Xenonauts 2 News

Hello everybody - it's time for our monthly progress update. There was no update last month because we were in the process of switching our marketing partner, but everything is back to normal now.
[h2]Marketing Partnership[/h2]
Xenonauts 2 is now being published by Hooded Horse, a specialist strategy publisher who we think are a really good fit for the type of game we're making. This publishing deal is purely a marketing partnership, so Hooded Horse have no control over the design of the game, but they'll be handling future community updates and helping build some buzz around the game as we approach Early Access (which is finally approaching, and is planned for the first quarter of 2023).

This means you'll start seeing trailers and updated screenshots for the game in the near future, which should show off the progress we've made in recent months!

[h2]Development Progress[/h2]
Development has gone well over the past two months. We recently released a tactical demo for Steam's Tacticon event, which was well received (it's still available on our Steam page for anyone that wants to play it!) and we're planning on launching our next Closed Beta build towards the end of next week.

The biggest feature we added was Abduction Missions, which are a new type of tactical mission that provides a bit more variation to the game. The aliens have captured a number of civilians and imprisoned them within teleporter pods, and you have a certain number of turns to rescue as many as possible before the timer expires and any unopened pods teleport away.

These missions are no harder than normal missions as only 50% of the civilians need to be rescued for you to win - but you gain resources for each extra pod recovered, allowing the player to earn extra resources by playing more aggressively than normal. Personally I think this makes them a nice change of pace from other mission types.

The other major feature we added was heavily requested by the community - giving grenades arced throw paths, allowing them to be thrown over cover or walls. Implementing a curved arc in an abstract 3D tile grid has been quite a knotty problem, but it's now working pretty well and it definitely opens up a lot more tactical options!

Beyond that, we've added a lot more assets, small features and bugfixes. In brief - achievements and cloud saves are now functional, lots of new terrain tiles have been added including a complete rework of the Xenonaut Base tileset, about twenty new research reports have been written, and three of the important UI screens on the strategy layer have now been reskinned in their final style, and quite a few more things I just don't have space to mention.

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 or just want to chat!

Greetings - July is now complete so it's time for this month's update.

Unfortunately, progress on the game this month has been somewhat disrupted by covid. All of the UK-based team members managed to get ill at one point or another, so - as you can probably imagine - this did not have a great effect on productivity.

While this meant we were not able to release Build V24 last month as planned, we are hard at work on it right now. There have been a lot of crashes to fix that have been introduced by all the new systems we've added since V23 but most of those should have been found and fixed. The team is now focussing on adding and polishing new content.

[h3]Breaking New Ground[/h3]

Many of the terrain tiles we've been working on over the past six months have now been implemented and are starting to work their way into maps. This has been mentioned in previous updates but in V24 you should now see new (or revamped) buildings in various biomes such as the Jungle (which now has ancient ruins) and the Desert (which now has trailer park-style mobile homes). Farm maps now have a new type of barn and a storage shed, and the Xenonauts Base Defence missions feature a host of new tiles.



We're hoping to have the terrain tiles pretty much done in the next month or two, barring ongoing visual polish during Early Access. There's still a few base buildings that need tiles done for the base defence missions, and the Soviet Town biome is still incomplete - we're working on the buildings for it right now. Then it's just a case of checking through everything we have to ensure all the assets have the correct metadata set up etc. We've got a wide selection of tiles across a lot of different biomes now, so we should have everything we need to ensure the game has far more maps than Xenonauts 1.

[h3]Additional Art[/h3]

We've also been adding other types of art to the game too - a few new autopsy paintings have been added to the Xenopedia, plus the Stealthsuit now has its final painted art. The UI update continues to progress with the Funding Report and the Xenopedia getting visual updates this month. We're currently working on the designs for the Base and the Base Stores strategy screen, and hopefully we can start to implement them later this month too.



[h3]Other Bits[/h3]

There's not many new features that have been added this month because the coders have mostly been supporting other work. The map editor had become painfully slow due to all the data we've added to maps associated with the alien movement system (all the AI waypoints etc) so quite a bit of time was spent on improving performance there, and there was also work to be done related to the UI styling and functionality. Some of this is purely visual, but there's a few quality-of-life elements in there (eg the Xenopedia is now accessible in ground combat).

One thing we did add is the "tutorial notification" system, which you'll have encountered in other games -little pop-up notifications that appear at certain points in the game to explain information. For example, the first time you get a bleeding wound on a soldier it pops up a notification explaining how to heal them. Spotting a door pops up a notification telling you that you can right-click on the door to open it without walking through it, etc. The first batch of these will be V24 once Chris has had time to write out the text for them.

So that's been the progress over the past month. Not great but not exactly terrible either. Hopefully next update things will have gone more smoothly and we can talk more about our future plans in more detail!

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.

July has arrived and it's time to check in with last month's progress on Xenonauts 2. Apologies for slight slowness as we got this month's update in order - here's all the info…

There’s three main things to talk about this month: accessibility, the end of the game, and the release of V24.

[h3]Accessibility[/h3]

We recently noticed that a lot of players were misunderstanding game mechanics, and given the people currently playing the game are Kickstarter backers who usually know the first game well, this set some alarm bells ringing at our end. As a result we've added a lot more information to the game this month, which should help experienced players easily understand how the different mechanics are interacting and should (hopefully) make the game much less intimidating for new players.



The first element of this is a "hit calculation" panel during tactical combat, which explains exactly how the hit chance of a shot is calculated (see above). This is a relatively simple change that makes ground combat much clearer, as it previously wasn't always obvious what you could do to improve the hit chance of a shot.



The second improvement is to the Xenopedia (research) reports, which now show the stats of the corresponding alien / UFO / aircraft / piece of equipment / etc. To make things even clearer, we've also added in a section for "abilities" that allows us to explain any unique properties - e.g. the basic Sebillian aliens have the "Regeneration: 20" and "Scaled Hide: 5" abilities and hovering over either of these displays a tooltip that explains exactly what those abilities do and how they work.

The result is a clear summary of what each thing in the game does. Importantly, this does not require the player to read the wall of text that comes with each research report - although lots of players like reading the lore, we suspect there's also a lot who would rather not have to!

As a final improvement here, we're also working on making the Xenopedia accessible during tactical combat via the Esc menu.



Next, we’ve added mission briefings at the start of tactical missions that make it clear what the objectives are, along with any special rules / alternate win conditions. Previously, this wasn't required because almost every mission boiled down to "kill all the aliens" but now we've started adding more mission variety via more complex objectives, it is definitely needed - we were finding a lot of people were getting confused on the non-standard missions.



Lastly, we’ve re-enabled the loading screen tips and added quite a few new tips. These are surprisingly useful to communicate minor gameplay or usability features that even some experienced players are not aware of.

What comes next on usability? The two main things we're currently planning out are the tutorial and little pop-up notifications that explain mechanics to players as they play (e.g. you can right-click on a door from an adjacent tile to open it, etc). We're hopeful the game will be fairly easy to learn and play once those systems are done, given our tooltips are already in a reasonably good state!

[h3]Operation Endgame[/h3]

We've been working on the final mission of the game for a while now. Last month we blocked out the maps and worked on the fundamental code required to support two missions back-to-back. This month, we were doing proper gameplay testing on the mission which has led to a lot of bugs being fixed and quite a few amendments to the levels and the balancing.

It's now possible to unlock the final mission and win it. However, we want to make the experience of winning a game slightly more rewarding than it was in the first Xenonauts, where the game just flashed up a couple of lines of congratulatory text and then booted you back to the menu screen. We've been implementing a campaign stats panel to show the player (e.g. "Total Aliens Killed", "Total Soldiers Lost", etc) and we're also planning a more substantial epilogue to the game too.

[h3]Build V24 / Public Release[/h3]

We're hoping to release our next closed beta version towards the end of this month, likely some point during the week commencing 18th July.

The eagle-eyed among you may have noticed that the things we're working on at the moment are some of the biggest things blocking an open beta / Early Access release (people need to be able to understand the game and win the campaign), and this is not entirely a coincidence. We're not going to publicly announce any plans yet but we're making a concerted effort to get the game ready for sale in the near future.

Thanks again for the patience on this - those of you who leave positive and supportive comments on these updates are hugely appreciated.

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.

Time once again for your Xenonauts 2 monthly development update! Thanks again for your ongoing patience as we continue our work on the game.

Yesterday we released V22 onto our standard Steam / GOG branches for backers to play, as it's in decent shape after the seven (!) hotfixes we have released for it over the last five or six weeks.

Obviously all those fixes and releases took up quite a bit of developer time this month, but there was also a lot of other progress on the project to report. The biggest new feature we've been working on is the updated tactical interface, which is a fairly complex beast given the depth of the tactical combat. The UI now looks better and is much less cluttered and (hopefully) easier to use and understand. Perhaps more importantly, it properly integrates the relevant information for the Morale and Armour systems which were added earlier this year.



Additionally, we started working with a couple of new illustrators at the start of the month to finish off the remaining research art. Three new autopsy paintings have been added this month and the final dropship has also been completed - we also amended the in-mission tiles for this dropship to improve its interior layout and fix some visual issues. Several more enemy units have had their corpse artwork painted too and that job is now nearly complete.



On the 3D front we've now managed to finish and rig all the female civilian models (meaning all the human models are now complete and set up in-game) and several alien armour variants from previous months were also rigged and added. In terms of environment, we're still working on the Xenonaut base biome because there's just so many different base rooms that need to be created, but progress is pretty good and the new assets are definitely looking like an improvement!

Beyond the tactical UI and bugfixes, the coders also found time to implement a proper re-arming system for interceptor weapons (previously the planes would instantly rearm when returning to base) and then do some work to support the final mission. In classic X-Com style, we have decided to make this a two-part mission so we needed to do a bit of work to support this - that all seems to be working. Both maps need further playtesting and visual improvements but in theory it should now be possible to properly win the campaign when we release the next build.

Overall, we feel like we've made good progress this month. We'll start to think about putting out the first iterations of V24 towards the end of next month to let those in the beta play with the final tactical UI and hopefully several more significant improvements too.

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.

Greetings - here is your Xenonauts 2 development update for April…

[h3]Bugfixes, Art and Tweaks[/h3]

This month saw the release of Closed Beta V23 and a series of hotfixes on our Experimental Branch. This has been quite a bit of work since we previously hadn't released a new public build since November, but we are continuing to release hotfixes to fix the bugs found by the community and expect to be able to release it to the standard branches in the next week or two.

There's been a lot of improvements to the gameplay in V23 but many of them have been covered in previous updates. One nice thing we got in relatively recently was the final 3D art assets in place for the enemy Cleaners and male civilians, with the female civilians and some additional armour variants for the aliens due to arrive this month. Given there's multiple civilian outfits for the eight biomes we have in the game, that's a lot of new models - and we're glad it's now done, because getting them all set up has been rather painstaking work!

We've also gone through the research tree and added a few more research entries and some artwork to research projects where it was previously lacking. We've been stuck for a while with the artwork for our alien autopsies / interrogations, as we lost the artist who painted our existing autopsy art due to personal reasons and we'd been hoping he would be able to come back (because he was great) - and while that did not happen, we thankfully have managed to find someone that looks like they are capable of matching his art style. We'll therefore be adding more new research artwork to the game shortly.

Work has also continued on the environments. Recently we started work on the biome that is currently in the worst state, the Xenonaut Base biome. This is seen more frequently now because the Cleaners now attack your base in the opening months, and the Cleaner Headquarters mission also uses the same set of tiles, and it's currently a mish-mash of half-finished assets and different styles we were experimenting with. The new tiles are starting to take shape nicely and hopefully we'll be able to show some of them off in V24.

Among the various bugfixes and usability updates, there's also been various small features added to the game. The autoresolve for the air combat is being upgraded to better reflect what is happening in the air combat, so it doesn't throw out weird results (and if it does you can ignore the result and fight the battle manually). Aircraft weapons now also take time to rearm when the aircraft returns to base, etc.

[h3]Power Up[/h3]

The biggest new feature that we have added this month is something we want to test out for potential inclusion in V24, which is an updated power system for your bases. This will allow you to improve the functioning of a building by feeding it more power - e.g. increase the range on the Radar, the research speed on your Laboratory, etc. As you can unlock better power generation buildings as you advance down the tech tree (as well as more advanced buildings that consume more power) this will hopefully create some interesting choices for the player. However, we just won't know how good the system is until we test it, so we can't make any promises about it being in the final game.

We'll keep you updated on our progress as ever so see you again for the next update!

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.