Neon District: The Road to Season One
Neon District is Going Live with Real-Time Combat
Neon District has grown and transformed significantly over the course of three years, and will continue to grow and change, but this month marks a major milestone for the Neon District community.
Next week, we’re beginning the phased release for “The Road to Season One”, a progressive series of milestones that allows us to release the entire game in stages, first to our Key Holders and Trophy Holders, and then to everyone else on a monthly cadence.
This Tuesday, December 15th, our Key and Trophy holders are invited to battle with their characters and gear for the first time. On Tuesday, key and trophy holders can construct their teams and pit them against other players in Private Matches. This unlocks a way to challenge your friends, take the token model out for a spin, or even battle immediately against the AI in Practice Matches.
Key holders and Trophy holders will get the first look into the aggregate of work we’ve put in to build Neon District over three years:
- Tens of thousands of different art pieces ranging from weapons, armor, characters, and backgrounds
- A hybrid role-playing / trading card game design consisting of 400+ cards and multiple character and weapon classes
- A real-time character animation system, using Spine, that allows you to equip and battle with your uniquely equipped characters
- In-house music, sound effects, and special effects all made for Neon District
- And all of the behind-the-scenes technology that makes Neon District a 100% free-to-play blockchain game
“The Neon District game design is realizing an RPG through a deck builder. It has been done in some way before but the cards in ND are more core to your character progression.”- Dave Smith, Lead Game Designer for Neon District, Game Designer for Riot’s LoR
The release on Tuesday is hot off the presses. Over the upcoming weeks, players will witness the rapid development and release process to improve and iterate on the full Neon District combat experience. Once we’ve worked together to complete the combat experience, clean up bugs, and add features based on initial feedback, we’ll then release Player-vs-Player combat to the general public.
In the coming days, we’re also going to update the prices for NEON on the site, pegging the cost of NEON to an Ethereum valuation of $650, giving everyone a discount until Ethereum rockets past.
Further, we have one more weapon that we’re adding to the Loot Boxes in a few weeks — the elusive Death Knight’s Blade — which we couldn’t add until the game design and engine could support the new design. (Literally, it was too big to fit on the character rigs.)
Watch our Neon District Twitter for the announcement of the added DK Blade, which will be capped at 25 ever minted.
Neon Pizza: Passive PvP in January 2021
On January 19th 2021, just shy over five weeks from now, we’re going public with our first play-to-earn game mechanic: a player-vs-player game experience tentatively titled “Neon Pizza”, an asynchronous PvP game in which you can earn NEON within Neon District either as a contractor for a pizza delivery conglomerate, or as the seedier, less-savory type that would rather ambush the pizza delivery agents and steal their pizza and tips. (You can also play both sides of the fence!)
In this upcoming game, you’ll get to compete against other players and teams within the world, where ambushes are resolved using the combat system automatically — allowing all players to play at all times without needing to be online at the same time, and to strategically lay out your teams and construct the strongest defense and offense possible. You’ll progress on the global ladder, compete against other delivery agents and ambushers, collect badges, and gain notoriety in the first player-vs-player experience for Neon District.
“I am so in love with the Neon Pizza experience! We designed it to shine a light on an entirely different skill when it comes to competitive PvP play: Deckbuilding.” - Chris Chapman, Executive Producer Neon District, Director of Multiplayer at The Sandbox
The “Neon Pizza” game design is critical for Neon District in this early stage — our player base isn’t yet large enough to prevent everyone from sitting around in matchmaking lobbies for hours on end, so we’re going to start by delivering something that everyone can play right away, and enjoy at your own pace. This opens the door for anyone to play Neon District completely free with everyone else in the community.
Season One: Campaigns and Missions in Q2 2021
Following the release of Neon Pizza, we’re going to introduce new, active ways of working as a contractor within Neon District — this time by finding and accepting dedicated missions from Mission Givers. Campaigns and missions introduce the traditional single-player RPG experience that Neon District was originally designed for, and will add even more ways to play and earn NEON.
In these missions, you’ll explore a series of combat scenarios with certain objectives to get a fat payout of NEON and gear. Missions also introduce a new combat mechanic, called Interaction, that provides an alternate way to win combat scenarios against the enemy. Further, with the introduction of Missions, the layout of the city will start to be unveiled, divulging the depth and breadth of a city five times the size of New York.
“Neon District is more of a cause than a game. It’s on a mission to create a beautiful, multi-faceted, player-owned universe that lasts longer than any game like it ever has. And now, after 3 years of hard work, we see part one of that mission coming to life.”- Alex Atallah, CTO OpenSea
A Major User Interface & Platform Update
During this time, our brilliant art team is working on redesigning the Neon District Portal to introduce a whole new look and feel to the game. The Portal was originally designed as a hub for collecting, equipping, and trading assets — but it has since evolved into the central location for the game. And so, we’re going to upgrade the entire site to evoke that feeling.
In order for us to move fast, build and ship for all players on all devices as quickly as possible with our lean team, we’ve decided to go full web with mobile support — which means you’ll get to play Neon District on any modern browser, even on your phone. This means that our initial Steam release is being put on hold, and all content that was designed for Steam is being made compatible with web and mobile instead. And as soon as we have some time to experiment with it, we’re going to package all of Neon District into a standalone mobile application so that you can load up Neon District on your phone anywhere, anytime.
Exploring the World of Neon District Together
From this point forward, we’re building Neon District based on how you play Neon District, and what makes the most sense to explore, from real-time combat tournaments, to tag-team style cooperative combat play, to land-based “king of the hill” activities throughout Neon District, and even to community-wide events that affect everyone. For those of you who are aware of the origin of Coin’s E-Den, the E-Den is itself a Syndicate within Neon District — and we’ll start to reveal what that means over the course of next year.
When the time is right, we’re going to introduce even more ways to personalize your characters, including a new generation of armor and weapons, with a new set of cards. Further, when the game balance feels right, we’re going to increase the level cap beyond Level 5, also with a whole new set of cards and stats to increase the variety of assets in Neon District. The long-term vision for Neon District is rich and full of potential, and those who play early will reap early benefits and rewards — such as limited edition assets — and your voice will strongly impact the direction that Neon District grows.
Season Zero & Radiant Blades
We’ve made a lot of assets over the years, and we’re almost ready to unlock their full potential. Firstly, Season Zero assets are being redesigned right now as Season One assets, so that when the game mechanic to burn Season Zero shells onto Season One gear is ready, your gear can visually transform into the origin pieces from Season Zero. Secondly, the Radiant Blade pieces will be integrated into the game soon as well, allowing you to use these special swords in battle. Thirdly, Baus will be making its debut in combat over the next few months.
Our Cyberpunk Future
This is the beginning for Neon District. We’ve front-loaded most of the hard work — tens of thousands of hours in game design, art production, engineering, animation, special effects, music, and more. And now we’re going to start sharing this content with you and releasing the game mechanics one by one.
Neon District is designed to grow with the community, and to provide hundreds to thousands of hours of casual fun and innovative experiences for players over the coming years. In Neon District, you can personalize your characters and teams, play with them in combat, explore active missions and passive games, and dive into immersive experiences and crossovers with other exciting projects that are the core of what we do at Blockade Games. We want you to be involved — join our Discord, be a vocal fan, report bugs you find, share your suggestions and ideas. We’ll also share all of our latest builds and updates in our Discord on a daily and weekly basis.
And importantly, Neon District is not solely a blockchain game, but a game that anyone can join and play without any need to use or understand blockchain technology. As players create valuable assets and want to trade or sell them, or buy from other players, the incentive and the on-ramp is here for them through the Matic and Ethereum networks. We want everyone to feel welcome to play, regardless of technical prowess or personal finances — Neon District is for you.
“I’ve admired Neon District from the sidelines over the last 3 years as your team developed a blockchain-based game with the potential for mass appeal. I know it hasn’t been easy, but you made it! And this next chapter is where all the blood, sweat, and tears starts to pay off. For you, for Blockade, and most of all, the players! I am very f** excited for you!!”- Jim McNelis, Founder nft42 and Avastars
A Look Back, A Look Forward
Over the past three years, the company behind Neon District, Blockade Games, has worked on numerous projects since we launched, starting with a collaboration with The Pineapple Fund, called Pineapple Arcade, then leading up to Plasma Bears, the first free-to-play blockchain game. Along the way, we’ve worked on a dozen other smaller games, puzzles, and projects, including Codename: Metaboss and The Ledger of Szabo. Each of these projects served as a stepping stone, so that we could learn how players would interact with our ideas, or to build prototypes of the technology needed to support the bigger vision behind Neon District.
During these three years, we built, raised funds, prototyped, and released all throughout the bear market, and multiple times, we’ve had to get creative, scrappy and lean. With the COVID-19 pandemic and the immediate impact it had on our funds, this past year has been the most challenging for us. However, in huge part to our most ardent fans and followers, our incredibly dedicated and talented team, and the long-term support provided by investors and our biggest fans, a core team of us have been able to survive and continue to build all year.
Thank you to everyone for sticking with us through thick and thin, for being a casual fan on Twitter, Telegram, and Discord, and even for putting in your own hard-earned Ether to support us by buying keys, loot boxes, swords, and more over the years.
And a huge, special thank you to each and every one of our investors, advisors, and supporters who have stuck with us and believed in us from day one: BlockTower Capital, Techstars, Matic Network, HODL Capital, Pinksky Capital, XSquared Ventures, Chain Reaction, Fulgur Ventures, Polyient, Inc, Amazon’s Startup Team, Google’s Startup Team, Aurel Iancu, Alex Amsel, Yossi Hasson, Oleg Mikhalsky, Chris Loverme, Pine, William M. Weddleton, Kirill Bensonoff, Kung Family Office, Giuseppe, Notsofast, Unchained Ventures, Oto Gomes, and many others who’ve supported us financially, educationally, and technologically. We couldn’t do this without you.
