Article originally composed by Pnin with minor edits by Csaint02

On Jan 8, 2022, The Neon Crisis team held a live Twitter Spaces AMA for the 2nd of 4 weekly mints of their genesis “Neons”, launching on Moonriver, with a limited supply of 250 Genesis Neons each mint priced at .5 MOVR each. After all Genesis Neons are minted, minting will be closed until the RMRK standard is fully launched, and the price of mint will increase to 1 MOVR each with a total supply of 6008.

This week’s mint sold out in 8 minutes.

This is a recap of what was discussed, organized by subject.

Neon Crisis

Neon Crisis is generative, highly modular, cyberpunk-anime themed nft collection on Moonriver, a Layer 1 blockchain built on KSM.

The early collection is being launched as a PFP, but it's being designed as a runway to build towards a play-to-earn battle system game that features the RMRK standard with modular NFTs.

Eventually, there will be integration with one or two metaverses, depending on what's available on the RMRK standard. The goal is to be the first NFT collection launched that is RMRK compliant.

Originally Neon Crisis launched in Oct 2021, with Lead Developer Cicada and Front End Developer Kenji and two marketers, but the team paused after the initial launch as the two marketers didn’t feel they could contribute their full time efforts--so the team found a new marketing team: Yaba, Corndog, and Adam.

Neons

Unlike other NFT collections, visual rarity and stat rarity are separate, and ultimately matters less for gameplay compared to character development. You will be able to "push your stats around" with your equipment, training, and in-game activities. In other words, “

It's not only about how your NFT looks. Even if you don't have the most rare looking, you might have rare stats.”

There are, however, 8 1/1s in the collection that are visually unique and will play additional roles in the future.

Lead Developer Cicada

Cicada has a background in Solidity development, 3D modeling and graphics, machine learning, and he is the lead developer that is building the RMRK standard for Moonriver. Because he is working full time in both RMRK integration and Neon Crisis, he is deeply involved with all the ins-and-outs, and can modify things as he needs which he deems as a “crazy opportunity.” He loves complicated math, which the battle system that Adam has developed has plenty of, and he is excited to work in implementation of the battle system.

He has always been into the cyberpunk genre and loves defi, trustless models, resource management, and user-empowering blockchains.

Moonriver and RMRK

Moonriver was chosen because it's a fast, EVM compatible, experimental layer 1 built and secured by Kusama with all the tooling of Substrate. It’s low gas fee, and the current NFTs also launched on Moonriver have so far fit the ethos of the team.

The RMRK standard is special because it’s highly flexible and allows for modular NFTs. For instance, NFT arbitrary data can be passed between each other which allows, for instance, 3d avatars to be fed into other metaverses. With NFTs in combination with RMRK, the battle system becomes something truly special.

RMRK standard is said to be coming “very soon”.

Skybreach is the RMRK metaverse that is planned to be launched as a pixel native metaverse.

Alpha for Genesis Holders

• Early access to battlegrounds will be released to Genesis holders. There also may be additional NFT drops for Genesis holders. Additionally, the 1k Genesis minters are being tracked and will be kept in mind for future benefits.
• The team hopes they can become one of the first NFT collections on Skybreach, though they can’t guarantee anything. They are lobbying strongly for it.
• Development of the game will go through testnet, then early testers in which there will be contests and tournaments with such rewards such as the 1/1 Berserker minted in the prior week.
• With Cicada’s background in machine learning, Neons will likely be able to integrate generative lore that is built by AI for each NFT. For instance, you would call a contract to generate lore, and you would be given 5 options to select between. The machine would remember all your prior choices and build a lore based on your choices until you’ve built your character’s lore stack. From there, it gets written to the blockchain and becomes a permanent part of your character’s backstory. Essentially, you have an AI dreamt piece of fiction that you’ve helped create into your NFT. Additionally, events such as winning a tournament could open up a new lore stack that could be written to your NFT.

Here are some Machine Learning AI generative art pieces that Cicada had played with in the past in order to test how equipables and mods could affect visuals.

• There's no plan right now to create tokens associated with Neon Crisis, though DeFi gaming isn’t out of the question. If NC will have a DeFi aspect, Cicada does not want to take value from new users, and ideally make it include skill/resource management in implementation.
• Moonbeam will be the Moonriver chain launched on Polkadot, and there will certainly be a bridge between them so that Neon Crisis can exist on both interoperable chains.
• Here is an image of a pixel asset of a Neon just released. Could this be related to Kanaria Skybreach?

• A new “sideproject” was announced that is community building for the Moonriver ecosystem, as well as a charity project. This will benefit not only Neon Crisis, but the network as a whole.

It is similar to r/place on Reddit where there’s only a certain amount of pixel real estate, and anyone can write to the pixels to create art that can be overwritten by others. Unlike Reddit, however, this will be permanent on the blockchain, and the contest will end after a week’s time or so.

Individuals or communities can purchase, for a very cheap fee, pixels, and they can organize to “take over” pixel real estate in competition against other communities.

99% of the income will go to charity, and any EVM community can take part. Communities will choose specific charities to donate to, and a leaderboard will track profit until the end of the contest in which the resulting image is finalized on the blockchain.

Battlegrounds

Battlegrounds was heavily covered in the Alpha, which is why it gets its own devoted section.

The battle mechanics have essentially been fleshed out. Most of the battle contracts only need formalization into Solidity contracts.

A whitepaper written by Adam will be released soon, hopefully before the next weekly mint. The contracts hopefully could be done by the end of the month.

The whitepaper, as a first draft, will only cover the p2p battles, but it will not cover training dojo, tournament, round robin, turn-based gameplay, or otherwise.

The battle mechanics and system, while not meant to be an immersive gameplay experience, will be “pretty legit” and elaborate. It can be seen as a set of simulations where the more you enter your NFT into simulations, the more your NFT evolves.

This is also beneficial to budget as the team is starting small, but will expand as necessary.

Article originally composed by Pnin

• KSM address for tips: D8WrK1jsFy9zpFwFZStaDTmX32pMZVdwXTm5rt9LsRKBQrz