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 decided the answer to a burned-out planet is fewer people. Version 0.6 is out, and it is mostly about how the war feels.

Every gun sounds like itself

Until now the game’s weapons were picked by weapon type, so a Resistance tank fired the same thin “coil” sound as a sniper. Now every unit has its own voice, all synthesised live in the browser. The rail-tank’s main gun cracks, the barrel rings and the breech reloads. The howitzer shakes the street, and its shell whistles in before it lands. The Overmind’s machines fire space-opera blasters, from the drones’ three-bolt “pew” to twin heavy turbo-blasters, and its grav tank sucks the bass out of the air when it fires.

Underneath that are 25 real recordings from Freesound, shared by my sister project Iron Front ’44: explosions, ricochets, death cries, boots on gravel and a battlefield raging beyond the edge of the map. Their authors are credited in the game and on the game’s GitHub page.

The fix I’m happiest with is the least visible. When I played it back, the sounds felt detached from the picture. Some guns had a wind-up before the bang, so the tank’s shot arrived 140 milliseconds after its muzzle flash. Every weapon now fires within one frame of the flash, and every death sound follows its animation: a body hits the ground when it lands, and a blown-off turret clangs when it comes down.

No two deaths the same

Troops are blown back, crumple, spin, stagger, or, hit by the wrong weapon, burn or turn to ash. Tanks flip onto their roofs, lose their turrets, cook off for a while, melt into slag or shatter. Walkers topple, gunships spiral down trailing smoke, and ships capsize or break their backs. Every wreck stays on the map for the rest of the battle. (There’s a setting to turn the blood off.)

The soldiers talk

Borrowed from Iron Front, where the soldiers shout in their own languages: little speech bubbles now pop up when units move, fire, score a kill or get hit. Shin-Pacifica’s Resistance talk street slang, English code-switching with Japanese, Korean, Mandarin, Tagalog, Hindi, Vietnamese and Indonesian (“Move, 빨리!”, “撃て!”, “Tara na!”). The Overmind’s machines answer in binary, and some of it spells real words if you decode it.

A fairer end of the war

I asked an AI playtester, “Rei”, to play the late missions by hand on Veteran, every turn, no autopilot. Rei won one of nine. The bosses were ten to fifteen times as tough as a tank, the final mission’s storm grounded your aircraft for the whole fight, two escort missions sprang ambushes the briefing never mentioned, and some target times were shorter than the travel. All of that is fixed, and the briefings now tell you what’s coming.

Also in v0.6

• Story choices: four decisions where the cast argues both sides, and your pick changes later missions and the epilogue.
• Fusion and Singularity Cores for late-game power, faction units (the Scrapper, Kite Drone, Gleaner and Swarm Node) and faction traits.
• A power theme for every leader, and six new enemy personalities for Custom Battle.
• A soundtrack half the size to download, composed by Tristan Hotham.

The code is now open on GitHub. It’s still an early build: if something feels unfair, the pause menu’s “Report a problem” button writes the bug report for you.