The Neuroslicers Pre-Alpha Mid-Point - Epic Cool Content And Cyber Development Sorcery news

Hi Everyone,

It's been a mad house (Quite litterly....Milcho, our lead designer / gameplay programmer lives in my house) the past few weeks as the Pre-Alpha for NeuroSlicers has been in full swing since the 13th April.

As we quickly approach the mid-point this Friday I wanted to go over some of the cool enhancements we've made to the game with the Communities help over on Discord.

We're been doing weekly sprints to get some of the many requested features in game with the aim of making sure that we're creating an awesome experience for everyone.

In addition we've been running a weekly competition for our most active players where they have a chance to earn a custom in game Avatar, created by our Art Director, Loic.

Anyway, lets get on with the content!

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EPIC COOL CONTENT AND CYBER DEVELOPMENT SORCERY

Over the past 3 weeks we've been listening closely to everyone on our Discord, players that have filled out our Surveys and we've watched 100's of hours of video content from players who have taken the time to analyse and dissect every aspect of the game. We've shared some of their video's below if you'd like to check them out.

We're eternally grateful to these people as it's with their help we're able to make a better game and achieve our goal of pushing the RTS genre forward in a meaningful way.

So what have we added to the game since April 13th?

WEEK 2 UPDATES

2V2 Mode
A much requested feature the 2v2 map has been a favourite of the community since we put it in.

Additional Changes + Bug Fixes
In addition to the 2V2 Mode we included a large number of gameplay changes including the first version of a Unit AI attack priority system, improvements to the Rally system, some balance changes and some bug fixes and usability upgrades.

For a full list of the changes check out the Patch Notes for Week 2 here.

Community Portraits
With week 2 came the first few community portraits to be integrated into the game.

We had a competition to win one in the run up to the Pre-Alpha for the most amazing bit of cyberpunk or NeuroSlicers related community creation whether it be some art, music, fan fiction or anything else. The winner ended up being our community member Kryo with his short story about GL17CH, a Hacker in the world of NeuroSlicers, have a read of it here.

Next up was the portrait for another community member, HRCK0, who grabbed one of the packages on our Brightlocker page.

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Finally we had the Portraits for Week 1 and 2 winners of our XP competition, Divaliz and Omicron-Domo. These guys managed to earn the most XP in each of their respective weekends playing the game. XP is time based, so the longer you play the game over a weekend the more likely you are to win a portrait.

​Want a chance to win your own custom in game portrait? Then be sure to jump into the game during one of the weekends up until the 4th June - XP starts at 0 each weekend, so even new players are up for a chance to win!

WEEK 3 UPDATES

The Replay System

With week three came a fully featured replay system that allowed players to review and analyse their games in lots of detail. Features of the system include:

1. Pause and control the playback speed of the replay
2. View info about all player's Resource generation
3. View each player's active Scripts when they unlock and swap them

NeuroBot

With week two came the introduction of our custom Discord Bot which we rightfully named NeuroBot.



NeuroBot interfaces directly with our custom backend servers and is capable of all sorts of cool stuff including:

Live Match Results posted to our #Looking-For-Match channel

Current Server Status + Display's Current Online Players and what game modes they're queuing for in the #Looking-For-Match channel description.

Player can request info using the following commands:

!player [playername] - Shows information about a player

!list - Lists player's usernames that currently online

!top - Lists the top 10 players

!topweekly - Lists the top 10 players this week

This is just the first steps that we've taken to integrate NeuroSlicers with our community experience and we have lots more planned for the future.

Additional Changes + Bug Fixes
In addition to the 2V2 Mode we included a large number of gameplay changes including the first version of a Unit AI attack priority system, improvements to the Rally system, some balance changes and some bug fixes and usability upgrades.

For a full list of the changes check out the Patch Notes for Week 2 here.

Community Portraits
Just the one Community Portrait this week, our winner was xRetri. It was a close race to the end of the Weekend with Recon, another one of our community members hot on his heels until Sunday evening.

Anyway, this is still a WIP version of the xRetri's portrait. Still waiting for his final approval before Loic polishes it up and we get it in game so xRetri can use and show it off this weekend.

THIS WEEK'S UPDATES + DISCORD CIPHER CHALLENGE

This week we have some great things in store for the Pre-Alpha, but we're not quite ready to show anything substantial just yet......well, nothing apart from the image below.....what could it be? :P

Last week, at the request of the community, we started giving our Discord users the chance to join one of the 4 NeuroSlicers Factions, Tesseract, Bit.Crash, Xanctuary and the Freelancers. We had plans to build an ARG (Alternate Reality Game) using a custom Discord bot and have the 4 teams solve Ciphers to uncover some of the game narrative. The original plan was to do this after the Pre-Alpha, but we really wanted to test out the mechanics of this ARG in a more manual way first before spending time coding the bot.

Every week we release a number of new Cipher's for the Corporations to discuss and solve. Hidden within the Ciphers are clues to our game narrative as well as information about the next Pre-Alpha update content.

Each Faction / Corporation is able to recruit new members to help solve the ciphers, they also had to choose a leader who would make decisions in regards to how Factions spent their resources.

All Factions start with 1000 credits. With these credits they can purchase clues from the Keeper (currently me, Justin, but eventually a bot), they can also trade information with the other corporations for a price.

The First team to solve a cipher wins 100 Credits + a Faction Point that will come into play later down the line to unlock Faction abilities, 2nd 50 Credits and 3rd, 30 Credits

Here are the Cipher's the community have already managed to solve, do you think you can solve them too?

MORE COMMUNITY VIDEOS AND LIVESTREAMS

Last week we finally managed to get NeuroSlicers added to the Twitch Database so that our Pre-Alpha players could select the game while streaming. You can check out all the saved videos here

This week we're highlighting a couple of community video's along with our Weekly Developer Q&A which we hold on Friday's just before the servers go live each week. Be sure to join us this week where we'll be talking through the new updates and taking questions from the community. Stream starts from 5PM UTC over on our Twitch Channel.

That's it for this week. As usual, don't forget to join us over on Discord to come and chat with us directly, an remember you can jump into the Pre-Alpha by either purchasing access via Brightlocker or through one of our Discord giveaways.

Until next week,

Justin and the Dream Harvest Team