Black Ice News

Hi everyone! superdupergc and Nonadecimal here with a new batch of content and a 15% off sale! As usual there's been a ton of performance boosts along the way, particularly for high-framerate physics and multiplayer. We're still working on the Act 2 missions and its ~final battle~ atop the Kinetic Temple but we wanted to add more high-level servers to the world while you wait. That starts with The Scar.

[h2]The Scar[/h2]
This month marks 12 years since a catastrophic error cracked the Supermesh, separating founder Rachana Joshi's Kinetic Temple from the rest of the grid. Fearing cascading failures, Quarkus sealed off the afflicted area with a massive firewall in the interest of public safety. The countermeasures proved effective and the integrity of the Supermesh was preserved.



The disaster left deep fissures radiating outward from Quarkus. Sensing opportunity, a number of shell corporations and black market enterprises leveraged the disaster to entrench themselves in Quarkus' shadow. Cloaked in fog and stealth security, they run illicit ops and trade stolen IP.

Be careful getting lost in the Scar. It's hard to tell what kind of trouble you'll find in its depths.



[h2]Branded Stores[/h2]
This feature's been a long time coming but we've finally got 5 branded stores ringing the Arcade with unique risk/reward profiles for better build customization. Having trouble looting the right gun to fit your build? You know exactly where to buy it.... but at a cost. Branded items have a pool of guaranteed benefits but also guaranteed penalties to up the challenge. Coincidentally this lets people role spec more easily as tank, sniper, etc...

Kalt - health+ / speed-
Feisty! - speed+ / damage-
Overclock - damage+ / accuracy-
Talus - accuracy+ / health-
Dysrupt - hack+, loot+ / RAM-


[h2]Talent Respecs[/h2]
One of the most requested features is here! Ouroboros responded to feedback on his OS and added the ability to spend 2 Ouro coins to respec 1 talent point. You get Ouros for completing bounties so get to work. Capitalism isn't going to topple itself!

[h2]Green Hill Zone[/h2]
We've also released the work-in-progress Green Hill Zone near the Helices tower. It's a more open-air vertically layered combat space with lots of occluded sightlines and level 35-45 servers. Please give us feedback on the combat to help shape the area as we finish it! Should be a good place for flying enemies....



[h2]Coming Soon[/h2]
Speaking of flying enemies, we have some .bat files to share with you in the next update. Be seeing you soon!



Enjoy!
- SDGC and Nonadecimal

(full patch notes here)

Hi everyone! superdupergc here and I've got a lot of cool stuff to show you. Nonadecimal has been working really hard on all these giant new areas, and in between taking care of my baby and my day job, I've managed to improve some systems and add some cool new stuff too.

This update is hot off the presses because we are very excited about it and want to y'all as soon as possible! We're still working on a lot of it, so if you've got feedback, you can help shape the game.



You may notice some changes to the supermesh here in Black Ice. Like, complete world shuffling changes! Lots of new places to explore, but mostly we're opening the Forest and Oshiro Orbital areas for combat. These new areas really push the verticality of the game to new levels (pun intended), so bring your favorite grappling hook or glide jump and have at it!



Above you can see one of the two new arenas - which I won't spoil the name of for plot reasons, but look at this place! It's a hacker's playground! I'm also working on a third arena for later with Tele-porters in it... I'll let you guess what those do.



I've added a bunch of fun new player tweaks, the biggest one of which is that talent points now go up to level 100 instead of 50, so enjoy playing at those higher difficulty levels much easier now! I've also added new guns that reload when you're damaged (like the unique weakening bolt hand cannon, Kinetic Maintenance). This can be really powerful!

I've also made a few subtle changes which make lower rarity items more exciting - every once and a while, you'll find a common item with much higher damage, or a lower rarity item with a Lot of an affix on it, more than you could get on a high rarity item.



We hope you enjoy this update! Coming up next, we'll be working on quests for the new areas, plus a talent respec option, among other fun things that I'll keep secret for now!

Enjoy!
- SDGC and Nonadecimal

Please forgive me for the brief patch notes, we just had a baby! That said, this patch has a ton of new stuff. Check it out!



The 0.9.1 Patch is here! This one has a lot of fun systems upgrades, adding a ton of new weapon types, several new enemies, and a lot of bug fixing.

• Turret and E-Snail Enemies, which add a whole extra strategic layer to combat
  
• Mini-webcrawlers and E-xploding-snails enemies, which spawn as ambush waves to surprise you
  
• New items! Dash, Fire Wall, Electrostatic Discharge, Flare Gun, Shredder, Line Break, etc!
  
• A full 20 New unique items, including the Sharkbringer, Pizza Launcher, Slink King, Jash's Ten-Pounder, and more!
  
• New item affixes, including Fire pools on the ground, Kill Chain, Longshot, Reverse Spread, Cleanse, Self-Push, and No Clip
  
• New Enhancement system, a dozen new types of temporary buffs you can find in the world, but choose wisely because you can only use one at a time!
  
• New Debuffs: Fear, Corrode, Weaken, with items to match
  
• New Perk: R.I.P.exe, which heals you on close range kills but prevents the use of healing items, enabling a new push-forward playstyle!
  
• Four new exploding barrel types - fire, ice, lightning, and healing, plus they drop zones on the ground for a lingering effect
  
• Tons of bug fixes, especially for Multiplayer and Photosensitive Mode
  
• A bunch of other stuff I didn't have space to mention
  

Enjoy!
- SDGC and Nonadecimal

The Volcano is finally out, and with it, Act 1 of the story is done! To support it, we've added a ton of new mechanics. New guns, new abilities, perks, enemies, music, world events, and more! This patch is so big, we're finally moving the price of the game up to the full $20 after the sale.

Also a heads up - we have not yet updated the trailer with all this new stuff, but the demo is now updated!




We've got a giant new zone fully implemented! The volcano fortress of an eccentric tech trillionaire, packed full of monuments to his success and corporations mining their IP. Continue unraveling the conspiracy with Anima as you wade through the miners' mischief and plenty of lava.

The volcano offers multiple pathways through the caverns, and triples the game's quest content, with new missions utilizing new mechanics like one-to-many server links to untangle, servers to defend, laser and lava hazards to dodge, and secrets to find. All of this culminates in a leap of faith and a boss fight with a new enemy - the Mother of Spiders and her many eggs. Be careful you though - along the way, you might get ambushed by a corp trying to take revenge in one of the new random world events.




Get ready for even more build options and replayability, with over a dozen new unique items and about 10 new normal item classes as well. Hand Cannons are a new base weapon type - close range burst damage, utilizing a new reload-style mechanic. Not shocking enough for you? How about Chain Lightning? SMGs? Smartguns? And my personal favorite, the Pinball Launcher.

We've also added a Grappling Hook and a Glide Jump, to give you even more movement options to master, complete with new perks to complement them.

New affixes? Tons! Off the top of my head: shield piercing, cooldown speed, charge speed, extra projectiles, aim assist, health/ram on kill, crit kill explosion, shatter frozen enemies, double/half projectile speed, spread vulnerabilities, and more!




Mako is finally showing her face in multiplayer, fully modeled and animated! You can set up a unique look, changing her suit, skin, and hair colors to whatever RGB value you prefer. Personally, I think you can't go wrong with magenta and cyan. Additionally, you can customize her jacket with a bunch of great icons (some from my friend's games!).

You can even mod your own icon in extremely easily - just put a .png in a folder. (Modding in general is easier with a new in-game debug display). If you don't want to see other people's icons, just uncheck "Allow custom content" in the game options, password protect your game, and kick anyone that crosses you.

And don't worry, if you miss the old pill models, you can still do that too!




I'm very excited to announce that we have over 24 minutes of excellent new music from V-Axys! The music system is now location-specific, so for instance, the Volcano has a different feel than other places. And what's also location-specific? Spawn points. So if you die in the volcano, you get to go right back.

We've also added a new Recycle Bin mechanic, which lets you reroll 3 items into a new item which will be different from those three, of average item level, and of at least the rarity of the minimum one - so you can reroll 3 uniques into a new one!

We overhauled the Scorporation firing pattern which is much easier to predict and track while still being very challenging, and the Webcrawlers can now dodge! You'll notice this right away, it's a big change.

Also! Six new perks, Encrypted Server Security, better bounties (simpler, with in-game tracking and the option to reroll), and enemy path jank reduction. Of course, we've done tons of bug fixes, including a truly MASSIVE amount of optimization, resulting in a gain of *40* FPS, even on some low spec systems!

Full details here.


We hope you like all the new stuff! If you do, please feel free to leave a review and let us know on the discord.

Thanks for playing, and Happy Hacking!
superdupergc and Nonadecimal