Xenonauts 2 News

Hello everyone - it’s time for our monthly Xenonauts 2 progress report! This month we've got a shorter update for you, because we've been working hard on getting things ready for the Steam Next Fest demo we'll be releasing for the event - this contains a fully playable slice of Xenonauts 2 limited to the first fifty days of a campaign.

We've made a few minor additions to the gameplay this month, including new research art and a reskin of the Geoscape panels related to launching and managing aircraft squadrons on the Geoscape. Players will hopefully appreciate the latter in particular as the updated Launch Aircraft panel now displays the equipped weapons on the selected aircraft, something that’s been a frequent community request!

The biggest feature we've been working on is the tutorial, as a proper tutorial is an absolute must if we want anyone other than hardcore X-Com / Xenonauts fans to be able to enjoy Xenonauts 2. It's also a good way to allow us to introduce the Xenonauts and the Cleaners / aliens at the start of the game, and generally help set the scene without relying on a massive text dump. Unfortunately it has been rather time-consuming to implement though!

As of today the demo is functional from start to finish, but there's still quite a bit of polishing left to do. I'm expecting it to be in fairly decent shape by the 6th but we'll be continuing to make improvements to it in future builds too. Beyond that, we've mostly been working on stability fixes - another couple of hotfixes for V25 this month and we've got another one on the way shortly.

[h2]Coming up[/h2]

Next month we're going to be continuing to fix and address the gameplay problems / feedback provided to us by the V25 testers, and we'll probably put out V26 towards the end of February. We'll also be evaluating our translation needs, as we need to make a decision about which languages we'll be supporting before we announce an Early Access date.

And that's everything - thanks for reading!

Hello everyone and welcome to 2023!

December was a good month for the project even though it was curtailed by the Christmas holidays, as we released V25 and then opened the game up to the first wave of open beta testers. We didn't add many new features as most of our time was spent gathering community feedback and fixing bugs identified by our new (and old) testers, so I'll instead talk more broadly about what we're going to be working on in the next couple of months.

[h2]Open Beta[/h2]

The first thing to say is that the open beta has already been extremely helpful. We started by inviting a small group of new testers (50) and asked them to post up their initial impressions of the game, and report any bugs / issues they encountered so we could fix them.

The response has been really good so far. Thankfully, the initial response to the game has been almost universally positive (i.e. nobody saying that they didn't enjoy the game, or that it felt too similar to Xenonauts 1 to be worth playing) but we've also received a lot of useful feedback about what people do and don't like about the game. Stability is generally pretty good but there's still a LOT of bugs reported that we're currently working through - every bug fixed makes the game feel better to play!

As we release future builds we'll be inviting new players to join the Open Beta so we can maintain a continual stream of "first impressions" posts, but we'll probably only be inviting 50-100 people for each new build. However, if you're not lucky enough to get an invite, fear not, we have a surprise coming that you'll find out about in a couple of weeks.

[h2]Upcoming Work[/h2]

The dev team will mostly be spending their time working on the surprise, which we’ll share more details on Soon(™). Another primary goal is to get the tutorial implemented - veteran testers have already said they would find it helpful, so I imagine new players will be entirely lost without it! This is a quick 5-minute sequence that covers the plot events immediately prior to the start of the game, and introduces the player to the key controls for the Geoscape and tactical combat.

In other news, we're also going to be improving the difficulty settings so that people can better adjust the challenge to their level of expertise, further balancing work, and working on fixing as many of the reported bugs / usability issues as possible.

The project is entering an exciting period now and I wanted to say thanks to everyone continuing to read and contribute. Hope everyone had a good holiday!