Xenonauts 2 News

With October over, it's once again time for our monthly update.

The big news this month has been the release of Closed Beta V22, which is a fairly significant upgrade on previous builds. This is currently only on our Experimental branch but it should be making its way to the main / default Steam and GOG branches in a week or two when it has had a bit more testing. We've done three hotfixes for this build since it was first released and there is a fourth due out shortly that should iron out the most serious remaining bugs we're aware of.

[h2]Establishing Shots[/h2]

Our priority for V22 has been to improve the opening hour or two of the game, which we've done in several ways. The first is to establish the game setting more clearly right from the start of the game, which we've done by adding a short text intro that is played when you start a new campaign. Some of you may remember that we've set Xenonauts 2 a little before the alien invasion properly begins, with the player first having to deal with the Cleaners and transition from being an intelligence agency into being a military organisation. Of course, we've also put some further lore and explanation in the first Research project popup that the player gets.



[h2]Visual Polish[/h2]

The second thing we've done is to continue to improve the visuals. The new UI graphics for the loading screen and strategy topbar have been added to the game, and all the Xenonauts are now using their final 3D models in the tactical combat. Another cool little detail is that we've added a lot more hairstyles to the 3D models, so now a soldier in the ground combat will change hairstyle and colour to (roughly) match the hair shown in their soldier portrait - something that took a surprisingly long time to implement, but makes your starting squad much more distinguished from one another. The visual updates to the tactical mission environments continue too, with the Polar biome getting some attention this month - we'll be moving onto the fourth Biome (likely the Dock) next month.

[h2]Maps and Missions[/h2]

Thirdly, we've added another dozen maps to the game. There's a lot of Raid missions in the early part of the game, but there was previously only one Raid map per biome. There's now three Raid maps per biome which means there's way more variety in the early missions, something that will improve further once we set up the new mission types in the early game in the next major build. We're currently hoping to get that out before we break for Christmas, so stay tuned.

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! A few things have been a tad slow over the past few weeks owing to various team holidays and illness, but we're getting back on track now and ready to share some more progress with you.

As well as doing a number of bugfixes on V21 of the Closed Beta after its release, we have mostly been working on the strategy balancing / air combat and some of the new art assets for the tactical combat.

[h2]Improved Tactical Art[/h2]

We've done a texture pass on the entire Western Town biome now, which is one of the biomes used in Terror Missions. This had some very inconsistent visuals before but it's now looking much neater and more detailed - we're now working on the final damaged / destroyed states for all of these tiles. Next up is the Boreal biome, which has already seen a lot of work done to the sawmill building. Hopefully both biomes will be ready for the release of V22.

We're also in the process of hooking up those final Xenonaut 3D models. They're now all rigged and have the various hair models set up, but we need to do some final code work to ensure that soldiers display the correct ethnicity / hairstyle / hair colour in the tactical missions to match their portraits. Again, hopefully this will be done in time for V22.

[h2]Strategy / Air Combat[/h2]

Next up is balancing the strategy layer. Our main method for doing this is going through multiple passes of the game where every air combat battle is played manually but every tactical encounter is an automatic win. This enables a campaign playthrough to be completed within a couple of hours, rather than an entire day.

During this time we experimented with several ways of making the air combat more interesting - this has led to a few changes.

interceptors are now built in squadrons of three, which all share a single 2x2 Hangar (dropships are built individually and also fill a 2x2 Hangar). Once constructed, these interceptors are controlled as normal, so it's possible to send a squadron out with fewer than three aircraft, or even send out a squadron with a mix of different interceptor types. If an interceptor is shot down, you can either wait for it to be replaced automatically as normal or you can pay a certain amount of cash (plus alloys / alenium in the case of advanced interceptors) to replace it within a few days.

We've decided on this because 1v1 air encounters are much less interesting than 3v3 battles, and also it's easier to balance the air combat if you know the player can always send 3 interceptors to fight a UFO squadron if they want. Additionally, this speeds up the base setup process for the player: in X1, building a base in the early game usually forces the player to construct at least three planes (and possibly more) if you want a mix of capabilities (e.g. you might want 3 Condors and 2 Foxhounds, which is 5 interceptors to build). Under the new system you just build a single squadron initially, or perhaps two if you need an even greater range of air assets.

The second major change is to give the aircraft a wider selection of equipment, but also limit their weight capacity. In X1, if you wanted a plane with heavy torpedoes, you had to build an entire aircraft capable of carrying them. In X2, the starting interceptors are actually capable of carrying heavy torpedoes, but they need to unequip their cannons and light missiles to do so. The advantage of this is that it gives the player more options to react to a changing situation - if alien capital ships start appearing, you can rearm your existing aircraft rather than having to build an entirely new set of interceptors. This all contributes to much greater flexibility on the strategy layer - as aircraft have full potential to be repurposed for multiple roles, you can focus your optimisation efforts on the assets you already have, rather than being forced to go through the slightly tedious process of constructing planes one by one just to get access to new capabilities.

The actual air combat mechanics have seen some additions too - these include rotating weapons with limited travel, which means we can have side-firing weapons or turrets that track your aircraft. The Afterburner ability from X1 has also been added to all the interceptors.

[h2]Other Systems[/h2]

We've also added a couple more systems to the strategy layer.

The first is a solution to the problem of your engineers or scientists sometimes not having anything to do: now any idle engineers or scientists will automatically generate income for the player at a rate high enough to pay their wages, plus a small profit - it's assumed they're helping out with maintenance work you would normally have to pay for, etc. This is a lot like the ability to manufacture and sell items for profit in classic X-Com, except it requires less micromanagement and is a bit more intuitive for new players. The effect of this is just to smooth out the difficulty curve on the strategy layer a bit, as having idle staff could previously be financially crippling.

There's also been some progress on the tactical combat morale system. We need to do a bit more work to get the actual panic / berserk / etc effects working correctly, but there's now a full system in place, as there was in Xenonauts 1 and the original X-Com. This also ties into the Stress system - when we reactivate this, soldiers will suffer Stress based on what has happened to them in combat and their Bravery score rather than just suffering a flat Stress penalty for going on a mission like they did previously.

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, the team's been hard at work on Closed Beta V21 which is planned to release this week.

[h2]UI / UX[/h2]



The biggest new feature in V21 is that we've implemented the final visual style for the Main Menu / Game Settings screen, and all the related sub-panels (Settings, Load Game, Save Game, etc). We've been working on this new UI style for quite some time now, and it's nice to finally be able to put it in the game - but there's also been a lot of time and effort spent on improving the usability and general polish of the screen. This includes everything from adding support for mass-deletion of save games to adding new UI sounds. Overall, it's a much more slick and stylish experience and it should make a much better first impression when you first boot up the game. We'll continue to roll this new UI style out to other parts of the game as development continues.



[h2]Meet the Cleaners[/h2]

We've also worked on a number of things that haven't really made it into V21, but will be arriving in the next Closed Beta build. We've updated the early game so the war against the aliens starts a couple of months in, and you begin the campaign fighting the infiltrator faction called the Cleaners who are intent on suppressing knowledge of the alien invasion. Because the Cleaners are spread across the planet and have numerical superiority over the Xenonauts, this allows us to have mission objectives that don't make sense when you are fighting the aliens. For example, wave survival maps, VIP escort / assassination missions, extraction missions, objective capture, etc. Some of these should arrive in V22 and make the early game a bit more varied and exciting!

[h2]Visual Polish[/h2]

More work has also been done on the visual side of things. The updated Xenonaut models aren't quite ready to go in the game yet but should be fine for V22, and we're now working on modelling up a series of hairstyles for them so your units are more varied and easily recognisable. Work also continues on the tactical combat environments. The final visual pass on the Western Town tiles is now mostly complete (one of the biggest environments due to the number of different buildings in it) and we'll put them in V22, after which we'll move onto some of the other environments that need some visual upgrades.

There's also been some work on wall destructibility, as once a tile is visually finished we can do the final destructibility setup on it and then put it in the game as a finished asset. The wall "frill" system is designed to ensure destroyed walls have a natural-looking irregular edge (rather than the perfectly straight-edged hole you get if you just remove the wall). However, we also don't want these "frills" floating in the air if there's no adjacent wall for them to attach to, so we needed to do some work detecting whether there was a suitable wall on either side and only placing the frills if so. In any case, the important thing is that our destruction system should now be finished, which allows us to start doing the final destruction states on all of our finished assets.

[h2]Other Bits[/h2]

We also implemented a couple of smaller elements this month too - difficulty settings are now complete, and there's a number of options we have to customise difficulty. This hasn't yet been finalised, as obviously the main campaign still requires some significant balance work.

The other new system is directional sound, which is intended mostly to allow us to play sounds when certain things are on screen (fire noises, the noise of engines running on vehicles, etc). Again, this is just useful for making the game feel a bit more alive.

Finally, we've made a start on the soldier dialogue / barks system. This is a simple system that generates (non-interactive) text dialogue from your soldiers based on things that happen on the battlefield. As a basic example, a soldier might say "I'm hit!" if they are shot by an alien. We're hoping to implement that in its basic form next month with some test dialogue to see if it's a good addition to the game (there's potential for it to be annoying if we get it wrong), and we'll spend some time making it as varied and natural as possible. We're hopeful that this system is going to make the combat feel a lot more reactive to your actions, but we won't know for certain until we've had a chance to test it!

[h2]Beta Progress[/h2]

We're aware that many of you who were not part of the original Kickstarter still want to jump into the beta - we were looking at doing this earlier but the excellent level of feedback we continue to receive from existing players, and the state of the game currently, mean that we haven't found the right timing for this so far.

However, we are still looking for opportunities to add more players to the beta. There's still a significant amount of balancing and gameplay work to be done in order to get the game to a point where that wider feedback will be useful, so please do continue to bear with us - thanks again for your patience on this so far.

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 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.