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