Xenonauts 2 News

Hello! Apologies for the slight delay in getting this update out - things have been very busy around here as Xenonauts 2 is gathering momentum and we're responding to a lot of your enthusiastic community feedback as we go. Here's what we were working on during January…



[h2]New Content and Polish[/h2]

We released Closed Beta V17 on the Experimental branches last week and patched a number of bugs. We'll leave it a few more days and see how many more bugs are reported by the community after the latest patch, and if no further hotfixes are required we'll likely push V17 out to the default stable Steam / GOG branches.

The main new feature is an adjacency system for the base structures on the strategy layer. This system makes buildings more effective if they are built next to other buildings of the same type; for example Living Quarters grant additional living space if constructed next to other Living Quarters. Although the system is quite simple in principle, it makes planning your bases far more interesting than before and I think it'll be one of the first new features in X2 that returning players will notice, because it adds a wholly new dimension to a familiar system.

We've also been doing further work on the visuals. The MARS vehicles now update their art on the strategy layer and model in the tactical combat when you change their weapons. We've started working with a new particle artist, which has allowed us to replace the truly awful fire animation we were previously using, and we'll be updating the smoke / explosions / etc over the coming months so they look a bit more polished. There's been a few new pieces of research art added, we're designing the first new dropship for the game, and we're also working on the inventory art for the various vehicle weapons. We're hopefully going to start work with a new UI artist shortly too, so there's plenty going on.

However, we've prioritised improving the stability and usability of the game above everything else. We've fixed upwards of a hundred bugs or small stability issues every month since about August and we're starting to see the results. You still shouldn't expect Xenonauts 2 to feel like a finished game when you play it initially (it's still a much worse experience than Xenonauts 1) but it certainly seems possible to play it for a time and enjoy it - which is good news, because we've still got lots of polish and improvements planned!

[h2]Upcoming Work[/h2]

It's hard to plan too far ahead when so much of our work is responding to issues experienced by the community, but there's a few things we have our eye on.

The first thing is to get the final two UFOs that create crash sites into the game. We've finalised the 2D art for these UFOs and we've got the basic model in place, but doing the final texture work and setting up the tiles in the tactical combat is rather time-consuming for UFOs this big (plus we'll have to create maps for them for all the different biomes). However, having all the UFOs done will be a nice mini-milestone for the project and will allow us to test the tech tree all the way through to the very end of the game.

We're also going to be looking into some optimisations. This month we removed quite a chunk of unused old assets from the game directories, which reduced install size by 20% and sped up load times a little. We've also been working on improving the performance of the Geoscape by optimising the prerequisite system, as this controls everything from what time UFOs spawn and when research projects unlock to whether base structures are being constructed in a valid location or whether a specific unit can equip a specific item. Hopefully this will speed things up noticeably on low-end systems.

Other things we're hoping to be able to spend some time on are AI improvements, putting in a penalty for going over your Stores Capacity, and making further improvements to the Stress system so that the stress accumulated by soldiers is tied more closely to what actually happens to them on the battlefield.

[h2]Early Access[/h2]

Our current plan is to launch into Early Access towards the end of next month, but we'll be evaluating the game in a week or two and making a final decision on whether to postpone the launch or not. If you've been eagerly awaiting the Early Access launch so you can finally get your hands on the game, fear not - we've been working on alternate arrangements to allow new people into the Closed Beta even if the Early Access launch does get delayed! More details on all that once we've made the decision to postpone or not.

Before we get into things, we hope everyone had an excellent Christmas and that you're all set for a thoroughly Reaper-free New Year.

Here's your update for December…





A new version was released for backers this week with a host of gameplay improvements but a few juicy new features as well.

We've added a Soldier Memorial screen (based on the popular Xenonauts: Community Edition feature) which allows you to view your fallen soldiers and the date on which they died.

The second feature is the new soldier Stress / Fatigue system. The purpose of this is to discourage the player from running too many missions: the player isn't meant to fight a crash site battle every time they shoot down a UFO).

Soldiers gain stress from taking part in missions, but stress diminishes gradually over time. If a soldier ever goes over 100 Stress they suffer a breakdown and are set to Wounded for a certain number of days until they recover. At the moment the system is a little basic but I'm hoping we'll find time to integrate it into the ground combat mechanics in a more interesting way (i.e. high Stress soldiers are more likely to suffer morale events / psionic attacks in battle than well-rested soldiers).

There's a long list of gameplay and UX updates - most of which are small in isolation, but have a large collective effect: we've added tooltips to various parts of the game, as previously it was impossible to view the stats of certain items anywhere; we've done some work to ensure fewer things are being incorrectly hidden below the Hidden Movement screen; and we've brought back the cover icons from X1 that people have been asking for a while, etc. Switching between the primary and secondary weapons is now "sticky", making using secondary items a much more pleasant experience than it was before. Many of the bugs reported in the later versions of V15 have also been fixed in V16 too, as well as countless more small fixes.



We've also added quite a bit of new art to this build. There's a new 3D model for the Colossus armour (the most advanced suit of Xenonaut armour) and we've done some texture work on a number of the basic aliens that has made the Sebillians in particular look nicer than they did before. There's inventory art for our new Electroshock weapons and updated designs for items like the Medikit, Stun Baton and the Alien Magnetic Weapons. We've added the final background art to the Soldier UI screen, and we've rendered the new MARS models out for use in the Soldier Equip screen (these will be painted over by a 2D artist soon too).



For those who are not involved in the beta, the game is now starting to take shape reasonably well.

At this point this is mostly a matter of content. Although there's still a fair amount of coding to be done on the project, most of the things that are likely to jump out at people as being wrong with the game is missing content like missing parts of the tech tree, research reports not having images or text, or seeing terrain objects or aliens that look bad because they're still using semi-placeholder assets, etc. We're making steady progress on this front and the presentation of the game will continue to improve and the missing content will continue to arrive in the coming months.

It's been nice to see the bugs and issues reported on the forums gradually shift from being technical issues to gameplay issues, and to see people starting to properly play the game. We've been working hard to try and remove as many of the annoying / broken / jarringly ugly things that get in the way of players enjoying the game and with the Early Access launch still planned for late February we'll be continuing to prioritise this - having a more polished and enjoyable game is probably better than having one or two extra features!

November has been a productive month for us on Xenonauts 2. We're making good progress and the support we've received in terms of testing and feedback from the community has been outstanding - it's hugely appreciated.



[h2]Closed Beta V15[/h2]

This was released on the Experimental branch a week ago and has already received two hotfixes, with another one planned for this week. We're currently working on bugs and hope to have a stable version out on the standard Steam and GOG branches next week.

There are quite a few new features in this version but it's also significantly more polished. We've added some new UI screen background art and some new weapon art on the strategy layer, and in the tactical missions we've introduced improved ground textures to our maps and fixed lots of small things like the distracting pink error textures that were appearing frequently during combat.

Various parts of the UI have had tabs added to them to make navigation easier. There's more ambient sound than there was previously, etc. Lots of little things that collectively make the game look better and play better than before. You can take a look at the full changelog here if you are so inclined.

[h2]Training[/h2]

The Training system is new in Xenonauts 2. It allows your soldiers to gain experience passively outside of combat (assuming they are stationed at a base with suitable training facilities), but the initial rate of gain is fairly slow. However, completing autopsies on dead aliens and interrogating captured aliens will increase your institutional knowledge about the aliens and their tactics, and therefore increase the training speed of your soldiers. Soldiers will train up relatively quickly towards the end of a campaign, allowing you to replace lost veterans with semi-experienced troops.

We like the training system for two reasons: firstly, it gives a good reason for the player to complete autopsy research (autopsies might not autocomplete in X2) and also for them to try to capture at least one specimen of each alien type. Secondly, it fits the theme of the game quite well - it's about the humans gradually learning the alien weaknesses and reverse engineering their technology, then eventually steamrollering them.

[h2]Undersuits[/h2]

The Undersuit system is simple but adds more depth. Each soldier now has an additional armour slot in which they can put an Undersuit, which is a garment that can provide a variety of benefits from additional armour to stat boosts or even regenerative effects (it's quite similar to the Vest system in XCOM in many ways). This is just a way of expanding the tech tree and adding more ways of customising your soldiers - it seemed like an easy way to give the player some fun new toys to play with.

[h2]Next Month[/h2]

Once we get V15 Stable out, we'll be turning our attention to V16 - but with our Early Access launch planned for late February the emphasis will be on polishing and improving what we already have rather than adding major new features (although we might add one or two). As we play the Campaign now, it feels as if things are starting to click together nicely - we're looking forward to seeing how much better we can make it over the next three months!

Many thanks for reading and for staying up-to-date with our work - as ever please do join us on Discord, the forums or here on the Steam community if you have any questions.

Yes, we know it's not October any more but, as we all know, time is a mere construct of our limited human perception...Ok, we're sorry but we've been busy!





The biggest news for October is that we released our first backer build in about four months (V14), and we're continuing to push out hotfixes for the various issues people are encountering with the game.

This build is mostly a test build to help us find and squash most of the bugs that have accumulated over the last four weeks, but the game is rapidly becoming more playable. We're hoping to release the next major update (V15) in two weeks with some significant visual updates and new mechanics, and this should hopefully mark the point where someone can sit down and properly play a multi-hour campaign of the game.

That's a huge deal and we want to thank the community once again for bearing with us up until this point. The overwhelming majority of you have been tremendously patient and supportive - it makes a big difference.

Most of the new features that appeared in V14 were features from the original Xenonauts that we knew we had to include in Xenonauts 2 to make it a proper sequel (e.g. night missions, proper base defence missions, etc) but we're now in a position where we can start to implement entirely new features. Systems like the soldier training system and the soldier stress system were implemented earlier in development and should just require a few days of coder time to get working again, and even entirely new systems such as base structure adjacency bonuses shouldn't be too much work to implement. Some of these new elements will start to arrive in V15.

The visuals of the game aren't going quite as well as the code side of things, but we're still making progress there. Work continues on the new strategy UI screen backgrounds and if all goes well they will be complete in a couple of months. We're recruiting a new artist to design the weapons that are still using placeholder art (e.g. the early-game Accelerated ballistic weapons) and to do some of the research artwork for the weapons. We've finished some more UFO designs. We're starting to take a look at some of the 3D character models and consider which ones need replacing or retexturing, and we'll be ironing out a few of the more obvious animation issues in the near future too.

The environments in our tactical missions should look noticeably better in V15 too. We're currently focusing on the ground textures in the various biomes and have been drawing inspiration from the ground textures in the first Xenonauts, which to me hit a sweet spot where they weren't detailed enough to be distracting but were still interesting enough that you didn't have to fill an area with props to avoid it looking boring. Although there's still plenty of work to be done, the maps already feel a lot more cohesive than they did six months ago, and once the ground textures are done it'll be much easier to update all the other terrain in each biome to match their style.

Finally, when our fixes on V14 are done the game should now be playable up to the fifth crashable UFO (of 7 non-unique ones). This represents over half the length of the campaign and is more than enough playable time for us to start proper balancing work, so from V15 onwards we'll start acting on player feedback about balance issues and specific problems in the game that are acting as barriers to enjoyment. In short, V15 will be the point we start treating Xenonauts 2 like a playable game.





Given this, we've reached the point where we can start to plan our Early Access launch in earnest.

We're not yet able to give you a firm date but February is looking likely (which means we'd ideally need a final launch build ready for late January).

We'll give more details on Early Access when V15 arrives - we're currently targeting Tuesday 17th November for the V15 release. Hopefully some of you will be willing to spend a little time testing the game and giving us your thoughts on that day, as it'd help us a lot with our planning!

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.

Here we are again with another monthly update - more behind-the-scenes stuff for you this time so stay tuned if you're interested in that sort of detail. Let's kick things off with a little bit of art, though - here's some new advanced armour…





[h2]Base Defence[/h2]

The most significant new feature implemented this month was the Base Defence missions, which are now fully functional on the strategy layer.

We've now added base defence turret structures that can be upgraded. UFOs spawn and attack your bases, the defence turrets attempt to destroy them, and casualties are inflicted on the alien ground forces based on how much damage you do to the UFO.

Additionally, the alien base attacks now operate on a "threat" system that triggers attacks based on how proactive you are about shooting down UFOs. The system also takes into account which bases the interceptors are flying from, so the aliens will tend to strike back against bases that have lots of interceptor activity and ignore more research or manufacturing-oriented bases.

Thanks to our work on the dynamic map loading last month, we were also able to implement the tricky bit of the ground combat code - the part that creates the tactical map dynamically based on the layout of your base. We now need to create the ground combat assets for each room and then base defence missions should be fully functional. That'll happen in a few months, but in the meantime it just loads in a generic "under construction" room for each building if your base gets attacked.

[h2]Alien Patrol Routes[/h2]

We've also added the basic movement system for the new AI, which allows us to set patrol routes for aliens. This will be most useful within UFOs: in X1 the aliens would usually be in the same positions (mostly camping in a corner) because the AI had calculated they were the "best" positions.

Our new system is much more dynamic, and we expect the aliens to move around a lot more and potentially catch players off guard. Note also that aliens go into "combat mode" as soon as they sight an enemy unit and are allowed to move freely, so this doesn't constrain the AI - it just encourages it to move around more when not in combat.

We're now starting work on the last remaining parts of the Geoscape base separation, as a few things are still shared between bases that should not be - specifically personnel, items and the engineering project queue - and we're now starting to split those out so each base is fully independent from the others, as well as implementing the UI to allow you to transfer items and staff between them. This task is quite a bit of work relative to how much it affects gameplay, but ultimately it's necessary to maintain immersion. If we don't do it, weird stuff happens like all your soldiers being present at base defence missions no matter which base gets attacked.

There's also been more work ironing out issues with the night missions, the UFO hull hiding system and the ground destruction systems, which are still continuing to cause problems. Hopefully we'll have them fixed up fairly soon too.



Our content work this month has mostly been on level design and assets related to the ground combat environments. The first UFO has made the jump from being a temporary test blockout to having final assets in place, which has allowed us to properly test the dynamic loading of the crashed / landed variants for the first time (thankfully it's working fine).

We've now started work on the final art for the second UFO too, and we've made some progress on 2D design for the next UFO (which is an early-game transport craft somewhat akin to a more compact version of the X1 Landing Ship).

Level design and art work continues on the tactical maps. The layouts for most of these maps across all the existing biomes are complete and we're now splitting them out into small randomisable sections and adding spawn points, etc.

The visuals are a bit of a weird mix of old and new right now but that'll naturally change as we work through the remaining art assets. These maps should be complete by the end of the week, however.
Finally, we've brought a new artist on to paint the background art for the various strategic screens. We've unfortunately had several artists unsuccessfully attempt this job in the past, but the work produced by the new artist is looking good so far.



We are currently shaping up for a major beta milestone which will include pretty much all of the fundamental game mechanics, as night missions, base defence missions, dynamic map loading, ufo hull hiding and full separation of the bases will now be in place.
There is a fair amount of balancing work to be done as well in advance of this but we're continuing to head in the right direction.

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. We can't promise to get to everything but we'll do our best to answer things which come up frequently from the community.