Xenonauts 2 News

Hello everyone - May is now over, so it's time for our monthly update to explain the progress we've made.

[h2]Early Access Launch Date & Plans[/h2]
The first thing to mention is we now have a date for our Early Access launch. I don't know exactly when it will be revealed because our marketing partners Hooded Horse are handling the announcement, but we're focused on getting the game as good as possible for that date.

Anyone whose been spending time on our Discord will at least know that we’re not planning on launching in Q2. However, you won’t have much longer to wait - watch this space; the invasion will begin sooner than you might think!

Please be aware that the Early Access version of the game at launch is going to cut off after about 60-70% of the full campaign. This is still a big chunk of the game - depending on how quickly you play tactical missions, you could easily spend 10-15 hours playing a campaign before you hit that point. Ultimately we had to make a decision between spending our time working on polish and bugfixes that affect the whole game, or fixing various issues (and adding some missing content) that only relate to the final section of the game.

In the end, we thought people would prefer to play a 15+ hour chunk of Xenonauts 2 that would hopefully leave them impressed and keen to play the final game, rather than release the entire campaign in a less polished state that they might enjoy less. We will be adding back the removed content during Early Access, once we've had a chance to test it and polish it up to the standards of the rest of the game.

[h2]Current Goals[/h2]
Our current goal is to make sure the playable parts of the game are as enjoyable as possible. One important aspect is to ensure all the research text and art in the playable sections are ready, so I've been working hard on that (along with a number of illustrators). We're also working on lots of bugfixes and usability improvements, and adding little quality-of-life features requested by the community - e.g., you can now rotate soldiers when arranging them inside the dropship on the strategy layer. If there's any time left over, we'll try and add some new maps too.

We're not going to be making any further large changes to the game until after the Early Access launch, as we want to avoid introducing new bugs. It's always important to have the game as stable as possible on launch!

[h2]Completed Work[/h2]
Now I've discussed our future plans, I'll quickly summarise the work we did last month in the space I have left:

• We released Closed Beta build V27 onto the Experimental branch for Kickstarter backers, along with four hotfixes that fixed a LOT of bugs. We'll be hotfixing a few more issues this week and then hopefully releasing it on the Steam / GOG main branch.
  
• More work on the translation.
  
• As mentioned above, quite a lot of work on the research text/research artwork.
  
• We did some more work on the new Geoscape icons.
  
• We fixed the memory leaks in the game, which were causing performance issues and eventual crashes if you played the game for an extended session. This involved upgrading a copy of our codebase into the most recent version of Unity (as the version we're using is so old it doesn't have the tools required to easily find memory leaks), which is good news - after the Early Access launch, we'll probably upgrade the main project to this new version of Unity too. This should improve performance and compatibility, as well as make the lives of the developers easier.
  

There are a few other small things we worked on that probably aren't worth talking about, as this post is already rather long. That's all I have for this month, so thanks for reading the post, and I'll make another post once our release date is announced!

Now that April is behind us, it's time for another monthly update. There's been good progress in some areas this month, but also some areas of frustration.

[h2]Cleaner Cells[/h2]

The main new mission we've been working on this past month are the Cleaner Cells. These are VIP Elimination missions where you're tasked with attacking a hidden Cleaner command post and killing / capturing the leader in charge. If you're successful, all Cleaner activity in that region will stop and Panic will stop rising there.

The other part of the mission is capturing data from the various computers around the map (the same way as in the Intel Hub mission). This is an optional activity, but any data captured will increase the player's progress towards revealing the Cleaner Headquarters - and once that is revealed and destroyed, all Cleaner activity everywhere will stop. Capturing the VIP rather than killing them also provides a bonus to Cleaner HQ progress.

This means these missions are another example of a mission where you can choose how much you want to push your luck. Enemy reinforcements start spawning after seven turns, so most players will have enough time to fight their way in and kill the VIP without needing to fight off the reinforcements - but you can take a risk and try to grab more of the computer data either by staying and fighting the reinforcements for a few turns, or just by spreading your team out more in the early stages of the mission.

Although obviously this isn't that different from the Abduction missions or the Cleaner Intel Hub mission, I personally feel it still makes a nice change of pace from the standard crash site / elimination missions, so hopefully everyone else enjoys them too!

[h2]Translation part deux[/h2]

The other big feature we've been working on is still the translation, which has sucked away a lot of our time and delayed pretty much everything else we've been working on. Frustratingly, it's still not done - although we're a lot closer than we were last month.

I wrote out several long paragraphs of explanation here in my previous draft of this post, but honestly I won't bore you with the details. There's just a lot of work to be done to set up support across a variety of different languages (including non-Latin languages like Russian or Chinese and Japanese), and this is a big and complex game with lots of text in it. Lots of text needs to be loaded or displayed differently in very specific circumstances, so there's been a lot of unpleasant surprises.

We're hoping we'll be done with our end of the translation work next week, but ultimately it's difficult to know what further problems we'll encounter.

[h2]Other Work[/h2]

We have done a few other things though. I've spent a bit of time this past month adding more 'character conversations' to the game, which are a nice way to sprinkle a little more flavour into the game beyond the research text. I think they're a nice addition in terms of immersion.

We changed Combat Shields back to working like they did in X1 based on all the player feedback we got on the topic. There's also been quite a lot of bugfixes and small UI updates on the strategy layer too, which are collectively useful but there's nothing individually worth picking out.

That's everything for this update - see you next time!

March is nearly over and it's time for our monthly update. We've still not nailed down a definite date for our Early Access launch but barring any major disaster we're planning to stick to our Q2 target window, so we're an absolute maximum of three months away from launch at this point.

[h2]Campaign Options[/h2]

One of the two big features we've worked on this month are campaign options, which take the form of a new panel alongside the New Campaign menu.



The values for these options update as you change difficulty settings, allowing players to better understand how each difficulty setting changes the game. However, you can also change the values manually and create your own custom difficulty setting - for example, if you found the strategy layer fairly easy but wanted to make the tactical combat harder.

We've also included new options (both on this panel and in the standard settings menu) that allow you to enable or disable several of the quality of life features or gameplay changes we've made in Xenonauts 2 - for example, some people like enemies displaying their heath values above their heads, whereas others do not. This also applies to things like the camera automatically focusing on newly detected enemies or whether soldier rotation when firing weapons should cost Time Units.

[h2]Translation[/h2]

The other big feature we've worked on this month is the technical implementation of translation, which has involved finding literally every text string displayed in the game and exporting it into a massive spreadsheet so it can be translated.

There's many thousands of these (many of which are dynamic strings rather than static ones), so it's been a lot of work and has caused quite a few bugs. However we're now pretty close to being done with this, and we'll hopefully be doing a dry run of the tech next week with the localisation teams from our marketing partners. If that goes well then we'll be sending the text off to the professional translators afterwards.

This is the main reason why I've not been comfortable setting a date for Early Access quite yet - I really wouldn't be surprised if at least one unexpected problem arises from the translation testing that derails general development for a week or more, so I don't want to be working to a hard deadline until the dry run is complete and we've fixed any major problems that were identified as a result.

[h2]Other Work[/h2]

Another improvement that happened this month is the Aircraft screen and all associated panels being reskinned. This was the last of the strategy management screens that required a visual revamp, so now the only parts of the game that still need a UI pass are the Geoscape map itself and the Air Combat. Quite a nice mini-milestone for us!

That's all I've got for now - see you all next month!

Hello everyone! February is now over so it's time for our monthly progress update.

The biggest thing that happened this month was Steam Next Fest. We put out a demo for this that allowed players to play the full game for just over a month and included our new tutorial. This was the first time we've allowed people to play more than a curated single mission, so it was quite a nerve-wracking experience, but overall I think things went well - we got a lot of new wishlists and a lot of useful feedback.

[h3]Steam Demo[/h3]

Broadly speaking the feedback on the demo was good. I want to thank everyone that posted up their thoughts and suggestions either on Steam or on our forums or Discord, because it's been really useful to read those. Even the negative feedback has been very useful, because in most cases it revealed either bugs we were not aware of or parts of the game that need better communication or balancing. It's never nice to realise parts of your game don't work quite as well as you thought they did, but it's certainly much better to find that out before the Early Access launch than after!

A lot of our time this month has therefore been spent working on the issues and problems people experienced in the demo.

[h3]V26 Stable Released![/h3]

This morning I released the final version of V26 onto our standard Steam and GOG branches, which is the first build to make it beyond our Experimental branches since November and should be a substantial improvement on the previous V24.7b. Thanks to all of the testers who made suggestions and reported bugs with V25 and V26! I'm currently working on V27 which will hopefully be arriving on the Experimental branches later this month.

[h3]Translation[/h3]

Based on the sales data provided by our marketing partners Hooded Horse, we've decided that it would be sensible to support translation for our Early Access launch. We're working on the technical implementation of this now and will hopefully have that finished this month (although the actual translation work will take a bit longer to deliver).

Hooded Horse will be using professional translators to deliver high-quality translations into most major languages, but we also hope to make these tools available to the community in the future so people can translate the game into other languages if they wish.

[h3]New Gameplay Changes[/h3]

The two large gameplay changes we've been working on this month are the reskinning of the Soldier Equip screen into the new UI style and adding another unique tactical mission type.

The new tactical mission is an "Eliminate VIP" mission, which in this case takes the form of an attack on a Cleaner outpost where the objective is to kill the Cleaner leader and escape before enemy reinforcements overwhelm you. This mission requires a bit of extra work because we're also adding some optional secondary objectives in the form of more computers that contain Cleaner Data that can be recovered, but hopefully it'll be another interesting new mission type to keep the campaign nice and varied to play.

This all ties into a bigger revamp of the Cleaners which we'll be testing this month. I don't want to reveal too much about it until we've had a chance to properly playtest it, but the idea is to make the Cleaner mission sequence a bit more dynamic rather than their story just being a straightforward research chain. If all goes well people will be able to try this for themselves in V27.

That's everything from me. As always, thanks for reading and we'll see you next month!

Xenonauts 2 will be streaming for Next Fest!

Wage a global war of resistance against an alien invasion. Command turn-based tactical battles, build a network of covert bases, directly control your fighter wings, and achieve strategic victory in a simulation of asymmetric warfare against a technologically superior foe.

Discord: https://discord.gg/fG4Xr6q

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