Neon Protocol: Uprising is my free browser tactics game: Advance Wars battles, Command & Conquer base building, set in Shin-Pacifica in 2187, where the city’s defence AI has done the arithmetic and decided the answer is fewer of us. Version 0.5 is out, and it’s the biggest update so far.

Play it free in your browser (phone, laptop or controller).

Stealing from the greats, on purpose

Before building anything I studied what made the genre’s best games work, and wrote down what Neon Protocol was missing:

• From Advance Wars: the battle scene. Every attack now plays a short split-screen fight on a backdrop of where the units stand, and soldiers drop as their HP falls. Tap to skip.
• From Command & Conquer: the voice of the base. “Construction complete.” “Our base is under attack.” Mara calls it out on the radio, or a cold system voice if you play the machines. Superweapons get a public countdown, and the enemy’s target is marked a full turn before it fires.
• From Fire Emblem and XCOM: people you care about. Five named soldiers carry their rank across the campaign, choose a specialisation, form bonds, and, if you play Classic, stay dead.
• From Into the Breach: fairness. Rewind your turn, see what the enemy will hit, and since luck is now worked out from the battle state, Rewind can’t be used to re-roll a fight.

The panel of AI playtesters

Every change was tested by AI players with very different personalities, each playing the game in their own browser and reporting what went wrong:

• Hana, a story-first newcomer, found that the tutorial tips buried the actual lessons.
• Dex, an exploit hunter, found a free extra move hidden in the save system.
• Lou, a C&C veteran playing the villains, found that the Overmind could never build a single unit from a factory. That bug had been live since launch.
• Kenta, an Advance Wars veteran, found the AI too passive.
• Sol, a story critic, mapped the whole campaign and rewrote its weakest scenes.
• Ivy played only on a phone, Max stress-tested everything at once, and Ana audited accessibility as a colour-blind, keyboard-only player.

A sister game helped

I’m also building Iron Front ’44, a WW2 game on the same bones, and the two projects traded notes. Its first tip was to play mirrored maps from both sides before balancing anything. That one test found a 7-to-0 bias that turned out to be a single general’s income bonus. Another of its tests, a text map of the end of a stuck game, showed forty AI units circling an undefended base for ten days because they’d run out of ammo and never went home. Both are fixed, and Iron Front picked up two of my bugs in return.

Also in v0.5

• A Boot Camp that teaches one idea per mission, ten new story interludes, two side stories, and a full arc for the Overmind campaign.
• New 96px portraits, redrawn sprites, character voices and an after-action report.
• Map Maker III with symmetry, stamps, copy and paste, and an AI-vs-AI balance simulator.
• Full keyboard play, colour-blind shapes and palette, a reduced-motion setting, and a thumb-friendly phone layout.

It’s still an early build. If something feels unfair, there’s a “Report a problem” button in the pause menu. Play Neon Protocol v0.5.