Xenonauts 2 Monthly Development Update!

[p]Hello everyone - it's time for our monthly progress update. I'll be keeping things brief this month![/p][h2]Milestone 6 & 7[/h2][p]We had hoped to release Milestone 6 onto the public branch last month, but unfortunately we've been dealing with a couple of rather thorny UFO-related bugs in the shroud / line of sight system. These are now fixed and what we hope will be the public release of Milestone 6 has been compiled and released onto the Experimental branch. Assuming no serious bugs are found over the weekend, we'll then release it onto the standard branches next week.[/p][p]We'll probably continue to patch Milestone 6 for another week or two, as there's a couple of annoying visual bugs in the game that we still want to fix (such as certain tiles incorrectly drawing under the shroud, etc). We'll also make it a priority to fix any bugs that are reported by the community after the public release.[/p][p]Aside from the programmer working on fixing those key bugs, most of our team moved on to Milestone 7 towards the end of last month. That update will be the final launch update for Xenonauts 2, and we'll be focusing primarily on polish and performance - however, we are still planning to add some extra content to the game in the update, and we've started by working on that.[/p][h2]Strategy UI Background Updates[/h2][p]The most noticeable piece of new content will be the strategy UI background illustrations changing and updating as the game progresses and the player unlocks new technology. This feature existed in the original Xenonauts and was very well received; players felt it made the game feel much more reactive and immersive to get to see how the new technology impacted the day-to-day life of the Xenonauts. [/p][p]We've actually been working on these in the background for several months now. The artwork is already complete for the Research and Engineering screen backgrounds / characters, but the work of integrating them into the game only began at the start of this month. We still have to finish the new background illustrations for the Base Stores and the Soldier screens (which are the other two that upgrade), but we're expecting to have everything wrapped up in the next couple of months.[/p][p][/p][h2]Aircraft Equipment Visualisation[/h2][p]In a similar vein to the background illustrations, we've  been working on a proper "paperdoll" system for the Aircraft screen. The idea here is simple - the artwork for your interceptors should accurately reflect the equipment and upgrades that you've chosen for them. If you're equipping them with missiles, you see missiles appearing under the wings. If you've run the engineering upgrade project to give it improved engines, the artwork for the interceptor updates to show a more advanced engine, etc.[/p][p]We started working on the art assets for this task last month, and we'll be starting on the code implementation for it this month.[/p][h2]Balancing Playthrough[/h2][p]Last month I did another campaign balancing / testing session. As always, this was rather time-consuming - the campaign I completed took about 35 hours, and there were also a couple of other shorter campaigns before that that were ended by serious bugs. Nonetheless, it was time well spent. We identified a lot of minor polish and balancing issues that we were able to fix relatively quickly and roll into the Milestone 6 builds.[/p][p]However, we also pushed a number of tasks back into Milestone 7, and we've been busy working on those over the past couple of weeks. Some of these were bugfixes that we didn't want to include in Milestone 6 because they risked introducing new bugs or breaking save game compatibility, whereas others were larger balancing changes that we'll implement as a group before we start our Milestone 7 playthroughs.[/p][p]Finally, playing the game for an extended period of time has been valuable for our planning process. There's only so much development time remaining before we leave Early Access, and we're not going to have time to polish or improve everything we'd like - so having a better understanding of how much each individual issue affects gameplay makes it much easier to make sensible decisions about what we should prioritise.[/p][h2]Additional Maps[/h2][p]Another thing that has become obvious after repeated playtesting campaigns is that the game needs some additional maps for the early-game UFOs. There's currently three maps per biome for the small UFOs (Scout, Destroyer, Observer), which is enough that you shouldn't see repeats within a single campaign - but many users will restart the campaign at least once, and will therefore end up playing the early-game content multiple times.[/p][p]We've already started work on two extra maps per biome for the small UFOs, which should hopefully address the problem. We're hoping these new maps will all be complete by the time we release the first test versions of Milestone 7, which will probably be early in the new year.[/p][p]I think that covers everything we did last month. As always, thanks for reading, and I'll write another update in a few weeks![/p]