShift Support page, which can be accessed by clicking the HelpShift Support link at the bottom right of the Breeding Tool page.

Errors

As I’m sure you’re aware, the unfortunate state of the Solana network right now is that transactions can be dropped, lost, or time out. We’ve put in as much error handling as we could reasonably think of, and we also have a handy ticket system on the error popup where you can submit a ticket right to us if something goes wrong:

If you get an error, it’s safe to try again. If it keeps failing, read below:

There are unfortunately multiple points of failure that can happen on the Solana Network within this transaction, so if the transaction fails to complete, check your wallet and see what happened.

  1. Do you still have your Fine Filly? If so, refresh the page and retry the transaction again, it may have just timed out. If it keeps failing, submit a ticket.
  2. Do you have a Generation Zero ticket, but not a Marvelous Mare? If so, give it a minute or two before submitting a ticket. We have seen MULTIPLE instances of the Solana response being one of a timeout, yet all transactions actually completing and all mares/tickets arriving correctly in the wallet.
  3. Do you not have either a ticket or a Marvelous Mare, but don’t have your Filly? If so, give it a minute or two to see if they appear, then submit a ticket.

Aftermarket Trading

Marvelous Mares and Generation Zero Tickets are both trade-able on the aftermarket in their own new collections.

Marvelous Mares: https://magiceden.io/marketplace/marvelous_mares

Generation Zero Tickets: https://magiceden.io/marketplace/photo_finish

Inbreeding Warning

As in real life, inbreeding can cause serious genetic defects in a child. For foals in Photo Finish, the penalties for inbreeding are similarly significant.

When two horses intend to mate, the system checks their bloodlines back to each of their great grandparents. For every single great grandparent that the two share, the foal gets a penalty point. Then, when we breed the genes, every allele in every race gene has a chance to demote based on the penalty score. With even a single shared great grandparent, it’s likely that the foal will demote a grade step (A => A-).

How does this affect the breeding of PFP’s? In essence, if you are breeding 100 different Fillies with the same Stud, then that’s 100 brothers and sisters now that cannot be bred with each other without significant penalties.

Summary

We are excited for you to all continue this journey with us! What started as a stealth PFP mint in fall of 2021 has us moving ever closer to racing with these amazing virtual steeds. As always, join the Discord and follow us on Twitter for the most recent updates!

About

Photo Finish Live is the 3rd horse racing title created by veteran game development studio Third Time Games. Founded by a senior leadership team with 50+ years experience heading up games, teams, and studios at EA Sports, Zynga, FanDuel, Glu, and more, Third Time is building the most authentic horse racing ecosystem with play to earn mechanics and a dual token economy utilizing the Solana blockchain, releasing in Q1/Q2 2022. Learn more at https://photofinish.live/

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Third Time Dev

Game development studio with many years in AAA, mobile, and F2P. Crypto enthusiasts. Big fans of Unity.