Cloudpunk
City of Ghosts - OUT NOW!
https://store.steampowered.com/app/1536370/Cloudpunk__City_of_Ghosts/
https://store.steampowered.com/bundle/20527/Cloudpunk_Ultimate_Edition/
In City of Ghosts, you play as both Rania and new character Hayse in a more dangerous, more tense city of Nivalis.
In this direct sequel to Cloudpunk, we see Nivalis through eyes old and new as two stories intersect, and the fate of Rania, Hayse, Camus, CORA and the city itself will be in the hands of you, the player.
As you return to the city of Nivalis you will explore brand new areas and meet new characters in a fully-voiced campaign. We’ve added many new features, like street races and fully customizable HOVA’s. Get ready to experience different endings based on choices made throughout Cloudpunk and City of Ghosts that will change the city and the characters living in it. As Rania’s story comes to an end, you will play as multiple characters as you embark on a more ambitious, more dramatic campaign that will change how you think about Cloudpunk forever.
https://store.steampowered.com/app/1488490/Nivalis
And we have more news! We are pleased to announce that we are working on a new game in the Cloudpunk universe. In our upcoming cyberpunk slice-of-life sim, you will learn what it truly feels like to live, thrive and survive in Nivalis.
In this unique slice-of-life sim with realistic weather simulation and night and day cycles, you can grow your business, meet strange and diverse characters, form friendships and experience the danger and wonder of this cyberpunk voxel city.
Welcome to Nivalis!
If you have questions or just want to hang out with us, join our Discord Server!
City of Ghosts DLC Announcement
https://store.steampowered.com/app/1536370/Cloudpunk__City_of_Ghosts/
Delivery driver Rania is in trouble - again. After surviving the events of the original Cloudpunk, she’s drawn the ire of monolithic courier corporation Curzona. With debt collectors, homicidal cyborgs and at least one death cult on her trail, Rania might not have a single friend left in the city of Nivalis. Meanwhile, deadbeat gambler Hayse has been set an impossible task: to clear all his debts by the end of the night. Their stories overlap and intertwine in this expansive DLC, which exceeds the length of the original game.
City of Ghosts features:
- Experience the direct sequel to Cloudpunk, seeing Nivalis through eyes old and new.
- A brand new, fully-voiced campaign longer than the base game
- Their fate is in your hands: unlock different endings depending on choices you make in-game.
- Customise your HOVA and compete in breakneck street races.
- Explore new areas, meet new characters, and experience new mysteries in a gorgeous futuristic cityscape.
“Going back to Nivalis has been a thrill,” says Marko Dieckmann, studio head of ION LANDS. “It might be a DLC, but City of Ghosts has a sequel’s worth of content. It’s a darker, tenser, more complex story, and we can’t wait for people to experience it.”
You can start to put Cloudpunk - City of Ghosts on your wishlist today. We will soon announce the launch date.
To celebrate the announcement of City of Ghosts, Cloudpunk is currently on Sale with 40% off.
Help nominating Cloudpunk for the Steam Awards
Landing a nomination alone would be a fantastic achievement for us. This year was a real rollercoaster for us. We launched a game during a pandemic after 3 years of development, which made us all super anxious. Would it work out? Did we miss something? Spoiler: Yes we did, but in those very hectic weeks after launch we tried to fix everything and continued adding features that, we believe, made the game better.
And we will continue to do so with the big story update that we teased earlier. We have also started prototyping a new game and we can't wait to show you what that is. Gameplay will be greatly different, but we will keep the intense atmosphere and will push it to a new level. We can't wait to show you.
Thank you all for spending time in Nivalis! We wish you a great upcoming holiday season, just make the best of it.
Your ION LANDS team
Win a Signature Edition
Please note that this raffle does not depend on which game you nominated for the Steam Awards. Just like this post and comment anything regarding the game, what you like, what you dislike, a special experience in the game, something like that. We just wanted to share something with you that you can hold in your hands.
We will ship worldwide wherever DHL sends packages to.
The Signature Edition is a physical box including the soundtrack on a double CD, a limited art print with our signatures on them and two lovely enamel pins.
End of next week we will announce the lucky winners.
Good luck!
Controller Improvements & DevGAMM
Grand Prize
Best Indie Game
Excellence in Visual Art
Excellence in Audio
Excellence in Narrative
Furthermore, we've received a nomination for Best Game from BAFTA Scotland.
And we're very proud to have won the Gold Prize at the Games Without Borders Awards 2020. Yay! This is the first award ever for ION LANDS.
Other nominations include the TIGA Games Industry Awards, where we received 2 nominations in the categories "Creativity in Games" and "Action and Adventure Game". We're also a finalist at IndieX.
We're very happy about all this recognition, it's very motivating.
Oh, and there's also a small patch coming with controller improvements. After receiving complaints that the PS4 controller and Steam controller did not work properly, we did some investigations and have found the root of the problem causing controller keys not getting mapped correctly.
If you own a PS4 Controller, you will have to enable "PS4 configuration support" in your Steam settings.
Xbox controllers for windows should work without any extra support, but if you have native Xbox controllers, make sure to enable "Xbox configuration support" in your Steam settings.
Steam controllers are now working fine as well. If they don't work for you right away, we found the following steps helpful:
1) Run Steam as Administrator
2) Launch the game, the Steam controller should work fine.
3) Afterwards you can launch Steam normally and the Steam controller should still work properly.
4) If wireless mode doesn't work, try it wired and then wireless again.
We hope this helps and that you'll have a flawless gaming experience with your controller. We will look into wheel support as well.
Enjoy your time in Nivalis and come say "Hi" on our Discord Server.
Your ION LANDS team
Cockpit Update
https://store.steampowered.com/app/746850/Cloudpunk/
Experience the city of Nivalis like never before with a fully immersive first person cockpit view. To see it in action, check out the new trailer right here, featuring music from cult synthwave artist Perturbator, with his track Venger (feat. Greta Link). We feel incredibly honored to have partnered with Perturbator for this update and we think the song fits our game perfectly.
While in the vehicle you can enter the cockpit view via the V key or DPAD Up on the controller. You can reassign this to another key that you'd prefer more.
In cockpit you can steer your vehicle just like before, but driving will feel completely new. Feel the rain dropping on your windshield and the city and all the other cars swoosh by. You may also unlock your camera like before, which allows you to look around inside the car. Look out the side windows and even the new floor windows. Funky!
When you approach a parking lot and slow down a bit, a holographic "below the car" view will appear on your windshield making it easier to navigation to the nearest parking slot. The hologram will automatically fade away if you drive off.
Don't damage your car too much or the windshield will get cracks limiting your view.
We've also upgraded your apartment by making many of the apartment items interactable. Eat your pizza, take a closer look at your fish tank, turn on your TV and play a game on the retro game console. Try to beat Camus' highscore!
Other changes in this update include performance improvements, smaller level design changes and much smoother controller input with the third and first person cameras. I (Marko) kinda prefer the controller for everything in the game now, but Roman is still a "keyboard+mouse boi" (his words). But we're happy that both feel really balanced and polished.
We hope you will enjoy this update as much we did making it. Let us know your thoughts in the comments below. We also welcome you on our Discord Server for a direct chat with us and other Nivali.
There's more coming in the future, such as the big story update introducing new characters and bringing back old ones, a vehicle constructor and optional racing jobs. But these will take us longer to develop, it'll be like a second game.
Enjoy!
Control Out
Future Update Teaser
This year everything is different, so the whole Indie Arena Booth will take place online. You can join it here for free: Indie Arena Booth Online
In the last weeks since launch we have been testing and plotting behind the scenes to prepare a large update, for which we would like to reveal 2 screenshots right now.
Yes, we will bring a cockpit view to Cloudpunk and it changes driving around the cyberpunk city of Nivalis completely.
Now, the details of this update are yet to be announced officially, but you know us. We like to tease a little bit and make you excited about what the future brings for the game. What we want to say at this point is that this update will bring a comprehensive story update with multiple hours of gameplay, introducing new characters and bringing back old characters. Furthermore it will add a set of new features around vehicle customization and racing.
We have been prototyping racing and decided we want it to be racing through the city as you know it. There are no specific race tracks, most of these races are semi-legal events through the city of Nivalis. So knowing it well will give you an advantage. As everything that happened to Rania, she will be pulled right into this without much of a choice. She's not a racer, but she needs to become one.
Adding racing will not entirely change the rather chill nature of the game, however. It will add a nice challenge after you got to know the city.
Use the comments below to let us know what you think!
You are also welcome to join our Discord Server for a direct chat with us and other Nivali.
Control out.
Performance & Smoothness
Yes, because it was our intention to make everything smooth like butter and remove all remaining micro-stutters happening in either low or high frames per second.
What has changed:
- Futureproofed the game to all display technologies (high-Hz, G-SYNC, FreeSync, odd-Hz)
- Better experience for VRR (variable refresh rate), FreeSync, G-SYNC, and high-Hz
- Better experience for monitors with refresh rates not divisible by 60 (e.g. 75Hz, 144Hz)
- Far less stuttering/jittering while walking
- The game behaves better with fluctuating framerates, and framerates not divisible by 60, even on 60Hz monitors.
- More consistent mousefeel experience, no more "lagfeel yo-yo" effect from the sync issues
Now, depending on your system specs, you might still experience hickups in heavy load or culling scenarios (i.e. much more detail becomes visible all of a sudden), but this effect should be reduced, especially on high-end systems.
To make use of variable refresh rates supported by G-SYNC or FreeSync, you can make these settings:
NVIDIA Control Panel:
Monitor Technology = G-SYNC
Vertical Sync = ON
In-Game:
Vertical Synch = OFF
Framerate Limit = 1000
If your GPU is running hot, you can still use the in-game framerate limiter, which now works much better and 60fps now feels a lot "faster" than before. You can also use the framerate limiter in RivaTuner Statistics Server (RTSS), which works a bit smoother than what Unity provides. In this case you will have to put the framerate limit in-game to uncapped (1000).
Soundtrack Changes:
We've added 3 new tracks:
"Tick Tock"
This one was in the game before, but not part of the Soundtrack DLC yet. It's used only once in the game. Can you guess where?
"It's like Floating"
"Stimulant"
These two are completely new tracks, played while driving or exploring on foot.
ː2017stickydrinkː
Cloudpunk will be 25% OFF for the rest of Summer Sale. So take a drink in a coconut and enter the city of Nivalis.
You are welcome to join our Discord Server for a direct chat with us and other Nivali. We would also like to thank community member Mark Rejhon of Blur Busters for his assistance and comprehensive testing of the stuttering issues.
Control out.
Surround Sound modes, FPS unlock and more
What has changed?
- Added support for changing the audio speaker setup. The following modes are supported: Mono, Stereo, Quad (4 speaker setup), Surround (5 speaker setup), 5.1, 7.1 and ProLogic DTS.
On startup the game detects what the audio driver currently supports. If you change an option, you might have to restart the game for some looping background sounds like rain to re-appear. - Added an option to remove the 120fps limit, which was used if V-Sync is turned OFF. This opens support for FreeSync or G-SYNC support beyond 120fps.
- By default the game uses a borderless fullscreen window. If you want Cloudpunk to use exclusive fullscreen, you can add the following command line parameter under "Set Launch Options" in the Cloudpunk Steam properties:
-window-mode exclusive - When buying or selling the Retro Antenna or Plasteel Bumpers for your vehicle, the parked vehicle is now updated right away and not only when entering it again.
- Added a safety measure to prevent the game from saving corrupted savegames in case of hardware failure. This is a rare case, but should not affect your game progress. Savegames are now written to a temporary file first, then verified and copied over the actual save file.
- When selling items from your inventory, the selected item will only reset if the last item from the selected stack was sold. This is relevant for player with game controllers.
- Fixed a crash happening on AMD graphics cards.
Enjoy your time in Nivalis and come say "Hi" on our Discord Server.
Your ION LANDS team
Summer Update (Midweek Madness 25% OFF)
While working on more long-term updates, we've just released a small update including a range of improvements and fixes.
What has changed:
- Implemented a savegame rolling backup system. Whenever the game is saved, the current save will be backed up and so will the two saves before that. This is mainly intended for scenarios when your hardware crashes during a save process. This is really rare, but we'd like to prevent it affecting your savegame. So if that happens to you and you can't continue with your game, please either restore one of the backups yourself or contact us directly for assistance at support@ionlands.com
- All voiceover sounds played while in your car have been reprocessed and upgraded for a more interesting effect. This will not change the lines by characters talking to you remotely, like Control.
- Fixed a bug when clicking an item in your inventory with your mouse and then hovering to another, which would result in both items being highlighted.
- Fixed a bug with moving platforms when running onto them while they are still moving up. It could sometimes cause a situation where the activator stayed green and the platform would only start moving after you left it and entered it again.
- Fixed an advertisement vehicle in the Marrow not displaying the billboards all the time.
- Tweaked the position of the first person camera. It has been lowered a bit to be exactly at the height of Rania's eyes. We've also slightly lowered the name and interaction UI's on other characters.
- When buying apartment upgrades and leaving the window, a savegame is now triggered. There was a confusing situation when you bought something, then left the game without a savegame being triggered and wondering where your stuff was.
You are welcome to join our Discord Server for a direct chat with us and other Nivali.
Also, enjoy the new Cloudpunk key visual:
Control out.