Xenonauts 2 News

March is nearly over and it's time for our monthly update. We've still not nailed down a definite date for our Early Access launch but barring any major disaster we're planning to stick to our Q2 target window, so we're an absolute maximum of three months away from launch at this point.

[h2]Campaign Options[/h2]

One of the two big features we've worked on this month are campaign options, which take the form of a new panel alongside the New Campaign menu.



The values for these options update as you change difficulty settings, allowing players to better understand how each difficulty setting changes the game. However, you can also change the values manually and create your own custom difficulty setting - for example, if you found the strategy layer fairly easy but wanted to make the tactical combat harder.

We've also included new options (both on this panel and in the standard settings menu) that allow you to enable or disable several of the quality of life features or gameplay changes we've made in Xenonauts 2 - for example, some people like enemies displaying their heath values above their heads, whereas others do not. This also applies to things like the camera automatically focusing on newly detected enemies or whether soldier rotation when firing weapons should cost Time Units.

[h2]Translation[/h2]

The other big feature we've worked on this month is the technical implementation of translation, which has involved finding literally every text string displayed in the game and exporting it into a massive spreadsheet so it can be translated.

There's many thousands of these (many of which are dynamic strings rather than static ones), so it's been a lot of work and has caused quite a few bugs. However we're now pretty close to being done with this, and we'll hopefully be doing a dry run of the tech next week with the localisation teams from our marketing partners. If that goes well then we'll be sending the text off to the professional translators afterwards.

This is the main reason why I've not been comfortable setting a date for Early Access quite yet - I really wouldn't be surprised if at least one unexpected problem arises from the translation testing that derails general development for a week or more, so I don't want to be working to a hard deadline until the dry run is complete and we've fixed any major problems that were identified as a result.

[h2]Other Work[/h2]

Another improvement that happened this month is the Aircraft screen and all associated panels being reskinned. This was the last of the strategy management screens that required a visual revamp, so now the only parts of the game that still need a UI pass are the Geoscape map itself and the Air Combat. Quite a nice mini-milestone for us!

That's all I've got for now - see you all next month!

Hello everyone! February is now over so it's time for our monthly progress update.

The biggest thing that happened this month was Steam Next Fest. We put out a demo for this that allowed players to play the full game for just over a month and included our new tutorial. This was the first time we've allowed people to play more than a curated single mission, so it was quite a nerve-wracking experience, but overall I think things went well - we got a lot of new wishlists and a lot of useful feedback.

[h3]Steam Demo[/h3]

Broadly speaking the feedback on the demo was good. I want to thank everyone that posted up their thoughts and suggestions either on Steam or on our forums or Discord, because it's been really useful to read those. Even the negative feedback has been very useful, because in most cases it revealed either bugs we were not aware of or parts of the game that need better communication or balancing. It's never nice to realise parts of your game don't work quite as well as you thought they did, but it's certainly much better to find that out before the Early Access launch than after!

A lot of our time this month has therefore been spent working on the issues and problems people experienced in the demo.

[h3]V26 Stable Released![/h3]

This morning I released the final version of V26 onto our standard Steam and GOG branches, which is the first build to make it beyond our Experimental branches since November and should be a substantial improvement on the previous V24.7b. Thanks to all of the testers who made suggestions and reported bugs with V25 and V26! I'm currently working on V27 which will hopefully be arriving on the Experimental branches later this month.

[h3]Translation[/h3]

Based on the sales data provided by our marketing partners Hooded Horse, we've decided that it would be sensible to support translation for our Early Access launch. We're working on the technical implementation of this now and will hopefully have that finished this month (although the actual translation work will take a bit longer to deliver).

Hooded Horse will be using professional translators to deliver high-quality translations into most major languages, but we also hope to make these tools available to the community in the future so people can translate the game into other languages if they wish.

[h3]New Gameplay Changes[/h3]

The two large gameplay changes we've been working on this month are the reskinning of the Soldier Equip screen into the new UI style and adding another unique tactical mission type.

The new tactical mission is an "Eliminate VIP" mission, which in this case takes the form of an attack on a Cleaner outpost where the objective is to kill the Cleaner leader and escape before enemy reinforcements overwhelm you. This mission requires a bit of extra work because we're also adding some optional secondary objectives in the form of more computers that contain Cleaner Data that can be recovered, but hopefully it'll be another interesting new mission type to keep the campaign nice and varied to play.

This all ties into a bigger revamp of the Cleaners which we'll be testing this month. I don't want to reveal too much about it until we've had a chance to properly playtest it, but the idea is to make the Cleaner mission sequence a bit more dynamic rather than their story just being a straightforward research chain. If all goes well people will be able to try this for themselves in V27.

That's everything from me. As always, thanks for reading and we'll see you next month!

Xenonauts 2 will be streaming for Next Fest!

Wage a global war of resistance against an alien invasion. Command turn-based tactical battles, build a network of covert bases, directly control your fighter wings, and achieve strategic victory in a simulation of asymmetric warfare against a technologically superior foe.

Discord: https://discord.gg/fG4Xr6q

[previewyoutube][/previewyoutube]

Xenonauts 2 will be streaming for Next Fest!

Wage a global war of resistance against an alien invasion. Command turn-based tactical battles, build a network of covert bases, directly control your fighter wings, and achieve strategic victory in a simulation of asymmetric warfare against a technologically superior foe.

Discord: https://discord.gg/fG4Xr6q

[previewyoutube][/previewyoutube]

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!