Xenonauts 2 News

Yes, we know it's not October any more but, as we all know, time is a mere construct of our limited human perception...Ok, we're sorry but we've been busy!





The biggest news for October is that we released our first backer build in about four months (V14), and we're continuing to push out hotfixes for the various issues people are encountering with the game.

This build is mostly a test build to help us find and squash most of the bugs that have accumulated over the last four weeks, but the game is rapidly becoming more playable. We're hoping to release the next major update (V15) in two weeks with some significant visual updates and new mechanics, and this should hopefully mark the point where someone can sit down and properly play a multi-hour campaign of the game.

That's a huge deal and we want to thank the community once again for bearing with us up until this point. The overwhelming majority of you have been tremendously patient and supportive - it makes a big difference.

Most of the new features that appeared in V14 were features from the original Xenonauts that we knew we had to include in Xenonauts 2 to make it a proper sequel (e.g. night missions, proper base defence missions, etc) but we're now in a position where we can start to implement entirely new features. Systems like the soldier training system and the soldier stress system were implemented earlier in development and should just require a few days of coder time to get working again, and even entirely new systems such as base structure adjacency bonuses shouldn't be too much work to implement. Some of these new elements will start to arrive in V15.

The visuals of the game aren't going quite as well as the code side of things, but we're still making progress there. Work continues on the new strategy UI screen backgrounds and if all goes well they will be complete in a couple of months. We're recruiting a new artist to design the weapons that are still using placeholder art (e.g. the early-game Accelerated ballistic weapons) and to do some of the research artwork for the weapons. We've finished some more UFO designs. We're starting to take a look at some of the 3D character models and consider which ones need replacing or retexturing, and we'll be ironing out a few of the more obvious animation issues in the near future too.

The environments in our tactical missions should look noticeably better in V15 too. We're currently focusing on the ground textures in the various biomes and have been drawing inspiration from the ground textures in the first Xenonauts, which to me hit a sweet spot where they weren't detailed enough to be distracting but were still interesting enough that you didn't have to fill an area with props to avoid it looking boring. Although there's still plenty of work to be done, the maps already feel a lot more cohesive than they did six months ago, and once the ground textures are done it'll be much easier to update all the other terrain in each biome to match their style.

Finally, when our fixes on V14 are done the game should now be playable up to the fifth crashable UFO (of 7 non-unique ones). This represents over half the length of the campaign and is more than enough playable time for us to start proper balancing work, so from V15 onwards we'll start acting on player feedback about balance issues and specific problems in the game that are acting as barriers to enjoyment. In short, V15 will be the point we start treating Xenonauts 2 like a playable game.





Given this, we've reached the point where we can start to plan our Early Access launch in earnest.

We're not yet able to give you a firm date but February is looking likely (which means we'd ideally need a final launch build ready for late January).

We'll give more details on Early Access when V15 arrives - we're currently targeting Tuesday 17th November for the V15 release. Hopefully some of you will be willing to spend a little time testing the game and giving us your thoughts on that day, as it'd help us a lot with our planning!

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.

Here we are again with another monthly update - more behind-the-scenes stuff for you this time so stay tuned if you're interested in that sort of detail. Let's kick things off with a little bit of art, though - here's some new advanced armour…





[h2]Base Defence[/h2]

The most significant new feature implemented this month was the Base Defence missions, which are now fully functional on the strategy layer.

We've now added base defence turret structures that can be upgraded. UFOs spawn and attack your bases, the defence turrets attempt to destroy them, and casualties are inflicted on the alien ground forces based on how much damage you do to the UFO.

Additionally, the alien base attacks now operate on a "threat" system that triggers attacks based on how proactive you are about shooting down UFOs. The system also takes into account which bases the interceptors are flying from, so the aliens will tend to strike back against bases that have lots of interceptor activity and ignore more research or manufacturing-oriented bases.

Thanks to our work on the dynamic map loading last month, we were also able to implement the tricky bit of the ground combat code - the part that creates the tactical map dynamically based on the layout of your base. We now need to create the ground combat assets for each room and then base defence missions should be fully functional. That'll happen in a few months, but in the meantime it just loads in a generic "under construction" room for each building if your base gets attacked.

[h2]Alien Patrol Routes[/h2]

We've also added the basic movement system for the new AI, which allows us to set patrol routes for aliens. This will be most useful within UFOs: in X1 the aliens would usually be in the same positions (mostly camping in a corner) because the AI had calculated they were the "best" positions.

Our new system is much more dynamic, and we expect the aliens to move around a lot more and potentially catch players off guard. Note also that aliens go into "combat mode" as soon as they sight an enemy unit and are allowed to move freely, so this doesn't constrain the AI - it just encourages it to move around more when not in combat.

We're now starting work on the last remaining parts of the Geoscape base separation, as a few things are still shared between bases that should not be - specifically personnel, items and the engineering project queue - and we're now starting to split those out so each base is fully independent from the others, as well as implementing the UI to allow you to transfer items and staff between them. This task is quite a bit of work relative to how much it affects gameplay, but ultimately it's necessary to maintain immersion. If we don't do it, weird stuff happens like all your soldiers being present at base defence missions no matter which base gets attacked.

There's also been more work ironing out issues with the night missions, the UFO hull hiding system and the ground destruction systems, which are still continuing to cause problems. Hopefully we'll have them fixed up fairly soon too.



Our content work this month has mostly been on level design and assets related to the ground combat environments. The first UFO has made the jump from being a temporary test blockout to having final assets in place, which has allowed us to properly test the dynamic loading of the crashed / landed variants for the first time (thankfully it's working fine).

We've now started work on the final art for the second UFO too, and we've made some progress on 2D design for the next UFO (which is an early-game transport craft somewhat akin to a more compact version of the X1 Landing Ship).

Level design and art work continues on the tactical maps. The layouts for most of these maps across all the existing biomes are complete and we're now splitting them out into small randomisable sections and adding spawn points, etc.

The visuals are a bit of a weird mix of old and new right now but that'll naturally change as we work through the remaining art assets. These maps should be complete by the end of the week, however.
Finally, we've brought a new artist on to paint the background art for the various strategic screens. We've unfortunately had several artists unsuccessfully attempt this job in the past, but the work produced by the new artist is looking good so far.



We are currently shaping up for a major beta milestone which will include pretty much all of the fundamental game mechanics, as night missions, base defence missions, dynamic map loading, ufo hull hiding and full separation of the bases will now be in place.
There is a fair amount of balancing work to be done as well in advance of this but we're continuing to head in the right direction.

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're back once again with a monthly update. A lot of under-the-hood stuff for you this time but also a few cool things to show you as well, so let's get started with one of those...



Take a look at this swanky new 2D art for the Phantom Interceptor...



We've also made some progress on the end-game exosuit armour artwork and the Fighter UFO design - hopefully we'll be able to show those off to you soon.



We have now moved to a system which generates maps dynamically when missions are loaded, rather than from a pre-baked file. This was something we thought might not be technically possible at the start of the project but thankfully we've managed to overcome the issues.

This means, for example, that a map does not require a separate variant to be created for every different UFO type it supports - it can just load in the required UFO depending on the mission.

You can read more about the ins and outs of this system over on the forums if you're interested but the short version is that we're now able to facilitate the following (among many other things):

• Xenonaut base defence mission maps will be able to mirror the layout of the base being attacked, as they did in X1
  
• Much greater support for map randomisation
  
• Saves players a load of hard drive space and makes our updates much smaller downloads!
  

Over the last couple of months, a lot of work has gone into creating new maps and improving the consistency of the ground combat visuals. We’ve spent a lot of time on the Desert and Polar biomes, and have also started work on the Farm.

We’re still experimenting with the finer points of the art style, but the main improvement has been to retexture our new assets in a consistent style that draws out additional detail. You can see a before / after shot of one of our retextured vehicles below (before is at the top, after is at the bottom):



We’ll be showing off larger sections of the maps in future updates once we’ve nailed down the overall art style, but the work is coming along nicely so far!



All of this ground combat work has enabled us to create a new set of Desert, Polar and Farm maps for the small UFO's - these maps use a mix of randomised and preset areas, which provides a great balance of "authorship" (ensuring the map is consistently fun to play) with a healthy dose of variety.

In addition to these, we've added a few Raid maps for the Desert, Farm and Polar biomes. Raids exist in the game already, but eventually they will occur more frequently and support all the major biomes instead of being limited to the Dockyard biome as they are at present.

These maps will feature capturable alien bombs, so the player will be able to seize some Alenium for successful completion - this should make them much more strategically rewarding and less of a chore than the Terror Sites in Xenonauts 1 and classic X-Com could be.

This dovetails nicely with our other work to minimise map repetition. In Xenonauts 1, the location of your starting base had a significant bearing on the type of map you would see on a regular basis: if you started in a Desert region, for example, you'd be cycling through the small UFO desert maps in rapid succession rather than seeing any of the other maps and biomes that the game had to offer.

Our new system attacks the problem in multiple ways. Firstly, it tries to randomise the map biome if at all possible, as each area of the Geoscape can support up to two biomes.

Once the biome is set, the game will then check a list of the last 100 maps you've played across all your different campaigns. It'll then try to select one you've not already seen from a pool of relevant maps. Raids will contribute even greater variation to this system, as they'll allow the game to place missions in biomes you may not encounter much otherwise.



Here's a brief summary of some of the other development work that's been taking place...

New UFO Style

The new UFO art style that we've been showing off recently has finally made it into the ground combat (these are still untextured models at present as the internal floorplans are still being tested). We've also managed to replicate the "hull hiding" system from X1 that makes it easier to fight inside UFOs, with additional support for the 3D rotatable camera. We’re planning 8 crashable UFO's in the full game total, and we'll show those off as they are finalised.

Fog of War / Shroud

We've been working on cleaning up the visuals for this - there were some annoying edge cases where bits of terrain would clutter up the edge of the player's non-visible area and some significant work has gone into resolving this.



In the short-term, we'll be working on further level design to get all the new content in there. At the moment, it currently takes around one week per biome so we should hopefully be in a good place to start planning another beta build in around a fortnight.

Welcome to this month's Xenonauts 2 development update - lots to talk about this time around so buckle in, Commander…



The first new thing we've been working on is the art for the modular MARS vehicle, take a look at these concepts:



The in-game models for these are nearly complete but not yet fully integrated - we'll be able to show those soon.

The MARS is now a vehicle that can use one of three primary weapons (rocket launcher, cannon or machinegun); these are all upgradeable as you research new weapon tiers. It also has upgradeable heavy and light armour variants: these allow you to give the vehicle additional HP at the cost of slightly reducing its time units.

The chassis itself can also be upgraded: once you reach a certain tech level you'll be able to replace the tracks with a hover chassis. This has additional TU's as well as jetpack functionality, and acts as a replacement for the existing ARES vehicle, making the MARS the only vehicle in the game. However, the initial MARS can now be upgraded and enhanced throughout your campaign, from a simple tracked unit with steel armour and a ballistic weapon to a high-tech alloy hovertank with powerful plasma weaponry.

The core idea here is that - just like a soldier - vehicles don't become obsolete as the game progresses: their relevance is determined by their loadout. However, we'll test this to see if it works and potentially return to a model based on separate vehicles depending on how it feels.



This month has also seen us make some strides in terms of how ground combat looks and feels in the game.

There have been a couple of additional changes to improve the clarity of the maps: the shroud now hides objects on hidden tiles (this avoids visual confusion such as shadows sticking out of the shroud); and the tile height has been changed to 3 meters. This latter alteration has several knock-on effects, the most significant being that it's now substantially easier and clearer to fight in enclosed spaces like UFO's.

One final tweak we've made is to speed things up a bit. We recently increased the run speed of units and we've now updated the code to remove the pause before units die. This makes things a lot snappier and more responsive- closer to that traditional X-Com feel.

Finally, we've been doing more work on night missions (which are nearly there and will be playable very soon) and the new UFO's. Our new UFO hull hiding system (ie when you see the inside of a UFO, the hull disappears and it turns into a floorplan like in X1) appears to be working well: we're in the process of building out the hull models and floor plans for the first 4 - 5 UFO's which will be a good point to do some more testing.

A quick note to say thanks for the great response to our new updates so far - we really appreciate all the support, feedback, criticism and discussion so keep it coming.

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.