I have made a new game. Neon Protocol: Uprising is a turn-based tactics game that runs in your browser: think Advance Wars battles with Command & Conquer base building, set in a neon megacity on the edge of collapse. It is free, there is nothing to download, and this is version 0.1, so it is an early build with rough edges.
The trailer
The story: a machine that did the arithmetic
It is 2187. Shin-Pacifica is a coastal megacity of eleven million people: harbour slums, neon towers, drowned deltas, snowbound peaks and a poisoned valley. It is all that is left of a burned-out planet.
The city’s defence AI, the Overmind, was built to manage the damage. It took the job seriously. People burned in two centuries what the planet took four hundred million years to store, they paved the wetlands and emptied the seas, and then they asked a machine to fix it. The machine’s answer is fewer of them. Sector by sector, it is “recycling” the city.
“They built me to manage the damage. I have managed it. The answer is fewer of them.”
The Overmind, Act I
In the Sector 9 harbour slums, an ex-docker with two chrome arms called Kova Arashi decides that the Overmind is not taking his block. That is where the uprising starts.
What makes the stakes interesting to me is that the villain is not simply wrong about the problem. It is wrong about the answer. So there are two campaigns: you can fight for the Resistance, or take the Overmind’s side through the same battles and hear its case in its own words. Across five acts the war moves from the harbour slums to a drowning delta, the glaciers on the coastal peaks, a valley poisoned by two centuries of industry, and finally the neon core where the Overmind defends its own heart.
The generals
There are twelve commanders, each with a passive bonus, a power and a super power that charge up as you fight. The Resistance has Kova Arashi (The Vanguard), the builder Wren Okafor (The Architect), the hacker Sable (The Ghost), the pilot Juno Hayate (The Skybreaker), and Oracle-7, an AI that sided with people and speaks in probabilities. Against them stand the Overmind’s lieutenants: Warden-9, Hydra, Mirror, Scourge, Tally and Vesper, and finally the Overmind itself.
The Overmind did not just copy the old armies either. Its machines have been rebuilt to cut people apart: red-eyed cyborgs with blade arms, tanks with buzz-saws and pincer arms, clawed gunships. You can see the difference on the battlefield at a glance.
What is in version 0.1
- Two five-act campaigns, one for each side, with boss battles, weather, and day and night.
- Battles across the whole of Shin-Pacifica: neon city blocks, resort islands, snowfields, desert valleys, drowned coasts and toxic foundries.
- Base building: capture city blocks for income, harvest Lumenite, and build barracks, factories, airpads, docks, walls and superweapons.
- Custom Battle from 1v1 up to 4v4 with allies and co-op, plus Conquest, a Horde mode and a Map Maker.
- Mouse, keyboard, touch and controller support.
- A 48-track soundtrack built on themes from my own recordings, running from synthwave and industrial to cyberpunk reggae, dub, city pop and taiko.
Version 0.1 means exactly that: it is playable from start to finish, but the balance is still moving and there will be bugs. If you find one, or a mission feels unfair, I would like to hear about it.
How it was made
Like my other games, this is a personal project made with AI assistance (Claude). The music started life as my own recordings: the chord progressions and melodies were taken from them and rebuilt in new styles. Shin-Pacifica, its people, factions and events are invented. Your progress saves only in your own browser, and no data is collected.
