For v0.2 I had a panel of AIs playtest Neon Protocol: Uprising. For v0.3 I added one more personality: Pip, nineteen, who plays everything on a phone, often one-handed on a bus, taps fast, and gives up on anything that needs precision or a keyboard. Pip played the whole of the first mission on a phone-sized touch screen.
What Pip found
- A turn that looked frozen. After every attack, the Next and End Turn buttons stayed greyed out until you happened to tap one of your own units. On a desktop you barely notice; on a phone, Pip nearly quit seven minutes in. The buttons were never told the attack had finished. One line fixed it.
- Seven tips in two turns. Some arrived after the thing they described had already happened. Tips now come at most one per turn, there is a “No more tips” button, and none pop up during the enemy’s turn.
- Targeting that never explained itself. Tapping an enemy you could not shoot just closed the menu. Now the game says why: out of range, no line of sight, or a civilian. Grey tiles in the attack range show where a building blocks the shot.
- A menu in the way. The Fire/Wait/Back menu sat on top of the very enemy you wanted to hit. On small screens it now docks at the bottom.
And the rest of v0.3
Mission 1-6, “Dead Air”, was the one mission that still beat every bot. The cause turned out to be simple: each Uplink Tower gives its owner +10% attack, the bonus stacks, and the Overmind’s infantry started right beside two of the three towers. It no longer does, and you get a second anti-air team against its gunships. Your income now appears at your HQ each turn with a one-off explanation, the result screen explains how it scores you, and Esc closes every panel.
One change did not survive. I tried making every army bolder once a mission ran past its target length, to stop AI-versus-AI games stalling. The bots just charged into losing fights, so it came out again. The stalemates are a limit of the bots, not something a human player hits.
