Ad Hunters, our new Double Update is OUT NOW! 🌙
Why do we call it a Double Update? Because we merged 2 feature updates into one: the Download City Update and the Vortex Zone Update!
So, as you might guess, this Update is PACKED with new content. Let's get started:
Download City
Introducing Download City, a sci-fi metropolis with five unique districts to explore. Each one brings its own flavor, secrets, and challenges:
Southern District – The starting area, home to the Access Point and the DNS.
Central District – Featuring Routing Station, where all Internet Downloads come from.
Eastern District – Once safe… now ruled by criminals.
Western District – The corporate side of the City.
Northern District – A secret for now... 👀
Agent Silver
In this episode, Alt and Magna become Detectives and join forces with none other than Agent Silver Havoc to hunt down criminals and put an end to the Ads flooding the City.
Silver is more than just an ally – she’ll fight alongside you, pick up weapons and items, and unleash her unique Ethereal powers. As an Ethereal, she can even possess enemy robots, turning their strength against them.
You’ll also be able to control Silver directly to solve split-character puzzles. For example, you might need Alt to hold one pressure switch while Silver activates another, opening paths that would otherwise remain locked.
Pipes
How do people travel around Download city? Pipes!
Since Download City is all about downloads, their travel system should be around transporting packages.
New Area: Department of National Security (DNS)
The police headquarters of Download City. Here, you’ll step into the role of a detective, piecing together clues and advancing the city’s storylines.
We added a Story mission to this level that takes place after the events of Access Point. In this mission you will learn the true Story about Ethereals and why it's difficult to solve crimes in Download City.
New Area: Routing Station
The central story mission of this episode and the Central Building in all Download City.
Routing Station processes all the downloads and routes them to all of the Internet.
Alt and Silver finally join forces to uncover the mastermind flooding the internet with Ads hidden inside downloads.
This level heavily revolves around pipes, boxes, packages and also introduces the unique abilities of Agent Silver!
Little secret: beating this level unlocks a series of side-quests.
New Area: Download City Interiors
Many buildings in Download City now have interiors, where you might find several Side Quests, Shops, hidden goodies and maybe even an Internet Vortex!
New Area: Abandoned Buildings
We wanted to add some challenge maps for this genre, where you fight waves of enemies. Be prepared for a tough fight, and be prepared to catch many criminals!
Criminals (Ethereal Enemies)
Enemy Ethereals can posses other enemies and make them stronger! To capture an enemy you will need to use the New Capture Disc Gun to launch a Capture Disc (CD).
Vortex Zone
This myterious new area acts as a secret hub to the entire game.
Starting this update, some levels will have secret Vortexes that you unlock by completing puzzles, quests or using weapons and spells.
Some Vortexes you unlock conect back to the Vortex Zone. As you unlock more Vortexes, you will unlock secret passages between all 3 main areas of the game.
Steam Deck Support
We've been working for a long time to make Ad Wars fully compatible with the Steam Deck. This release will get it's own article, don't worry.
To make it work on a smaller screen we had to do some things:
A better scaling system so it looks good on any display
Make the UI Scale Responsive
Test the entire game to make sure the camera never misses anything special.
We can finally say that Ad Wars fully works on the Deck so well that we end up forgetting about testing and we get lost playing around the game.
We hope that's your case too!
New Feature: Damage Elements
Throughout the game, you will find weapons, spells and debuffs of these elements:
Fire
Water
Poison
Electric
Ice
Ground / Rock
You can see those types in the RPG Battle system too, with the trends system, where you get bonus damage if you use a trendy attack element!
We're working on adding specific types of Obstacles that need specific types of elements to destroy.
Enemies
New Enemy: Elemental Fire
The next step after we added Damage Elements was adding an enemy that also played around with those types, so we introduced the Elemental Fire, which you can find in many areas of the game.
New Feature: Enemy Tiers
Enemies now have a new property: Tier. A Higher Tier means the enemy is smarter, deals more damage and has new attacks.
Tiers are indicated by the Enemy Color. If you see a Purple Spider, it means it's a Tier 2 Spider and doesn't roam around anymore, but runs straight to the player and shoots bullets, so watch out!
New Enemy: Aimed Turrets
Back in v0.4.4 we introduced Turrets in the very first level, but they were static and were easy to avoid.
With the new enemy tiers, we made rotating turrets that make up for a tough fight!
New Enemy: Mimic Boxes
We won't spoil much of Routing Station, but we finally added these enemies to the game. They've been around for years.
Thermal Goo & Flies in Platformer
We wanted to make some global enemies, making them appear in every episode, and what's better than the Thermal Goo for that!
We also added the Robot Flies from the Shooter into Platformer.
Spells
Starting this update Magna steps in with 4 different spells to cast. You can now cast them mid battle. This opens up the gameplay, as you can effectively now shoot and cast a spell at the same time.
In our previous update we had the Shield Spell and the Fire Spell, now we also added 2 new spells:
Ice Spell I
Thunder Spell I
Spell Upgrades
Spells can be upgraded by using Upgrade Points. This will make them deal more damage, cast faster, and add unique traits, but know that it will make them use more Magic Points (which can be upgraded too!)
Weapons
New Weapon: Capture Disc Gun
New Weapon: Turret head
Just like the broken Robot Arm in the First Level, we wanted to add a weapon that drops as part of a defeated enemy, and now that Enemy Turrets have a more important role it was a great time to add a small chance to drop the turret itself as a reward weapon.
New Weapon: Icethrower
An Ice Cannon that quickly shoots Ice Crystals that may Freeze Enemies!
New Weapon: Rocket Launcher
Weapon Upgrades
You can now upgrade Weapons too! Another great way of your Upgrade Points, and another reason to destroy more ads!
Some examples of weapon upgrades:
Add poison to the Water Gun, to add a chance to poison enemies!
Chance to throw more than one Knife at a time
Improve
Bomwat v2
We finally got to re-do one of the oldest characters in the game, Bomwat.
This is not on the update, but we're also working to make more puzzles that involve Alt's and Bomwat's ability to carry objects.
AdBlue Platformer v2
This was looooong overdue, but since we first introduced AdBlue in our first Steam Release, we were missing a proper background for the Platformer section.
We're glad to say that's in the past know!
Platformer Caves v2
This one was supposed to be in a Patch of v0.4.5, but got delayed and eventually made it to this update.
We added parallaxed layers to all 3 versions of caves (Normal, Ice and Forest Caves).
Platformer Physics Objects
In order to improve the Platformer, we wanted to add decorations that interact with Alt, that you could also destroy, so we added Cave Vines, Ropes, Mushrooms that hang to other objects and you can cut!
That's all for now! Hopefully you now know why this update took so long to make. We're really happy with the results, and even happier that we're connecting the entire Ad Wars universe through the Internet Vortexes and some Side-Quests that we added.
As always, we're going to work on many patches that fix bugs, polish some things and add some goodies while we work on our next big update.
If you find any bugs / glitches or want to request any features, you can do so in our Forum Posts.
Have Fun and blast ads!
aGlitch, Moon Snack Games