Xenonauts 2 News

We thought it was high time that we break down the context around your efforts to thwart the alien menace in XENONAUTS-2...

The game isn’t a direct sequel to Xenonauts (narratively there’s not many places to go from the end of the first game!) but a reimagining of the same scenario: how could a small multi-national organisation cope with defending the world against an alien invasion?

To set the scene, let's delve into a little backstory...

The Iceland Incident

The Iceland Incident was a political crisis that occurred in 1962. The official story is that the discovery of a secret American missile base in Iceland led the Soviet Union to mobilize an invasion force to blockade the island before nuclear warheads could be deployed. A large-scale face-off between the American and Soviet navies almost led to a nuclear confrontation - but the situation was eventually deescalated when the Americans agreed to abandon the missile base and allow Soviet inspectors to verify the closure of the site.

In reality, the confrontation was sparked when American engineers building a secret missile base in Iceland discovered fragments of an extraterrestrial spacecraft embedded in a nearby glacier. When the Soviet high command heard reports of this discovery, they assembled an invasion force - fearing that extraterrestrial technology might give their opponents a permanent advantage in any conflict. De-escalation occurred when the Americans agreed to hand control of the artifacts to a jointly-established research organisation that would study the recovered technology and report to both sides. This organisation was known as the Xenonauts.

In the end, less than half of the crashed UFO was ever recovered from the glacier and no sign of the extraterrestrials themselves was ever found. No major scientific discoveries were made as a result of the research work performed by the Xenonauts, and with no obvious signs of further alien activity, the superpowers eventually lost interest.

Undeterred, the Xenonauts continued to operate over the following decades (on ever-smaller funding) and developed several important pieces of technology that would prove invaluable in the coming invasion. The first of these was the inference radar; an extremely sensitive radar capable of tracking UFOs via the disturbances created by their energy shields as they moved through the air. The second was the X-24 Angel interceptor - a small reconnaissance jet equipped with a small inference radar and designed from scratch specifically to resist alien weapons.




The Present Threat

XENONAUTS-2 begins in 2015 on an alternate timeline where the Soviet Union did not collapse and the world is still in the throes of the Cold War (in no small part due to extraterrestrial interference).

The game opens with an invasion of Earth by alien forces: a wave of strikes by UFOs on major cities causes only minor damage but demonstrates that the various regional governments are woefully under-equipped to deal with such a sophisticated threat. Any attempts to rebuff these incursions are foiled: conventional radar tracking is near-impossible and conventional fighters are no match for the advanced energy weapons of the alien craft.

One solitary successful operation is conducted: an unarmed reconnaissance plane is able to intercept a UFO and gather a wealth of data. The Xenonauts, still in operation as a clandestine research organisation, are revealed to be behind the efforts and take it upon themselves to share their findings with both NATO and the Soviet powers.

Hurried bilateral talks are conducted: it is agreed that a unified planetary defense force is the only hope for the survival of humanity. The Xenonauts emerge as the only viable option and are provided with significant funding to conduct an expansion programme; their objective is to act as the "first response" force against extraterrestrial attacks. They are granted unprecedented jurisdiction to establish bases and deploy military forces anywhere in the world, provided they agree to share any research data with all participating nations.

An esteemed military officer - someone whose credentials are sufficient to garner the respect of both sides - is placed in charge to spearhead these efforts (which is where you come in!)

Next Time...

That’s the background to the game explained. In our next update we’ll be discussing one of the new mechanics added to the strategy layer - an alien superweapon that humanity (initially) has no answer for!

Hello all - first thing to do is introduce myself! I'm Paul - I've worked previously on Mode 7's strategy titles as well as a host of other things. Chris has brought me on board to help out with comms at Goldhawk to keep you all more informed about how Xenonauts-2 is progressing.

This will mean more regular updates, info and content.

We've kicked things off by starting up a Discord which you are more than welcome to join over here: https://discord.gg/fG4Xr6q





As Chris mentioned in his Kickstarter update, it's time to discuss the game's art.

A lot of new artwork is starting to arrive, but one of the biggest changes has been to the UFOs. As you can see from the images in this thread, we've decided to revert back to the style of UFOs from the original Xenonauts - the previous "grey box" style of UFOs was rather limited in terms of shapes, and a lot of players were telling us they weren't getting that same feeling of excitement and curiosity when a new UFO appeared on the Geoscape. We're therefore painting up a new set of UFOs for X2 inspired by the style of those from the first game.

However, one of the biggest problems with the X1 UFOs was that the hulls were not destructible so you always had to assault them through the front door. This won't be a problem in X2, as we are setting up destructible breach points in the hull that allow you to create additional entrances using C4 charges. The coding work here has been rather complicated, but we think it's worth it - combining the nice visuals of the X1 UFOs with the destructibility of the "grey box" UFOs should give us the best of both worlds!

We're also updating various other pieces of art in the game. Some of the strategy screen backgrounds have been updated (you can see the Research screen background below), and we're also getting artwork done for the early game research projects to replace the existing placeholder art.

Finally, we're starting to update the visuals in the ground missions. This is the first 3D game we've made and right now the environment art isn't working as well as we'd like, so we've brought in some more experienced freelance artists to tweak our textures to improve consistency and help bring out the detail in the assets we've already built. It's still too early to show off screenshots, but what we've seen so far is very promising!





There's been a lot of code work done in the past few months too - getting the UFO hull hiding (and destructibility) set up, setting up the code for night missions, getting jetpacks working, sorting out the grenade throw mechanics so soldiers spend less time blowing themselves up with their own grenades, upgrading the ground combat soldier inventory screen, improving the usability of the soldier equip screen, etc.

We've also implemented a new armour system with relative penetration system that factors in the hardness of the armour and the penetration of the weapon. Armour now provides a pool of HP that is drained before the soldier underneath takes damage, but particularly hard armour also applies a damage reduction % against weapons with poor penetration (whereas high penetration weapons punch straight through low hardness armour).

This system scales much better with advanced tech than the old armour system from the first Xenonauts. Also, rather than weapons just doing random damage from 50% to 150% of their damage value, hits are now assigned to a specific body part that then controls the damage suffered. This is the foundation for the locational injury system that will follow in a future update.

Finally, we've implemented the proliferation system into the game and set it up. What this means is that specific research (i.e. Laser Weapons) will be shared with your funding regions when completed, which gives you a small Relations bonus and means you will see the local AI soldiers in this region deploying that equipment in Terror Sites etc about a month later. It's pretty cool to see the world changing as a result of your research efforts!





We're planning to release a new Closed Beta build on our Experimental branch in the next week or two. All the upcoming changes to the maps (the new visuals, the new UFOs, night missions, etc) will break the existing maps, so it makes sense to put out one last build with the old maps before we have to rebuild them all.

As for Early Access, the game is now largely feature-complete and the two remaining major obstacles are the research text and the ground combat maps. I'm working on the research text right now, and will be switching over to creating the new set of maps once we've finished upgrading the level editor. Once both those tasks are done we'll be publicly announcing our Early Access date - and then we'll start frantically polishing and fixing the game in preparation for the launch!

Have a good weekend - we'll be back soon with more updates.