Xenonauts 2 News

This month, the team's been hard at work on Closed Beta V21 which is planned to release this week.

[h2]UI / UX[/h2]



The biggest new feature in V21 is that we've implemented the final visual style for the Main Menu / Game Settings screen, and all the related sub-panels (Settings, Load Game, Save Game, etc). We've been working on this new UI style for quite some time now, and it's nice to finally be able to put it in the game - but there's also been a lot of time and effort spent on improving the usability and general polish of the screen. This includes everything from adding support for mass-deletion of save games to adding new UI sounds. Overall, it's a much more slick and stylish experience and it should make a much better first impression when you first boot up the game. We'll continue to roll this new UI style out to other parts of the game as development continues.



[h2]Meet the Cleaners[/h2]

We've also worked on a number of things that haven't really made it into V21, but will be arriving in the next Closed Beta build. We've updated the early game so the war against the aliens starts a couple of months in, and you begin the campaign fighting the infiltrator faction called the Cleaners who are intent on suppressing knowledge of the alien invasion. Because the Cleaners are spread across the planet and have numerical superiority over the Xenonauts, this allows us to have mission objectives that don't make sense when you are fighting the aliens. For example, wave survival maps, VIP escort / assassination missions, extraction missions, objective capture, etc. Some of these should arrive in V22 and make the early game a bit more varied and exciting!

[h2]Visual Polish[/h2]

More work has also been done on the visual side of things. The updated Xenonaut models aren't quite ready to go in the game yet but should be fine for V22, and we're now working on modelling up a series of hairstyles for them so your units are more varied and easily recognisable. Work also continues on the tactical combat environments. The final visual pass on the Western Town tiles is now mostly complete (one of the biggest environments due to the number of different buildings in it) and we'll put them in V22, after which we'll move onto some of the other environments that need some visual upgrades.

There's also been some work on wall destructibility, as once a tile is visually finished we can do the final destructibility setup on it and then put it in the game as a finished asset. The wall "frill" system is designed to ensure destroyed walls have a natural-looking irregular edge (rather than the perfectly straight-edged hole you get if you just remove the wall). However, we also don't want these "frills" floating in the air if there's no adjacent wall for them to attach to, so we needed to do some work detecting whether there was a suitable wall on either side and only placing the frills if so. In any case, the important thing is that our destruction system should now be finished, which allows us to start doing the final destruction states on all of our finished assets.

[h2]Other Bits[/h2]

We also implemented a couple of smaller elements this month too - difficulty settings are now complete, and there's a number of options we have to customise difficulty. This hasn't yet been finalised, as obviously the main campaign still requires some significant balance work.

The other new system is directional sound, which is intended mostly to allow us to play sounds when certain things are on screen (fire noises, the noise of engines running on vehicles, etc). Again, this is just useful for making the game feel a bit more alive.

Finally, we've made a start on the soldier dialogue / barks system. This is a simple system that generates (non-interactive) text dialogue from your soldiers based on things that happen on the battlefield. As a basic example, a soldier might say "I'm hit!" if they are shot by an alien. We're hoping to implement that in its basic form next month with some test dialogue to see if it's a good addition to the game (there's potential for it to be annoying if we get it wrong), and we'll spend some time making it as varied and natural as possible. We're hopeful that this system is going to make the combat feel a lot more reactive to your actions, but we won't know for certain until we've had a chance to test it!

[h2]Beta Progress[/h2]

We're aware that many of you who were not part of the original Kickstarter still want to jump into the beta - we were looking at doing this earlier but the excellent level of feedback we continue to receive from existing players, and the state of the game currently, mean that we haven't found the right timing for this so far.

However, we are still looking for opportunities to add more players to the beta. There's still a significant amount of balancing and gameplay work to be done in order to get the game to a point where that wider feedback will be useful, so please do continue to bear with us - thanks again for your patience on this so far.

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.

Welcome to July's update! No public Closed Beta releases this month, as the team have been working away on some systemic stuff - we hope to resume those next month.



We've spent a fair bit of coder time improving the tactical AI. It now has a much more comprehensive understanding of both terrain and weaponry - it'll be ready for some combat balancing next month.

We're also planning to look into some "advanced" behaviours as part of this, whether it be squad behaviours that allow alien units to move and fight as teams, or unit-specific special abilities. Making the aliens feel more intelligent, with greater differentiation between the different species, should give the game more character.



Work has also taken place on various other aspects of gameplay. Performance on the Geoscape has been improved significantly, and we've implemented an initial version of the difficulty settings. In addition to that, we've finished the implementation of soldier medals.

Thanks to a community bug report, we realised that Landed UFO's weren't actually functional, despite support for them being there! We spent a bit of time looking into that and the coders fixed some related bugs, and now UFOs are landing like they should.





A significant number of new art assets have been added to the game as well. The last of the remaining Xenonaut armours has been modeled and sent off for rigging, so we expect all the final Xenonaut 3D models to be in the game by the end of August - you can see a couple of the designs in the images in this post.

There's also been a new alien model added to the game: the Cyberdrone. This was previously a big white sphere but now actually has a unique design. There's now at least one 3D model for all of the aliens in the game, and we're going to turn our attention to differentiating the variants (so you can better tell an elite alien from a standard alien of the same species, etc).

There's also new 2D art! We redesigned the Gauss weapons and have new-and-improved 2D art for that entire family of weapons. We've also added the top-down art for the two advanced dropships (as seen when arranging your troops inside them on the Aircraft screen), and as the 3D tiles are already complete we just need to paint the background art on the Soldier Equip screen for those and then they are done. This work should be completed next month.

Finally, we've brought back a freelance artist who was working with us on improving the look of the ground combat tiles. The quality of the ground combat environments is still quite variable, from the attractive dockyard maps we used in the Steam Demo through to biomes like Arid or the American Town which are not quite there yet. We'll be working hard on retexturing some of the less attractive assets to bring them up to final quality, and we'll also be adding the final destruction states to them too. It might take a few months for this to bear fruit but you'll see quite a big improvement in the way the game looks when it does!

One more thing on the art front - the new UI art style also continues to develop. We hope to have the new main menu screen and it's various sub-panels in the game next month (the "start new campaign" screen, load game screen, etc). Maybe even the new topbar too if things go well.





In addition to gameplay work, we've also been taking a look at some technical issues. We're continuing to work on translation support, but that hit a speedbump this month because we had previously been linking items / projects together via their name (e.g. when specifying which item unlocks a Research project). Unfortunately, this system falls apart once the name becomes a value that changes based on language, so we had to rewrite quite a lot of code relating to that too. Despite that setback, we're hoping to get translation support completed soon.

So, a very busy month with a lot of spinning plates. However, as you can see, progress on all these fronts continues to be positive - we hope to return to more game balancing work next month.

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.

This month saw the release of Closed Beta V20 on our Experimental branches, which incorporated further improvements to the current skeleton of the campaign as well as some more general gameplay updates.

[h2]The Campaign[/h2]

This month,we added the tactical combat tiles for the Battleship and Harvester UFOs (the two largest types) and also added the tiles for the two advanced human dropship types. We managed to play through a campaign up until the introduction of the Harvesters as well.
Quite a few balance changes were made along the way, and we now believe we have a rough structure in place for the entire campaign.. There's still a lot of fine tuning left to go, but there is some basic challenge to the game and it's reasonably enjoyable to play - assuming you can look past the rough edges!

The focus for the next month is the content. We've shuffled the research tree around a lot in the past two or three months, so even some of the initial research projects are "dummy" projects without text or research artwork. As we're now reasonably happy with the shape of the research tree, we're going to start filling those in, and updating any existing research text to reflect any mechanical changes we might have made since they were written. There will also be a proper pass on the tooltips and efforts made to ensure all objects, buttons and concepts are written up and accessible in the game. This will hopefully put us in a decent place to do the first stage of the open beta.

[h2]Alien Intelligence[/h2]

Recently, we've also been working on various other things that should improve the playability and usability of X2. The first thing is improvements to the AI, which is still basic but is getting steadily better. The AI in the first Xenonauts was purely dynamic, so aliens would read the battlefield and choose where they wanted to position themselves based on preferences (i.e. being in cover vs out in the open, etc), whereas in X2 we've moved to a system where aliens have waypoints set around the map that designate good places for them to move to / lurk in (when a hostile unit is sighted they go into dynamic "combat" mode and ignore the waypoints). All maps are now set up with these waypoints.
The effect of this is that in X2 you the alien movement should be more varied and dynamic, and you'll encounter enemies in a variety of positions (more like in classic X-Com). They might be standing in the open, or crouched behind cover, or looking out of a window with a good field of fire. In X1 they tended to run into corners and just stay there because those were the "best" locations based on their preferences. We've also been working on trying to fix some of the really stupid decisions the AI makes, which usually revolve around times when there's a really obvious way for it to kill one of your soldiers but it chooses not to. In future builds we'll be doing further work on this, but also trying to add more advanced behaviours like allowing us to partner up aliens that have abilities that work together so they form a little squad on the battlefield.

[h2]Tweaks and Improvements[/h2]

As always, we're also working on some odds and ends. The soldier medals system was largely implemented a couple of years ago now but never quite finished, so we've finished that and set up the 8 medals your soldiers can earn in battle (each one gives +1 to all soldier stats). Mind Control has been rebalanced so its effectiveness drops off with range, which should make it less annoying. We've also implemented proper drag-and-drop functionality for the engineering queue and the soldier lists on the Soldier Equip / dropship screens. There's various other small usability changes too, plus further work on the tactical combat camera to ensure it tracks the action better during the alien turn and some more work on the Reapers to make the zombifying / Reaper hatching effects work better under all circumstances.

[h2]Solid Progress[/h2]

In summary, we think once we've done the early-game research writing we'll be able to say that Xenonauts 2 is a playable (if unfinished) game. The standard disclaimers apply - the game needs another pass on the art (which we're working on in the background), we still need to do more to differentiate it from X1, and there's still more polish and content to be added. But the game is already quite fun to play (as long as you're not expecting a finished game just yet) and it'll only improve as we continue our work on it!

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.

Your Xenonauts 2 update for May is finally here! Apologies for slight lateness on this one.

Chris is back on the case full-time now and has been focussed on getting the early game balanced and playable.

[h2]Rinse and Repeat[/h2]

This has mostly involved repeatedly playing the campaign over and over again, making a series of gameplay changes and bugfixes each time. This isn't really something that can be done until relatively late in development, when all the key gameplay systems are in place. Chris is working on this earlier for the sequel because we've got new mechanics to implement / test, and we need a playable version of the campaign to do that testing. The upside of this is that the game is rapidly becoming much more fun and playable in totality.

There are still areas of the game which need significant attention - the AI and the repetitiveness of the maps, for example. Also, the research text is mostly absent, plus the UI and quite a few of the tactical combat assets still need visual improvement. This will all improve incrementally over time.

Chris' plans for June are to get all the UFOs and Xenonaut dropship tiles added to the tactical missions, and to be able to play a campaign all the way through to the final type of UFO without suffering any game-breaking bugs or ridiculous difficulty spikes.

This will be a major milestone, and will mark the point where Xenonauts 2 becomes a properly playable game in its own right. The rest of the team will probably spend most of their time fixing the various gameplay / usability issues encountered along the way but we're also going to be making some time to upgrade the AI.

[h2]AI[/h2]

Last month Chris created a large number of test scenes for the AI so we could test whether it properly understood the different aspects of how to play the game. These were scenarios where there is a clearly optimal course of action (e.g. use the best weapon / fire mode for the situation, use clearly the best cover, etc), and this makes it much easier to identify exactly what the AI is doing wrong and why. We should have a number of AI fixes and updates in our next major build as a result.

[h2]Eye Candy[/h2]

The visual upgrades are continuing but we are taking some time to work through the pipeline. We've got new Xenonaut early-game models that are ready to be rigged and animated, a new Light Drone model and an updated model for the X1 Praetor equivalents that also need rigging and animation. The 2D art for the aircraft weapons / equipment is nearly done now, and the final 3D model for the sentry guns is also nearing completion. The biggest ongoing project is the concept work on our updated strategy layer UI, which is progressing nicely but still isn't ready for implementation because there's so much UI that needs to be concepted up.

[h2]Onwards to Beta[/h2]

Closed Beta Build V19 came out last week, and we will be releasing a hotfix early this week. Unfortunately, the sheer volume of changes we've made recently means that you may well not understand what's happening in the latest versions of the game - the gameplay changes are some way ahead of the tooltips and the research text, making the experience confusing / frustrating unless you've been following the patch notes closely. Chris will begin work on updating the tooltips / research text once it's possible to play the campaign all the way to the final UFO type, and once that work is done we should be able to commence the open beta.

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.

Welcome to this month's update!

As we mentioned last time, Project Lead Chris took some personal leave recently - he's now back to full-time work. A quick shout-out to everyone in the community who posted supportive comments when we mentioned this - there can be a lot of negativity in game communities and it's great to hear from the majority of you who are continuing to support the project and make positive contributions! Thank you for this and for being patient as we work towards more public releases.

While progress has understandably been a little slower due to this, the team have used the opportunity to focus on some important back-end tasks....



The first of these is the final part of the change from a single-base Geoscape to a multi-base Geoscape, which is the final separation of the base stores so that each base is pulling from its own inventory just like in the first game (previously items, soldier equipment, etc were shared globally across all bases). This is now done and bases have been fully separated from one another - it's quite a significant change and it's almost certainly caused quite a few bugs which we'll need to catch, but it's good to get this in at this point.



The second thing was adding "nested tooltips" that contain hyperlinks to other tooltips, similar to those seen in Crusader Kings 3. It's a little tricky to explain but you can see a quick example of it in action in CK3 here. This system allows us to prioritise helpful information given to the player while also providing links that lead to more detailed explanations.

Each tooltip ends up being shorter and more focused, but more overall information is available than before.



The third major thing is setting the game up to support translation. This is actually a very big task, but we figured we'd tackle it now given we're going to have to write a lot of text into the tooltips. Essentially we have to find every piece of text in the game that is displayed to the player and reference it into a single giant file that can then be translated into other languages. This system is made more complex because this system also needs to combine with our planned modding system, so that new text added in mods could also be translated if needed.



In terms of art, we've started work on the final set of Xenonaut 3D models and we've been working on an updated design for the alien Gun Drone. We've also been working on the final designs for the two advanced dropships (up to this point we've just been using the old X1 designs as placeholders). There's also been some work done on the 2D art for the aircraft weapons and equipment, and further work on the new strategy UI concepts we've been working on for a while now.



The current plan is to start putting public builds out again in May - we hope to get the entire schedule back on track soon. I will obviously keep you updated as soon as the team is able to target a more specific release date for the Open Beta.

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.