NEON DISTRICT Update Q3

Marguerite deCourcelle

Published in

Blockade Games

7 min readAug 24, 2021

Blockade Games has been crushing it behind the scenes. We wanted to bring you up to speed on our developments!

We’ve been building!

Major User Interface Redesign for “Neon District Version 2.0”:

UI / UX Components and Elements are defined and solidified
UI / UX flows enter finalization stage
New development team members are moving into full development of new ND UI & UX

Upcoming Neon District Features:

Season Zero Shells Integration — integrating all of the Season Zero shells into Neon District. More details below!
Character Equipment Binding & Unbinding — to allow for transferring, buying, and selling characters with all of their gear attached
Circle Payment Integration to buy Neon with a credit card or debit card
NFT Marketplace Makeover, easier to discover and find Neon District composable Avatars and rare items with corrected supply numbers to reflect limited supplies

Season Zero Shells:

All of the 400+ Neon District Season Zero assets have been completely redrawn and redesigned to fit on the in-game character rigs for battle and equipment
Bonding shells require a base asset to apply the Shell onto — so we’re adding 5 new base armor sets of all rarities for the Doctor, Ghost, Jack, Chance, and Demon armor sets, and 6 new base weapons to the Loot Crate
Using a Shell in-game requires bridging the asset over to Polygon using a special mechanic built into the Neon District Portal. All shells migrated over to Polygon for use in-game will come with a drop of the base asset to apply the Shell to, and gas costs incurred in transferring assets are reimbursed in Neon. More details to come in a future article!

Coming in Q4 2021

Founders Alpha Preview of Neon District Version 2.0 — all Neon District Trophy and Key Holders will receive early access to the new release of Neon District as we’re building and preparing it for release
Full public release of Neon District Version 2.0
The first Neon District expansion set, “End of Days”, a limited edition all-weapons Loot Crate

Gearing Up For Growth

Our industry is still very young and so are we. We are firmly focused on the long-term horizon and our decisions to date reflect this.

Over 1M Season 1 NFTs have been minted to date
21K new users last month
50K registered and unique users

Neon District is seeing this growth without seasonal limited & capped asset drops being live. So the real incentive to play is being rolled out with limited/seasonal/capped gear and which will undoubtedly accelerate the growth.

1.12 million ND NFTs on Polygon minted from the game, almost entirely from free-to-play pipeline, vast majority minted since prototype launch in January 2021.
More than 75,000 addresses holding ND assets on Polygon, some are custodial through our custodial wallet system, and some are non-custodial typically to trade on OpenSea.
OpenSea trading volume is >1,000 sales per day, with low total trade value due to the faucet of ND assets currently — we are introducing more rare items and asset sinks to improve cumulative secondary sale value.
Number of active players is growing significantly month-over-month, with 33K players over the last month and an average DAU of 7,000 per day, up from 3,700 one month ago.

Sources

New Hires

We’ve recently hired a talented team of two Front-End Engineers and one Back-End Engineer to help ramp up Neon District for the next major milestones and deliver the upcoming launch of Neon District Version 2.0.

We’re also wrapping up a summer with our first college intern, who has been a fantastic member of the team this summer, as he built the scaffolding for our Neon District Administration tools while also picking up new engineering skills to further his software development career.

In addition to the roles stated the Art and Design team has been acquiring new talent in order to prepare for future feature commitments and the growing expectations of players and NFT holders

These roles include:

UX Designer — hired to assist in delivering the changes to the product fans of Neon District are anticipating in the next version
Junior Game Artist — hired to assist in the creation of the game’s CARD decks, a rich visual component to the game’s combat.
Junior Narrative Writer — hired to assist in the development and growth of the project’s narrative systems.

Development Milestones

Art and Design

Please note that some of the pieces display work in progress parts of the game.

I’m incredibly proud of what our growing Art and Design team has produced over the year so far. With production practices maturing our ability to deliver the attractive high fidelity Cyberpunk look players and NFT holders crave is gathering pace. — Kyle Chivers, Art Director

Shells

*Above: All components for Shell Binding are fully completed*

Shells are now fully supported allowing for previous NFT holders to realized utility in their Season 0 assets.

Rarities

*Above: Common and Legendary versions of Neondyne’s Light Shock Therapy*

Upcoming content will see a significant change to the visual representation of items of varying rarities factoring in an aspect of degradation.

Skins

*Above: A skin for TripleT’s Loads of Fun Gun which can be applied to the “base” weapon*

Support for Skins now paves the way for the significant growth of customization and monetization options for future and existing art.

Loot Crates

The team has recently completed the latest Neon District Loot Crate “End of Days” (Release Q4 21') and are currently working on its follow up “Rags to Riches” (Release Q1 22') both aimed at building on the growing appeal of Blockchain Gaming.

Baus Sharding

*Above: Arm of Baus limited edition weapon, one of several limited-edition weapons designed*

Production is also complete on a special reprise event featuring Neon Districts very own Baus featuring several limited-edition weapons (Release Q4 21'). Includes a special new in-game “guardian summons” card to summon the Baus for your team for a one-time attack during battle.

UX Improvements

*Above: Players were interviewed and surveyed about the current user experience*

Players have been canvassed about their experiences with Neon District which has been followed up by a comprehensive audit with the core objective of addressing issues flagged in the feedback surveys whilst also accommodating required future features.

UI Update

*Above: Work in progress versions of Neon District’s Inventory Management interfaces*

The stated UX audit resulted in the resolution of many points of frustration players had with the game.

The result has been a night to day transformation which offers clarity and a clear way forward when managing player assets or putting them to work through NEON earning “Gigs”.

Dashboard

A significant upcoming change is a completely revamped Dashboard which will be the player’s portal into the game world tying together key data from the core gameplay offerings.

Vendors

*Above: Boethius the Merchant’s weapons workshop End of Days*

The manner in which players make purchasing interactions will be streamlined and now offer a much clear look, support for special Loot Crate sale events as well as individual item events all wrapped in a narrative lore