Neon Crisis| Recap of AMA, January 22nd

Article Originally composed by Pnin with minor edits by Csaint02

In the last Genesis Mint of the Neon Crisis NFT series on Moonriver, the mint sold out in 2 minutes.

At present, there are 272 unique holders, with an average of 4.5 Neons each.

Several updates were given by the team

• A teaser on the visual elements of battle, seen in the cover photo, as a dynamic trading card drawing from blockchain data was dropped. More details in the article.
• Trait Rarity is now visible in each Neon’s profile under the "My Collection" link on the website. The team emphasized that Neons are meant to be modular, and you can frequently "create a rare Neon" with better equippables, not to mention the yet-to-be shown statistical rarities.
• You can now download your entire collection for easy sharing on the website.
• The current WIP of the Neon (White) Paper detailing exact math of the battle system, as well as rarity distribution is in progress here. Some highlights are presented in the rest of this article.
• With the market as is, the public mint price of the remaining 4872 Neons may need to be adjusted upwards above the 1 MOVR price in order to sustain the development team’s expenses. The exact price will be discussed with the community.
• The public mint will occur after the RMRK standard is released. You can purchase Neons through secondary market on the Moonbeans exchange
• The public mint will have a lower max on each transaction to improve distribution of Neons.
• Genesis holders will receive additional benefits in the form of gear, drops, access, and resources, though fair gameplay will always be preserved. The earliest of supporters with Neons numer 136 and under will be given additional benefits as the earliest of supporters, and will likely have visual rarity.
• Please migrate your Neons v1 if you haven’t yet
• MovrPlace (a creative charity project similar to reddit place where pixels can be purchased on an empty canvas for "a nickel a pixel") will be ready to launch soon. Other projects are encouraged to reach out for collaboration. 95% of funds raised will go to charity, with the rest for website maintenance and development.
• The early battle contract should be ready mid to late February.
• Artists, programmers, and other talented community members are encouraged to reach out if they would like to participate in Neon Crisis development.

Front End

Kenji is the front end developer who is working on the battle visuals, website, and other user-facing visuals. He comes from an extensive background in Web 2.0, and he joined Cicada in the Summer of 2021 to work on Neon Crisis.

He has been working on designing the aesthetic of battles and tournament brackets, and he released an early alpha of how the NFTs in gameplay might look, though he has been playing with several ideas and the final version may be different.

In these examples, data will be collected from the blockchain and displayed as trading cards for the ever changing Neons as they alter equipment and stats. It will be similar to Kanaria and DeFi kingdoms where there will be slots for items, borders that have different meanings, and some fun ideas that Kenji is not ready to reveal yet.

Battles will likely look similar to a card game street fighter, though additional games will emerge from the varying metaverse integrations (Skybridge, Phala, etc). Battles will be designed to engage players as much as possible.

Cicada (lead developer of Neon Crisis) may integrate a unique machine-generated fight dialogue, so that each battle is read entirely uniquely.

(Extra note: You can now click to download an album of your entire collection for easy sharing on social media.)

GameFi

Cicada has been focused on RMRK contracts, fractionalizing parts of NFTs into equippables to make each NFT as modular as possible. As Neon Crisis is "his baby", he is excited to develop in the many directions available to NFTs on the RMRK standard.

He used the phrase "GameFi" to describe the open system where—while there’s no token planned (and in fact, it will be avoided "at all costs")—he will build tools to allow anyone to put up whatever rewards (NFTs, tokens, equipment) they want to for the battle system in a way that incentivizes playing.

Lending systems are also being targeted so that renting a Neon Crisis will become possible, amongst other developments such as interoperability, asset management, and various tools that allows people to "do what they want to do with their stuff". Cicada believes this is one major reason that blockchain is so powerful—the open flow of things that have value.

This vision is what he refers to as "GameFi" in Neon Crisis, as opposed to creating a token that has no inherent value and in many cases in NFT projects, is frequently "borderline ponzi".

Both Cicada and Kenji believe that adding an additional token frequently can kill an NFT project because it’s a closed system and people end up chasing gains rather than playing the game. While not impossible to build a token into the mechanics, it’s usually not necessary, and, it exposes NFT teams to a legal grey area that could potentially issues.

Injuries

Previously it was misstated that it was possible to be injured for up to one year; the truth is that the longest possible duration of an injury will be 55 days, with the majority of injuries healing within the week.

There may be an option to use a "sickbay", or accelerate healing, though the exact mechanism hasn’t been determined yet, be it staking, or—as Cicada is in full support of, "dystopic hypercapitalism."

The Neon Paper

Adam released the link to the Neon (white) Paper in which you can see his edits live as he finalizes the paper. His intro is of particular power:

"Neon Crisis…may be a proof-of-concept for what is possible with the most advanced NFT integration on the planet. Neon Crisis will require almost every new utility that the RMRK standard enables such as equippables, additional resources, and programmed NFT bases. These new functionalities paired with the logically versatile language of Solidity are the technical foundations of Neon Crisis and will facilitate never-before-seen gaming utility in the NFT space.

"…All of the mechanics behind these NFTs are developed from scratch specifically for the use in Neon Crisis. This proprietary ensemble of mathematical algorithms and logical procedures ensures a unique gaming experience…the Moonriver networks makes it the perfect place to grow the Neon Crisis project…

A summary of a few points covered in the Neon Paper: * 9.726% of battles results in injury in one or both combatants which will affect future battles.

• Camaraderie effect increases rapidly up to 6, and decreases rapidly beyond that.
• Combat history, currently depreciating over 30 days, is dependent on number of fights over the last 30 days, and includes Dojo Training to affect battle rolls. Experience as another factor which depreciates over 24 hours and is based on unique and most recent battles.
• Each Neon is assigned a fixed defense, Strength, Luck, Agility, and Perception, each randomly drawn from a normal distribution (approaching the mean) with a minimum value of 20.
• Global constants are applicable in every battle environment (Speed/Awareness, Entourage, Veteran, Power/Guard, Active Duty, Fate/Fortune, Wound).
• Dojo simulated battles will generally generate weaker opponents, and are limited to one every 12 minutes. Heroes with heavy injuries can’t train in the Dojo. The max benefit of Dojo training is a 20% boost on Overall Combat and Experience attributes.

…as the Neon Paper is still being written, more coverage will be shared in the future.

Other Questions Answered

• Special skills that unlock with various gateways can be considered for Neons, though there are some technical complications to implementation.

• Bridges between chains are totally possible, with the understanding that deploying on other chains each have different costs and limitations.

• The systems in place will naturally have depreciating value to "whales" becoming too powerful. For instance, game mechanics have diminishing returns on benefits of holding many Neons. Additionally, each action has a fee, such a tournament entry fee in which the pot goes to the winner (plus a rare prize), and by doing so, there’s a natural balance of cost/benefit for players.

• There may be certain types of battles or environments that have more aggressive stat caps so that there is always an incentive for new players to engage with the game. This is important to the team, and if there is an imbalance in which new players are discouraged, the team will quickly work to resolve barriers to entry. There will always be a balance between giving value to the most loyal community members, and attracting new audiences.

• There could potentially be a refresh of the lore as development of the game continues.

• Game progression will always be encouraged, and much of it could come from things such as unlocking new lore and events for your Neon.

• There will be plenty of future AMAs as many things are in works and are coming quickly.

• KSM donations for this article can be sent here D8WrK1jsFy9zpFwFZStaDTmX32pMZVdwXTm5rt9LsRKBQrz