Xenonauts 2 News

Hello Hello!

It's time for the monthly progress update. The big news this month has been the release of V24, which is now coming to the end of its testing period and should be released onto the default Steam branches in the next week or two (rather than being on the Experimental branches).

[h2]General Progress[/h2]

V24 seems to have been received well by our community. It's the first time the community has seen large chunks of our new UI and some of our improved combat environments, and the game has generally been tightened up in a lot of ways. It's now feeling increasingly solid - although there's still a lot of balancing and polishing left to do to make it a genuinely good strategy game that really rewards the time you put into it!

However, as the first public release we've put out in about five months, V24 had some stability issues and we've spent much of the month fixing them up. Although this is obviously very important work, it means we've not really been working on big new features on the coding side of things. However here's some of the things we managed to get in anyway:

• The Research screen has now been skinned in the final UI style. The Engineering screen is next and I've spent quite a bit of time this month with our UI artist trying to finalise the design for that screen. We're pretty close to that being done.
  
• Most of the tiles for the Arid biome for the tactical combat are now largely done, so the only remaining work on the environment art is the remainder of the Soviet Town biome and then a final visual pass on the dropships and UFOs. I'm working on the level design for the Arid biome at the moment so hopefully it'll be in V25.
  
• I've written another ~8 research projects or so.
  
• We've added a system so that the sell value of items can gradually decline as you sell more and more of them. I'm going to be using this as soft pressure to discourage players from grinding too many crash sites (doing so makes the game very repetitive), as the returns will eventually fall below the Airstrike / Bounty value of the crashsite.
  
• We're working on smoothing the loading process so the game doesn't keep throwing the annoying "This game isn't responding" messages in Windows if you are playing in a window.
  

We're planning to start work on V25 relatively soon after V24 is released onto the standard Steam branches. The main feature I'm hoping to include will be the racial abilities for the various types of alien in the tactical combat, but beyond that we'll just be focusing on content and general balancing / polish.



[h2]Playtest / Open Beta[/h2]

As we want to expand the number of people playing the game and giving feedback / reporting bugs in preparation for our Early Access launch next year, we're going to be launching our Playtest branches when we release V25. These Playtest branches will be using the Steam Playtest function, which allows us to give users access to a free temporary version of Xenonauts 2 that will be deleted once the game enters Early Access.

This isn't going to be a proper open beta, as we'll only be inviting a few hundred people to join the Playtest with each update. We want a mix of fresh players and experienced players giving feedback on each update (as they tend to look for different things), and we know a lot of players will only want to play once and give some quick impressions / feedback and then come back and play properly when the game is done.

Unfortunately this means it's unlikely everyone who applies will get into the Playtest, as we've had quite a lot of signups already. However the picking is done randomly by Steam so if you're signed up you've got as much chance as anyone else - and if you're not signed up already, I've reenabled the signup button for the next two weeks. Just click the green button on the Xenonauts 2 Steam store page!

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 or just want to chat! Otherwise, see you for next month's update!

Hello everybody - it's time for our monthly progress update. There was no update last month because we were in the process of switching our marketing partner, but everything is back to normal now.
[h2]Marketing Partnership[/h2]
Xenonauts 2 is now being published by Hooded Horse, a specialist strategy publisher who we think are a really good fit for the type of game we're making. This publishing deal is purely a marketing partnership, so Hooded Horse have no control over the design of the game, but they'll be handling future community updates and helping build some buzz around the game as we approach Early Access (which is finally approaching, and is planned for the first quarter of 2023).

This means you'll start seeing trailers and updated screenshots for the game in the near future, which should show off the progress we've made in recent months!

[h2]Development Progress[/h2]
Development has gone well over the past two months. We recently released a tactical demo for Steam's Tacticon event, which was well received (it's still available on our Steam page for anyone that wants to play it!) and we're planning on launching our next Closed Beta build towards the end of next week.

The biggest feature we added was Abduction Missions, which are a new type of tactical mission that provides a bit more variation to the game. The aliens have captured a number of civilians and imprisoned them within teleporter pods, and you have a certain number of turns to rescue as many as possible before the timer expires and any unopened pods teleport away.

These missions are no harder than normal missions as only 50% of the civilians need to be rescued for you to win - but you gain resources for each extra pod recovered, allowing the player to earn extra resources by playing more aggressively than normal. Personally I think this makes them a nice change of pace from other mission types.

The other major feature we added was heavily requested by the community - giving grenades arced throw paths, allowing them to be thrown over cover or walls. Implementing a curved arc in an abstract 3D tile grid has been quite a knotty problem, but it's now working pretty well and it definitely opens up a lot more tactical options!

Beyond that, we've added a lot more assets, small features and bugfixes. In brief - achievements and cloud saves are now functional, lots of new terrain tiles have been added including a complete rework of the Xenonaut Base tileset, about twenty new research reports have been written, and three of the important UI screens on the strategy layer have now been reskinned in their final style, and quite a few more things I just don't have space to mention.

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 or just want to chat!

Greetings - July is now complete so it's time for this month's update.

Unfortunately, progress on the game this month has been somewhat disrupted by covid. All of the UK-based team members managed to get ill at one point or another, so - as you can probably imagine - this did not have a great effect on productivity.

While this meant we were not able to release Build V24 last month as planned, we are hard at work on it right now. There have been a lot of crashes to fix that have been introduced by all the new systems we've added since V23 but most of those should have been found and fixed. The team is now focussing on adding and polishing new content.

[h3]Breaking New Ground[/h3]

Many of the terrain tiles we've been working on over the past six months have now been implemented and are starting to work their way into maps. This has been mentioned in previous updates but in V24 you should now see new (or revamped) buildings in various biomes such as the Jungle (which now has ancient ruins) and the Desert (which now has trailer park-style mobile homes). Farm maps now have a new type of barn and a storage shed, and the Xenonauts Base Defence missions feature a host of new tiles.



We're hoping to have the terrain tiles pretty much done in the next month or two, barring ongoing visual polish during Early Access. There's still a few base buildings that need tiles done for the base defence missions, and the Soviet Town biome is still incomplete - we're working on the buildings for it right now. Then it's just a case of checking through everything we have to ensure all the assets have the correct metadata set up etc. We've got a wide selection of tiles across a lot of different biomes now, so we should have everything we need to ensure the game has far more maps than Xenonauts 1.

[h3]Additional Art[/h3]

We've also been adding other types of art to the game too - a few new autopsy paintings have been added to the Xenopedia, plus the Stealthsuit now has its final painted art. The UI update continues to progress with the Funding Report and the Xenopedia getting visual updates this month. We're currently working on the designs for the Base and the Base Stores strategy screen, and hopefully we can start to implement them later this month too.



[h3]Other Bits[/h3]

There's not many new features that have been added this month because the coders have mostly been supporting other work. The map editor had become painfully slow due to all the data we've added to maps associated with the alien movement system (all the AI waypoints etc) so quite a bit of time was spent on improving performance there, and there was also work to be done related to the UI styling and functionality. Some of this is purely visual, but there's a few quality-of-life elements in there (eg the Xenopedia is now accessible in ground combat).

One thing we did add is the "tutorial notification" system, which you'll have encountered in other games -little pop-up notifications that appear at certain points in the game to explain information. For example, the first time you get a bleeding wound on a soldier it pops up a notification explaining how to heal them. Spotting a door pops up a notification telling you that you can right-click on the door to open it without walking through it, etc. The first batch of these will be V24 once Chris has had time to write out the text for them.

So that's been the progress over the past month. Not great but not exactly terrible either. Hopefully next update things will have gone more smoothly and we can talk more about our future plans in more detail!

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.

July has arrived and it's time to check in with last month's progress on Xenonauts 2. Apologies for slight slowness as we got this month's update in order - here's all the info…

There’s three main things to talk about this month: accessibility, the end of the game, and the release of V24.

[h3]Accessibility[/h3]

We recently noticed that a lot of players were misunderstanding game mechanics, and given the people currently playing the game are Kickstarter backers who usually know the first game well, this set some alarm bells ringing at our end. As a result we've added a lot more information to the game this month, which should help experienced players easily understand how the different mechanics are interacting and should (hopefully) make the game much less intimidating for new players.



The first element of this is a "hit calculation" panel during tactical combat, which explains exactly how the hit chance of a shot is calculated (see above). This is a relatively simple change that makes ground combat much clearer, as it previously wasn't always obvious what you could do to improve the hit chance of a shot.



The second improvement is to the Xenopedia (research) reports, which now show the stats of the corresponding alien / UFO / aircraft / piece of equipment / etc. To make things even clearer, we've also added in a section for "abilities" that allows us to explain any unique properties - e.g. the basic Sebillian aliens have the "Regeneration: 20" and "Scaled Hide: 5" abilities and hovering over either of these displays a tooltip that explains exactly what those abilities do and how they work.

The result is a clear summary of what each thing in the game does. Importantly, this does not require the player to read the wall of text that comes with each research report - although lots of players like reading the lore, we suspect there's also a lot who would rather not have to!

As a final improvement here, we're also working on making the Xenopedia accessible during tactical combat via the Esc menu.



Next, we’ve added mission briefings at the start of tactical missions that make it clear what the objectives are, along with any special rules / alternate win conditions. Previously, this wasn't required because almost every mission boiled down to "kill all the aliens" but now we've started adding more mission variety via more complex objectives, it is definitely needed - we were finding a lot of people were getting confused on the non-standard missions.



Lastly, we’ve re-enabled the loading screen tips and added quite a few new tips. These are surprisingly useful to communicate minor gameplay or usability features that even some experienced players are not aware of.

What comes next on usability? The two main things we're currently planning out are the tutorial and little pop-up notifications that explain mechanics to players as they play (e.g. you can right-click on a door from an adjacent tile to open it, etc). We're hopeful the game will be fairly easy to learn and play once those systems are done, given our tooltips are already in a reasonably good state!

[h3]Operation Endgame[/h3]

We've been working on the final mission of the game for a while now. Last month we blocked out the maps and worked on the fundamental code required to support two missions back-to-back. This month, we were doing proper gameplay testing on the mission which has led to a lot of bugs being fixed and quite a few amendments to the levels and the balancing.

It's now possible to unlock the final mission and win it. However, we want to make the experience of winning a game slightly more rewarding than it was in the first Xenonauts, where the game just flashed up a couple of lines of congratulatory text and then booted you back to the menu screen. We've been implementing a campaign stats panel to show the player (e.g. "Total Aliens Killed", "Total Soldiers Lost", etc) and we're also planning a more substantial epilogue to the game too.

[h3]Build V24 / Public Release[/h3]

We're hoping to release our next closed beta version towards the end of this month, likely some point during the week commencing 18th July.

The eagle-eyed among you may have noticed that the things we're working on at the moment are some of the biggest things blocking an open beta / Early Access release (people need to be able to understand the game and win the campaign), and this is not entirely a coincidence. We're not going to publicly announce any plans yet but we're making a concerted effort to get the game ready for sale in the near future.

Thanks again for the patience on this - those of you who leave positive and supportive comments on these updates are hugely appreciated.

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.

Time once again for your Xenonauts 2 monthly development update! Thanks again for your ongoing patience as we continue our work on the game.

Yesterday we released V22 onto our standard Steam / GOG branches for backers to play, as it's in decent shape after the seven (!) hotfixes we have released for it over the last five or six weeks.

Obviously all those fixes and releases took up quite a bit of developer time this month, but there was also a lot of other progress on the project to report. The biggest new feature we've been working on is the updated tactical interface, which is a fairly complex beast given the depth of the tactical combat. The UI now looks better and is much less cluttered and (hopefully) easier to use and understand. Perhaps more importantly, it properly integrates the relevant information for the Morale and Armour systems which were added earlier this year.



Additionally, we started working with a couple of new illustrators at the start of the month to finish off the remaining research art. Three new autopsy paintings have been added this month and the final dropship has also been completed - we also amended the in-mission tiles for this dropship to improve its interior layout and fix some visual issues. Several more enemy units have had their corpse artwork painted too and that job is now nearly complete.



On the 3D front we've now managed to finish and rig all the female civilian models (meaning all the human models are now complete and set up in-game) and several alien armour variants from previous months were also rigged and added. In terms of environment, we're still working on the Xenonaut base biome because there's just so many different base rooms that need to be created, but progress is pretty good and the new assets are definitely looking like an improvement!

Beyond the tactical UI and bugfixes, the coders also found time to implement a proper re-arming system for interceptor weapons (previously the planes would instantly rearm when returning to base) and then do some work to support the final mission. In classic X-Com style, we have decided to make this a two-part mission so we needed to do a bit of work to support this - that all seems to be working. Both maps need further playtesting and visual improvements but in theory it should now be possible to properly win the campaign when we release the next build.

Overall, we feel like we've made good progress this month. We'll start to think about putting out the first iterations of V24 towards the end of next month to let those in the beta play with the final tactical UI and hopefully several more significant improvements too.

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.