Xenonauts 2 News

We've covered some general aspects of the Xenonauts-2 backstory in our previous updates, but today we're going to be looking at something that will directly affect your strategic approach to the game...

You'll quickly learn that the aliens' tactical capability isn't limited to small craft entering Earth's atmosphere as in Xenonauts-1: this time, they're taking aim at major cities with a terrifying new weapon.

Shortly after beginning the game, your Chief Scientist will discover an unknown object designated UOO-1. A few days later you'll learn that it is not friendly. The alien space station hovering above Earth is in fact a superweapon that will regularly destroy a major city from orbit, causing a large Panic spike in the affected region. This happens more and more frequently as the game progresses, ratcheting up the tension as you build towards the end of the campaign!



[h2]A Thematic Twist[/h2]

We’ve introduced this system for both thematic and gameplay reasons. Thematically, this emphasises the technological superiority of the alien forces - even if you’ve managed to intercept all the UFOs that have spawned in recent weeks and won all your tactical battles, the aliens still control space and are inexorably bombing humanity into submission!

[h2]Gameplay Impact[/h2]

In gameplay terms, this serves to cut short games where the Xenonauts are already losing badly. If you are doing well in your campaign, the Panic damage from UOO-1 is largely counterbalanced by passive Panic reduction that occurs from completing research. However, if a player has fallen behind the technology curve and can’t win ground battles that allow them to unlock new research options, they’ll quickly see Panic rising out of control.

Of course, we don’t want this experience to be unfair: it would be no fun if a player suffered bad luck and lost a region because the Orbital Bombardment repeatedly hit the same region, or was unlucky enough to suffer a bombardment on a region just after they’d failed a Terror Site there, etc. In order to prevent this from happening, the Bombardment always hits the region with the least Panic.

Orbital Bombardment should help us avoid the "death spiral" scenarios which can plague other long-form strategy titles: you'll need to stay ahead of the curve to maintain tactical supremacy.

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.

As ever, we have a lot going on behind the scenes so join us in two weeks' time for the next full development update.

Welcome to this month's Development Update - we hope everyone is safe and well out there.

[h2]Development and Testing[/h2]

We've been working on a variety of structural and behind-the-scenes things over the last three weeks, culminating in the release of Closed Beta V13 on the Experimental branch for our existing closed beta testers. This has already had a hotfix, and another is on the way.

We have some new (more exciting) screenshots up on the Steam store page as well

[h2]Narrative[/h2]

In other news, Chris has been working hard on writing for the game. Twenty-three in-game research reports have been completed over the past six weeks and quite a few more have been drafted. Much of the setting is already complete, so this is largely about fleshing out content and making sure that the progressive lore reveals throughout the campaign are coherent and compelling.

A couple of these research reports will be unlocked in the Xenopedia from the start of the game to set the scene - we gave you a sneak peek at some of this content in our previous development update.

Over the next month, one of our tasks will be tidying up the Xenopedia UI so that projects are organised nicely into category headings and the whole thing is much more readable.



[h2]Ground Missions[/h2]

Progress has been a little slow in this area but we're continuing to work on the new art style: we hope to have the first set of maps built with the new tiles very soon. We expect players will see this as a significant aesthetic improvement - it's certainly making levels a lot more readable. It's absolutely critical that enemies and cover objects are clearly delineated, so that's one of our main goals. This is all a work-in-progress but we hope to have something to show you very soon.

Here's a few other elements of ground missions that we're working on:

• Getting the hull-hiding system for the UFOs working properly continues to be troublesome but we're nearly there now!
  
• Night missions are largely functional but need a few fixes and minor details, such as vehicle headlights, to be added
  
• If we have time, we'll be fixing a few rough edges - jerky camera movement, missing action during the alien turn and the lag on unit death animations are just a few of these
  

[h2]Early Access[/h2]

We're not ready to set a formal Early Access date just yet but, as you can see from the above, we are making progress in that direction.

Our objective is a release that contains a polished version of the first three months or so of the campaign, which in Xenonauts-1 terms would take you roughly up to Landing Ships. There will be further (less polished) content available from release as well, but we feel that focussing on the full experience for that first phase of the game will give the best impression of the final product.

The date will be announced once we've completed the following:

• All of the research reports which appear in this first chunk of the game - as you can see above, we're making good progress on this right now
  
• Three maps per biome for each of the UFO's / ground missions that appear in this section of the game (including night missions)
  

At that point, we'll announce the date 2 - 3 months in advance and polish up what we have in advance of release to make it as enjoyable as possible.

[h2]Mod Support[/h2]

We have also been spending some time on making preparations for mod support. This requires us to save data in editable text files rather than leaving it deep in the impenetrable recesses of the game's codebase. Since the last update, we've managed to externalise the base buildings and we'll be moving on to unit loadouts, UFO crews and UFO missions shortly.

Once this is done, almost everything the game will - in theory - be editable by modders. In practise, however, you're likely to need some editor tools…

On that front, we've been chatting to our long-term community hero Solver about general community involvement with this. Our internal tools are embedded within Unity and aren't particularly user-friendly, so Goldhawk is planning to do a bit of work to prepare the code interface so that external programmers are able to build mod tools which can easily read and write to these data files.

We can't make any promises here, as our priority is obviously completing the game for players, but we're continuing to explore the possibilities.

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.

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.