Xenonauts 2 News

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.

Hello everyone - time for our development update for March. Apologies for this being a few days late - the intention was to time the update to coincide with the release of V23 but we've found a couple of crashes which have pushed the release back. For those interested, we'll be releasing V23 on our Experimental branches at some point this week.

Chris has been focussing on campaign balancing this month, which is always a significant undertaking given a full campaign playthrough is probably 15-20 hours long (i.e. at least two full working days). Each attempted playthrough results in a number of balance changes that need to be made, bugs that need to be fixed, usability changes to be made, gameplay mechanics that need to be checked out because they may not be working properly, etc. This is critical work, but not especially interesting to talk about - we therefore don't have many "big" features to discuss in this update, so here's a general round-up.





The main new change on the strategy layer is an attempt to introduce more strategic pressure. The Orbital Bombardment mechanic has made a return in a somewhat altered form, and it's now effectively a monthly performance target communicated in a slightly more thematic way. We're aware that the community had some concerns about this mechanic in the past, but this new format shouldn't cause any issues.

At the start of the month Orbital Bombardment increases Panic in all regions by a certain amount (e.g. +25 Panic) that increases as the game progresses. If any region has over 100 Panic at the end of the month it surrenders and is lost to the aliens, so the player must try to generate enough Panic reduction during the month to cancel out the Panic gain. Monthly funding from a region is tied to its Panic, so success means funding goes up and failure means funding goes down.

Panic reduction is achieved by defeating the alien invasion - shooting down UFOs and completing ground missions like Terror sites. These generate a local Panic reduction, but also a global reduction. The regions you are protecting best will have the lowest Panic but even undefended regions will have lower Panic if it looks like humanity is winning the war against the aliens.

The gameplay effect of this is much like the monthly funding evaluations that appear in every X-Com game, but it serves to reduce the amount of damage that can be caused if UFOs spawn repeatedly in undefended regions due to simple randomness, and it also ensures that the game ends more quickly if the player was underperforming (it was always a bit silly that it took 3-4 months to lose the game in Xenonauts even if you never shoot down a single UFO or win a tactical mission).



We've spent quite a bit of time this month fixing gameplay issues to do with the Xenonaut Base Defence missions, as we've introduced a base attack on your main facility by the Cleaners to increase early-game mission variety. While this biome still looks a bit ugly (it hasn't had the visual pass yet) the gameplay is more solid.

The first thing was to get the Sentry Guns set up. These cheap and durable vehicles are only used in base defence missions, and they had some display issues that have now been corrected. Also, their LMGs should now be upgraded appropriately as the player progresses down the tech tree.

The second thing was the spawning / deployment phase of the mission, which had apparently got broken at some point in development. The player can now deploy anywhere in their base at the start of the mission except in rooms where aliens have spawned. Additionally, the alien crews are now correctly splitting into assault teams and choosing the correct type of room to spawn in. Most types of aliens spawn into Hangars as normal, but certain other types (e.g. Reapers) are able to spawn in random rooms due to their ability to climb through vents or teleport.



We also spent more time this month on updating various strategic UI elements to our new style, and the updated graphics for the tactical combat UI may well make it into V23 too.

The Air Combat has also had a few more updates to ensure the new formation / deployment system works properly, and we've also set up the autoresolve to allow the player to manually fight the air battle if they don't like the result the autoresolve gives them. This protects players from the situation where the autoresolve unexpectedly destroys all your planes (usually due to low fuel).

The balance here has changed a bit too. There's now four classes of weapons that have different roles: cannons, missiles, torpedoes and energy lances. These have varying ranges, ammo capacities, and damage profiles vs armour and HP. The ability of an interceptor to perform the evasive roll maneuver is now also tied to the weapons they have equipped, so while energy lances are relatively powerful weapons they also make the interceptor carrying them more vulnerable to certain enemy attacks.
Finally, we've been working on the blockouts for the final mission this month too. We won't give too much away but there's a few unique rules on this mission that have required a bit of code work too. Hopefully the final mission will be playable in V24 even if the final art pass on the map probably won't happen until closer to release.

That's it for now - thanks for your patience as we continue working on getting the game into shape.

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.

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.