Xenonauts 2 News

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.

Greetings everyone - we'll start this update by addressing the delay to the Open Beta.

One factor here is that Project Lead Chris is currently working reduced hours due to a personal matter - here's a note from him:

"It's unlikely there will be any public releases (including the open beta) for the next four weeks or so. I'm now not sure exactly when the open beta will happen, but I'll let you know once my plans do start to return to normality. However, the time I do have has been spent on project management and I'm therefore hoping overall progress on the project won't suffer too much as a result of my absence. We've also made some decent overall progress this month."

So, apologies for that delay - we're aware that people are very keen to jump in and we appreciate that it's difficult to keep waiting. However, given the above and the fact that the game continues to receive regular updates to (and useful feedback from) the Closed Beta, we're going to have to ask you to continue to be patient on that front. Thanks!

With all that in mind, let's take a look at our recent progress…



We've placed a significant amount of emphasis this month on air combat.

Beta V18 arrived at the start of the month and that contained our new air combat damage model where UFOs / aircraft now have both Armour HP and Hull HP, with weapons doing different amounts of damage to each (damage is always assigned to Armour HP first). This allows us to differentiate between different types of tough UFOs, as different weapons are stronger against UFOs with lots of Armour HP compared to those that just have vast amounts of standard Hull HP.

This change added some welcome variety to the air combat, but it didn't change the fact that the air combat can be very repetitive. We've therefore spent the last couple of weeks trying out some new ideas to make it more reactive - the key change being that we've added a vision radius to all air combat units, added clouds that block vision (and weapons cannot fire though), and set UFOs to only go into attack / escape behaviour when they spot your aircraft.

The basic idea is to generate more interesting combat scenarios. The early tests suggest that these new systems do make everything more interesting but we'll probably need to build further upon them to make the most out of them.



We've added a generic system that allows us to set basic logic on items that modifies their accuracy - e.g. if a soldier has less than 60 Strength, give -1 Accuracy for each Strength below 60. This is interesting because it allows us to add unique values to certain weapons, for example we could say Laser weapons are easy to use so a soldier gets +0.5 Accuracy for each point of Accuracy below 65. This potentially means Lasers would remain viable weapons for rookie soldiers even towards the end of the game, without making them overpowered in the early game.

We've also been looking at how to support Recoil. We can now easily add in the system from the original Xenonauts (the 60 Strength example given in the paragraph above) but we've been experimenting with a system where the accuracy of each subsequent shot in a burst is reduced by a set percentage. For example, a weapon with 20% recoil and 50% hit chance would have the following hit chances in a 5-round burst: 50%, 40%, 32%, 25%, 20%.

This setup means we should be able to permit the option for longer bursts. Short bursts are relatively accurate but cost a lot of TU per shot, whereas longer bursts are more TU efficient but waste ammo.
This becomes interesting because you can do two things - firstly, we can add in a recoil penalty for certain weapons depending on whether they have moved (representing a bipod). So a machinegun might be able to shoot relatively accurate long bursts provided the shooter had not moved, whereas only short bursts would be worthwhile if the user had moved. Secondly, we can use the generic system mentioned above to modify Recoil based on the Strength of the soldier so that stronger soldiers suffer less from the effects of recoil.

Taken together these systems just allow us to differentiate the weapons a bit more and give the player a few more tactical decisions, without rendering weapons like the LMG completely useless if they aren't fired from a stationary position. I imagine modders will also find them useful tools.



We've added quite a lot of new art for various vehicle weapons, we've added support for keybindings, we've made a number of usability improvements to the tactical combat based on feedback on our Steam demo, and we've added proper jetpack movement to the game too. There's also been lots of smaller fixes / additions not worth individually mentioning.

Many thanks for reading and for staying up-to-date with our work - as ever please do post here in the Steam community, join the Discord or ask in the Forums if you have any questions.

While we don't respond to everything, we do our best to read every thread that is posted.