Neon District

Gameplay Guide

“A dream comes true: cyberpunk meets violence and pizzas.”

Pizza is essential. Pizza is life. Pizza is the combination of all the beautiful things in this world and took the form of food. According to the latest research by scientists, pizza is at least as important as oxygen. Of course, in this scenario, the scientists are my stomach and my mouth. 

Hello everyone! Today, we will take a look at the cyberpunk-themed RPG game, Neon District and its Neon Pizza game mode, where flavor meets combat mechanics and tons of LED lights.

Let's start this guide by explaining Neon Pizza and Neon District to avoid confusion; Neon District is a free-to-play role-playing game with collectible NFT assets that utilize both MATIC and Ethereum networks. In Neon District, players collect unique cool-looking characters, gear for their characters, customize and level up their crews, and compete against other players’ crews through Neon Pizza multiplayer game mode. 

In Neon Pizza, you can send your pizza delivery crew on missions to deliver pizzas to hungry people of the Neon District. After completing these pizza delivery missions, you can earn Neon, Juice, and Parts that you can use these earnings to buy equipment crates, level up your crew, and strengthen their armors and weapons. You can choose to be Neon District's law-abiding pizza delivery crew and deliver pizza to the citizens, like ordinary delivery people. Sounds boring? Well, you can go rogue and ambush other pizza delivery crews to steal their earnings as well! Under the LED lights of Neon District, no one is safe, apparently.

You can think of Neon District as the main game and Neon Pizza as an expansion or a game mode. You can even position Neon District as a metaverse and Neon Pizza as a game within this metaverse. How you want to position Neon District and Neon Pizza in your mind is entirely up to you, as these interlocking concepts do not change the gameplay.

Now that you’ve understood the general concept of the game, we can move on to how to start this delicious, colorful, and wild adventure. First of all, you need to go to the game's official website to get started.

After creating your new account, you’ll be given a free character, 300 Neon, and 5 Juice to start your adventure. You can pick one of these six characters; Heavy, Jack, Demon, Doc, Genius, and Ghost. After that, you can use your free-given resources to buy three additional characters to form your first delivery crew! 

• Heavy: Very sturdy and tanky character. Can taunt enemies to attack her. 
• Jack: Optimal DPS and debuff character. Can increase the amount of damage on an enemy by debuffing them.
• Demon: Pure DPS character. Hits very hard.
• Doc: Healer character. It can really help you to stay alive during a battle.
• Genius: Buff or support character. It can increase your characters’ damage or defense.
• Ghost: Pure DPS character. Can poison enemies to inflict poison damage for a long time.

I really like Heavy since I always play as a tank in every MMORPG.

By clicking the “CHARACTER” tab at the top of your screen, you can change your characters’ gender, skin tone, name, etc. if you want to. You can also equip your characters with weapons and armor from this tab.

I own Heavy, Ghost, Doc, and Demon characters, as you can see.

You need to set up your crew as your delivery crew to be able to send them onto delivery missions. To do that, just simply click the “BATTLE” tab and then select “TEAM SETUP.” You will be greeted with an empty team slot. Click on it to be able to customize your first crew; enter your crew’s name (mine is pizza4life) and then click the “ADD” button to add your characters to this newly created crew formation. From there, you’ll be able to see your unassigned characters. Click on one of them and pick a slot for your character.

The order of the slot placement matters. For example, if you place a character on Slot 1 they will the at the most-front. In that perspective, the Slot 4 character will be the rear-most character.

“Let’s get down into the pizza business!”

Congratulations! After slotting up your crew, you’re officially ready to participate in Neon Pizza! Now you can send out your crew to do pizza deliveries to start earning Neon. To send your crew onto missions, go to the “NEON PIZZA” tab at the top of your screen, then select “DELIVERY AGENTS”.

From this section, you can follow your crew’s progress.

This is the “mission control section” of the game, so to speak. From here, you can send your crew onto missions by changing the tier of the shift, aka mission. The tier dedicates the difficulty of the missions, and also, different tiers can determine whether you can ambush others or not.

Tier 1 Shift: You can’t ambush other players’ pizza delivery squads. You earn the normal amount of Neon without any bonuses.

Tier 2 Shift: You can ambush other players’ pizza delivery squads. You earn an increased amount of Neon thanks to added PvP encounter to your shift. 

There is also a tier 3 shift but it’s not currently available to players. In tier 3 shifts, you can earn Juice and Parts, in addition to Neon. A side note, though; tier 3 shifts are the hardest ones for you to complete successfully. 

After selecting a tier for your crew, they will head out to complete the delivery of that tier. You can monitor your crew’s detailed progress from the same window. Also, you can see the outcome -Neon-wise if it’s tier 1 shift- of your mission, estimated delivery time, and the crew's destination.

I expect to earn 12 Neon from my tier 1 shift upon completion.

When a shift is completed, your hard-earned Neon, Parts, or Juice will be displayed at the “EARNED PAY” section of the window. You may want to deposit your valuables from time to time if you are interested in doing tier 2 shifts because you may be attacked by other player crews and lose whatever you’ve earned so far. You don’t have to worry about that if you only do tier 1 shifts since they happen in the safe zone, which means no one can attack or ambush your pizza delivery crew and steal your income. 

If you are a PvP-oriented player and like to compete with other players, I suggest you pick tier 2 shifts for your delivery crew. In tier 2, when you ambush a player’s crew you have a 50% chance to steal their unbanked earnings. This will initially increase your earnings in the long term. Instead of doing PvE missions on tier 1, you can feel the thrill and earn more in tier 2 shifts. A side note though; You cannot use your crew to attack any player crews if they are already busy; if your crew is already on a delivery mission or attacking someone else’s crew, you won’t be able to use that crew. You need to create another crew with four different characters. If I were you, I’d create a crew just for tier 1 delivery missions and another crew for tier 2 ambush missions. It is wise to equip your tier 2 crew with powerful weapons and armor.

After setting up your tier 2 ambush crew, you can now send them to ambush missions by simply clicking the “NEON PIZZA” tab on your screen and selecting the “CRIMINAL ACTIVITY” option.

Normally, you’d see your available crew on here. Since I am using my crew on a tier 1 delivery mission at the moment, I don’t have any available crew to execute an ambush.

In order to ambush a player, that player must be in the tier 2 area. Otherwise, if players are doing a tier 1 mission in the safe zone, you won’t be able to ambush them. You can only ambush a player per delivery. Basically, the enemy crew has to be on the move for you to be able to attack.

This is the detailed ambush screen. From here, you can gather intel from other crews. Upon completion of gathering intel, you may want to rethink your move. They might be stronger than your crew, and if that’s the case, you’ll surely lose against them if that's the case.

“We got our first pizza order. Lock and load, crew!”

Okay, now you know everything you need to know about the mechanics and general flow of the game. But what about the gameplay? What does it look like? How do you win against your opponents? Let’s dive into it, shall we?

The gameplay is purely turn-based. You face your opponent’s four-membered crew with your own crew. When it’s your turn to take any action, you can attack your enemy directly with the “BASE ATTACK” button, or you can use your character-specific movement card which may include heal, taunt, speed, defense, damage buff, or enemy speed, damage, defense debuff, depending on your character. The ultimate goal for you is to win the battle by wasting your enemies one by one. Using your character cards strategically is very crucial. For example, if your Doc (healer) is under heavy fire by your opponents, you may want to use your Heavy’s “TAUNT” ability to attract attention. By doing that, you’ll secure your Doc for a while and let Heavy take all the damage.

Two cool-looking pizza delivery crews are taunting each other. Nothing to worry about.

Neon District is totally free. Even the game gives you a character and valuable resources at the beginning of the game for your participation. However, you need reliable gear and better characters if you want to focus on the tier 2 ambush zone and its missions. You can’t just punch your enemies to death while they are attacking you with machetes and machine guns. Of course, you can try, but I would not recommend that.

As you earn more Neon from delivery and ambush missions, you can use your Neon to improve your gameplay by buying more characters to form new crews, buying gear crates to equip your crew members with good equipment, buying Juice to upgrade your characters, or buying Parts to upgrade your crew’s gear. In total, there are five equipment items for you to equip your crew with; head, body, arms, legs, and weapon. Each gear crate contains four random items with different rarities. Your rarity chances for items from the gear crates are listed down below:

Common: 47%

Uncommon: 28%

Rare: 15.35%

Ultra Rare: 8.25%

Legendary: 1.4%

A gear crate is 500 Neon on the game’s marketplace.

After opening your gear crate, you can view your loot from the “INVENTORY” tab at the top of your screen. 

Now with your new equipment, you can proceed to the next step; equipping your character with the equipment that you just received. To do that, go to the “CHARACTERS” section at the top of your screen, then select a character that you want to equip. 

I picked Heavy.

To equip a gear, click on the “EQUIP” button. To level up your character, click on the “LEVEL” button.

When you click the “EQUIP” button, you will be greeted with the equipment selection section. From there, you can pick a head, body, arms, legs, or weapon item and equip your character with it. To level up your character, you need Juice. You can buy Juice from the marketplace if you don’t have enough to begin with. Click on the “LEVEL” button at the character section and level up your character by using Juice. You can see the amount of Juice needed for you to level up your character down below the “LEVEL” button.

To level up your weapons and armor, you can go to the dashboard and click the “WEAPONS” or “ARMOR” buttons. 

The process is basically the same with leveling up characters. But instead of Juice, you use Parts to level up your armor and weapons. 

And now my friend, you are ready to join the big league of pizza delivery in Neon District! 

“What happened to the “pizza4life” crew?”

Well, we had a good run. The game felt strange at first to me, it took me about 5 minutes to get used to the battle screen especially. But after spending some time in the game, I can confidently say that the game is fun and has a lot of potential. The game is in alpha status at the moment, and its main cryptocurrency, Neon, has not been released yet. Nevertheless, it is a game that has a bright future and is fun to pass time. Maybe the game will get even better when its official token is released and it will have millions of players. Who knows?