The Alienworks Neo developer community is preparing to launch an interactive tutorial to introduce developers to the ecosystem, and a new Neo network monitor. Alienworks founder and former R&D director of Neo Global Development (NGD), Peter Lin, described the projects in an interview on the Neo News Today podcast.

The Alienworks interactive tutorial is designed to teach students how to write smart contracts on Neo through the development of an intergalactic themed game. The course involves creating aliens and a dice-based adventure system that can lead to various encounters, battles, and evolutions. Currently in beta testing, the concept was inspired by Ethereum’s Solidity tutorial, CryptoZombies.

CryptoZombies [was] designed very good, so people are attracted to this website to learn how to write smart contracts. That’s why we designed the interactive tutorial – to help people learn about Neo and learn how to write smart contracts on Neo. I think we can launch this project in Q3 [2020].

Each alien in the game is generated with its own unique “XNA” – a numerical genetic sequence that determines its species, strength, speed, and weight. These attributes will be altered as its moves through the game and confronts various situations. For example, falling into a trap may decrease an attribute, while finding a treasure may increase it.

The student will learn to develop with Neo by programming these logics into smart contracts, with planned support for C#, TypeScript, and Python.

Alienworks is also launching the NeoNodes.io network monitor. During his time at NGD, Lin mostly focused on the quality of the Neo network and helped formulate the frameworks necessary for testing, making him well suited to building and maintaining a network monitor:

The objective of NeoNodes is to get necessary information when there is a Neo network emergency. So, we designed it [to be] light-weight; it relies on nothing but itself. If anything goes wrong, it doesn’t influence NeoNodes. [It’s also] easy to maintain. For instance, if there’s something wrong in the Neo network and you have to monitor something new, you need to do a hotfix. [We can] do a hotfix in 15 minutes, and get this new version online in another 15 minutes. That means, it’ll take 30 minutes to get a new version of NeoNodes online to help you solve a network problem.

In its most recent updates, Alienworks integrated support for the Neo Matrix API, which supports basic CSV output and error log features. This is intended to help determine if issues with Neo nodes are caused by bugs or user and configuration problems.

The full Neo New Today podcast with Alienworks’ Peter Lin can be found below:

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