Xenonauts 2 News

September is over and it's time for our monthly development update. This month we've largely been working on Milestone 2, which is taking a while to arrive because it has slowly morphed into a rather substantial update!

However, we did release several early test builds of Milestone 2 on our Prototype branches this month so we could gather early community feedback on our ideas. The build is now shaping up nicely and we're expecting to move it over to the Experimental branches in the next week or two, where we'll continue to fix bugs and polish it until it's ready for general release.

[h3]Artist Recruitment[/h3]

Before I start talking about the new features, I quickly want to mention that Goldhawk is hiring a couple of additional 3D artists for Xenonauts 2. If you are potentially interested in joining our team as an Environment Artist or a Character Artist / Animator, please check out the posts below!

Recruitment - 3D Environment Artist (Remote, full-time / part-time) Recruitment - 3D Character Artist / Animator (Remote, full-time / part time)

[h3]New Missions & Early Game Update[/h3]

Two common issues raised in player feedback about the Early Access launch version of Xenonauts 2 were that the pacing of the campaign could be improved, and the role of the Cleaners (and their storyline) could be expanded.

We therefore added quite a lot of new content to the opening section of the game in Milestone 2. There's now more Cleaner missions in the early game, including three new mission types - Rescue Soldiers, Convoy Ambush, and Rescue VIP - and the process of locating the Cleaner HQ has become more organic. Now you gain progress toward the HQ location simply by winning the Cleaner missions that spawn on the map, with extra progress earned if you capture prisoners for interrogation or if you recover optional Cleaner Data from the map.

I've also rewritten the dialogue around the tutorial and opening section to make the plot more interesting (and do a better job of involving the Cleaners), and I'll be continuing this process while Milestone 2 is on the Experimental branch.


[h3]Soldier Armour - Heavy / Light Variants[/h3]

We playtested a number of changes to soldier armour in the prototype builds, but the only improvement we decided to keep was creating Light and Heavy variants of each type of soldier armour. This replaces the existing ballistic plates modules from Milestone 1 with a checkbox that toggles between these heavy / light variants.

Heavy armour simply weighs more, but offers greater protection that the lighter variant. This gives the player a lot more flexibility, and avoids the situation where your newly researched advanced armour is actually worthless because it's too heavy for many of your soldiers to use (as they can just use it in the lightweight configuration if needed). Feedback so far seems to suggest players consider this a big improvement over what we had before.


[h3]Interceptor Weight System / Air Combat Rebalance[/h3]

We've also taken a look at the air combat in Milestone 2. The biggest change is to how aircraft equipment works, as aircraft slots can now hold any type of item / weapon but each aircraft has an overall weight limit that the equipment loadout must stay below. We've also added a fuel pod item that boosts the aircraft range, and an armour plating item that boosts survivability. The UI for this system still needs work, but overall it feels pretty solid already.

Some work has also been done on the UFOs themselves. We've introduced a new early-game unmanned UFO called the Probe, which is much weaker than the Scout and initially serves as a basic introduction to air combat before being used as the first type of escort craft for larger UFOs (as Fighter UFOs are too deadly to use as escorts early on). The existing UFOs have also been rebalanced to try and make them more distinct from one another.

[h3]New Maps[/h3]

Our new level designers started work in September, and their first task was to address the lack of UFO crash site maps in the Dockyard biome. We've now got five new maps to support this, and we're working on expanding the number of Jungle maps too. After that, we'll get to work creating more maps for the new mission types added in Milestone 2.

[h3](Community) Mod Tools[/h3]

We've also continued to develop the foundations for modding. We've finished implementing the mod management systems, and the "mods" panel is now accessible from the Main Menu screen in Milestone 2. Unfortunately the modding tools themselves require more work at our end than we expected, so we're still in the process of planning that out. We're making steady progress, though, and the game should have a solid set of modding tools in place before launch.

Thanks for reading, and I'll write another progress update at the end of the month!

This update includes all the fixes from 1.33 that were tested on the Experimental branches over the past week or two. This should be the last update for Milestone 1 as all future fixes, gameplay changes and performance improvements are now being rolled into our upcoming Milestone 2 update.

[h3]Changelog:[/h3]

• Fixed a crash that would occur if you try to detonate C4 that had already been placed on the ground in a loaded save game.
  
• Fixed an issue in the tutorial where a soldier did not have enough TU to fire their shotgun a second time.
  
• Fixed an issue where missiles would sometimes not fire in air combat if you had activated the Afterburner at the start of the battle.
  
• Game no longer creates an Iron Man save when exiting the game (even if you're not playing Iron Man).
  
• Swapping weapons on the Soldier Equip screen now also swaps out the associated ammo for these weapons.
  
• Tooltips are now dismissed when you start dragging an item (e.g. on the soldier equip screen).
  
• Camera now correctly moves up / down when watching an AI unit climbing a ladder during the alien turn.
  
• Quantum Array now correctly shows the additional information on visible UFOs immediately after loading a save.
  
• Units attempting to shoot adjacent walls should no longer contort themselves like a pretzel to do so.
  
• Cleaner Accelerated Rifle no longer drops to 0% Accuracy as soon as it goes beyond maximum range, unlike other weapons.
  
• C4 should no longer show 0/0 ammo.
  
• Fixed issues with the following achievements, which should now be possible to earn:
  • First Contact
    
  • Counterfire
    
  • Unfriendly Fire
    
  • Future Warfare
    

This update is also only accessible by switching to our Experimental branches (instructions on how to do so here) - although note they have slower load times and worse performance than normal builds due to the extra logging they contain!

This is a small patch for 1.33 that fixes a couple more minor bugs related to the C4, and should (finally) have all our achievements working properly.

[h3]Changelog:[/h3]

• Fixed issues with the following achievements, which should now be possible to earn:
  • First Contact
    
  • Counterfire
    
  • Unfriendly Fire
    
  • Future Warfare
• You should now be able to place C4 freely. In the previous version you could not place it until you had moved a soldier.
  
• C4 should no longer show 0/0 ammo.
  

August was a busy month for us here at Goldhawk, and we've spent it hard at work improving Xenonauts 2! Here's what we've been up to over the past four weeks.

[h3]New Versions:[/h3]
Last month we continued to patch and improve our existing build (Milestone 1), culminating in us releasing v1.32 onto the standard Steam branches and v1.33 onto the Experimental branch today. We've fixed a lot of crashes and other bugs in that time, but also addressed wider issues like adding options to change the duration of timed missions and fixing the memory leaks affecting performance.

We've also begun working on our next major update, Milestone 2. A very early build of this is available on our new "Prototype" branch, and if you want to give thoughts on our changes then please read this (long) post which explains what we're trying to achieve and how you can access the build. Early feedback is always appreciated!

Finally, I want to talk briefly about loading times. We did investigate these last month but any substantial improvement to load times would involve changing the format of the save, which would break existing saved games. We'll therefore be working on load times this month as part of our work on Milestone 2 (as saves from Milestone 1 will be incompatible with Milestone 2 anyway).

[h3]Expanding the Team:[/h3]
Part of the reason for our relatively slow progress on Milestone 2 has been the expansion of our team over the past couple of weeks. Our small team size has left us in a situation where we've collected a lot of useful gameplay improvements / suggestions and bug reports from the community since release, but we've only been able to tackle the most urgent of these.

Given we already work long hours, the only way to make a serious dent in the task lists was to get more manpower. We've therefore hired another full-time programmer (an old friend that worked with us on the original Xenonauts) plus two highly experienced part-time programmers to help out. Many thanks to anyone that applied for the position after reading our last update - we really appreciated so many enthusiastic people reaching out!

Furthermore, we've also brought on some new people to help with QA, game design and level design. You should start to see new maps appearing this month, and we are now aiming to reply to all community bug reports on a daily basis.

Overall, this should dramatically increase the speed of our work over the coming months. However, the hiring process sucking time away from other tasks is why Milestone 2 has ended up a bit behind schedule.

[h3]Modding Tools:[/h3]
Another thing we worked on last month is the mod loader and Steam Workshop integration for Xenonauts 2, which is now nearly complete. However, to make modding viable we also need a standalone tool to allow users to easily edit the game files.

We've already done the backend work for this tool, so the remaining task is to create a GUI that hooks into this and displays the information in a sensible way - but as the dev team is focused on the game itself right now, it'll probably be a few months before we could start work on that.

However, it seems like there is some interest among our playerbase for creating an open-source community mod tool that does exactly this, and we're looking at how we as developers might be able to support that (as it would be a win-win for everyone). If you're potentially interested in contributing, there is more information in this thread.

That's everything for this development update. As always, thanks for reading and we'll be writing another update once September is over!