Xenonauts 2 - February Update
Hello everyone - it's time for the February update! With this update being a bit early and the last one being a little late, we've only had three weeks since the last dev post but a lot has been done in that time.
Releasing a new public build is our main priority right now and so we're actively working on Build V23.
We've mostly been working on polishing the experience and improving the game balance, and we've spent a lot of time playing the game this month to help facilitate that. We've done a lot of work on the Air Combat, as we've been adding various new features to it recently (such as the pre-battle deployment phase and the different formations that UFOs can spawn in) and we've also had to make some quite fundamental changes to the code in order to fix a persistent bug where missile hits would not always be detected correctly.
Although it's frustrating that this issue sapped away quite a bit of time, having missiles occasionally pass straight through their target without exploding is clearly not acceptable in a game where it can mean the difference between victory and defeat!
There's already been a lot of tweaks to the game balance and we'll continue with these as we work on V23. The early-game Cleaner missions are now a research chain that give you a series of standalone missions which occur alongside the alien invasion rather than before it. We've also done a pass on all the UFO / tactical mission crews to ensure the right aliens are spawning in roughly the right numbers at the right time. There's been a load of updates to the tech tree, sometimes to fix things not unlocking correctly but mostly to ensure a relatively steady flow of research and upgrade projects throughout the game. The tech tree is more extensive than in X1 and this can cause problems in some instances, for example if the player is doing too many research projects between ground missions then it can get a bit overwhelming.
We've also fixed a lot of bugs / issues we've encountered while playing the game, and updated various game systems that weren't working quite right (e.g. the Sentry Guns). We've updated some more of the strategic UI to use the new visual style, various new terrain tiles have been added to the game and we've produced the final destruction states on more terrain objects. Windows have continued to be a pain to get working correctly, but when you play a tactical mission on a finished biome like the Polar biome things are looking and feeling good. It'll be nice when we have all the biomes up to that standard, but it's taking a while to churn through all the assets. We're recruiting a rigger to get our new civilian 3D models into the game, and if all goes well we'll have those in V23 too.
All in all, it's been one of those months where we've fixed far too many things to mention individually but relatively few of them are big headline features you can write about in updates like this.
Once V23 is out, we're planning to focus on a few more mechanics that set the game apart from the first Xenonauts, as we're in quite a nice place with development now where the campaign is largely functional and all the remaining work is adding in new assets, polishing what we have, and adding things to make the game more distinct from its predecessor.
The biggest thing we want to test is various more significant alien abilities that will hopefully make each alien race feel more distinctive. For instance, we're going to test whether it makes combat more interesting if the regenerating Sebillian aliens enter a "downed" state when killed, and have to be finished off within a couple of turns else they'll get back up again. Or whether Wraiths are more interesting if they can enter a "ghost" state after taking damage and take reduced damage until end of turn (although perhaps only from kinetic damage). Basically what we're looking for is abilities that cause the player to think about how they sequence their actions or encourage them to use a wider selection of equipment than they otherwise would.
That's it for this time - we're hoping to put out the first incarnation of V23 at some point during the week after next (w/c 7th March).
Many thanks for reading and for staying up-to-date with our work - as ever please do join us on Discord, the forums or the Steam community if you have any questions.
Releasing a new public build is our main priority right now and so we're actively working on Build V23.
We've mostly been working on polishing the experience and improving the game balance, and we've spent a lot of time playing the game this month to help facilitate that. We've done a lot of work on the Air Combat, as we've been adding various new features to it recently (such as the pre-battle deployment phase and the different formations that UFOs can spawn in) and we've also had to make some quite fundamental changes to the code in order to fix a persistent bug where missile hits would not always be detected correctly.
Although it's frustrating that this issue sapped away quite a bit of time, having missiles occasionally pass straight through their target without exploding is clearly not acceptable in a game where it can mean the difference between victory and defeat!
There's already been a lot of tweaks to the game balance and we'll continue with these as we work on V23. The early-game Cleaner missions are now a research chain that give you a series of standalone missions which occur alongside the alien invasion rather than before it. We've also done a pass on all the UFO / tactical mission crews to ensure the right aliens are spawning in roughly the right numbers at the right time. There's been a load of updates to the tech tree, sometimes to fix things not unlocking correctly but mostly to ensure a relatively steady flow of research and upgrade projects throughout the game. The tech tree is more extensive than in X1 and this can cause problems in some instances, for example if the player is doing too many research projects between ground missions then it can get a bit overwhelming.
We've also fixed a lot of bugs / issues we've encountered while playing the game, and updated various game systems that weren't working quite right (e.g. the Sentry Guns). We've updated some more of the strategic UI to use the new visual style, various new terrain tiles have been added to the game and we've produced the final destruction states on more terrain objects. Windows have continued to be a pain to get working correctly, but when you play a tactical mission on a finished biome like the Polar biome things are looking and feeling good. It'll be nice when we have all the biomes up to that standard, but it's taking a while to churn through all the assets. We're recruiting a rigger to get our new civilian 3D models into the game, and if all goes well we'll have those in V23 too.
All in all, it's been one of those months where we've fixed far too many things to mention individually but relatively few of them are big headline features you can write about in updates like this.
Once V23 is out, we're planning to focus on a few more mechanics that set the game apart from the first Xenonauts, as we're in quite a nice place with development now where the campaign is largely functional and all the remaining work is adding in new assets, polishing what we have, and adding things to make the game more distinct from its predecessor.
The biggest thing we want to test is various more significant alien abilities that will hopefully make each alien race feel more distinctive. For instance, we're going to test whether it makes combat more interesting if the regenerating Sebillian aliens enter a "downed" state when killed, and have to be finished off within a couple of turns else they'll get back up again. Or whether Wraiths are more interesting if they can enter a "ghost" state after taking damage and take reduced damage until end of turn (although perhaps only from kinetic damage). Basically what we're looking for is abilities that cause the player to think about how they sequence their actions or encourage them to use a wider selection of equipment than they otherwise would.
That's it for this time - we're hoping to put out the first incarnation of V23 at some point during the week after next (w/c 7th March).
Many thanks for reading and for staying up-to-date with our work - as ever please do join us on Discord, the forums or the Steam community if you have any questions.