Xenonauts 2 News

Hello everyone and welcome to 2023!

December was a good month for the project even though it was curtailed by the Christmas holidays, as we released V25 and then opened the game up to the first wave of open beta testers. We didn't add many new features as most of our time was spent gathering community feedback and fixing bugs identified by our new (and old) testers, so I'll instead talk more broadly about what we're going to be working on in the next couple of months.

[h2]Open Beta[/h2]

The first thing to say is that the open beta has already been extremely helpful. We started by inviting a small group of new testers (50) and asked them to post up their initial impressions of the game, and report any bugs / issues they encountered so we could fix them.

The response has been really good so far. Thankfully, the initial response to the game has been almost universally positive (i.e. nobody saying that they didn't enjoy the game, or that it felt too similar to Xenonauts 1 to be worth playing) but we've also received a lot of useful feedback about what people do and don't like about the game. Stability is generally pretty good but there's still a LOT of bugs reported that we're currently working through - every bug fixed makes the game feel better to play!

As we release future builds we'll be inviting new players to join the Open Beta so we can maintain a continual stream of "first impressions" posts, but we'll probably only be inviting 50-100 people for each new build. However, if you're not lucky enough to get an invite, fear not, we have a surprise coming that you'll find out about in a couple of weeks.

[h2]Upcoming Work[/h2]

The dev team will mostly be spending their time working on the surprise, which we’ll share more details on Soon(™). Another primary goal is to get the tutorial implemented - veteran testers have already said they would find it helpful, so I imagine new players will be entirely lost without it! This is a quick 5-minute sequence that covers the plot events immediately prior to the start of the game, and introduces the player to the key controls for the Geoscape and tactical combat.

In other news, we're also going to be improving the difficulty settings so that people can better adjust the challenge to their level of expertise, further balancing work, and working on fixing as many of the reported bugs / usability issues as possible.

The project is entering an exciting period now and I wanted to say thanks to everyone continuing to read and contribute. Hope everyone had a good holiday!

November is over so it's once again time for our monthly dev update. We've had a productive month here overall, making numerous improvements to the game and adding in several new features too.

[h2]Public Releases[/h2]

We continued patching V24 this month, eventually releasing V24.7b onto the standard Steam branche. We got a lot of useful feedback on balancing from the community and I'm actively playtesting V25 at the moment with the intention of releasing it either later this week or some time next week.

V25 is going to be our first open beta build, although it'll spend a few days with our existing community beforehand so we can find any critical bugs in it before we begin the open beta. The first (small) wave of invites will probably therefore be going out in mid-December.



[h2]Alien Abilities[/h2]

The biggest new feature we implemented this month were the remaining alien racial abilities. These are a bit more "active" compared to the alien powers in the first Xenonauts, with the idea being to pose interesting tactical challenges for the player. I'll give a couple of examples to show you what I mean.

The first is the Wraith, which in Xenonauts 1 could teleport around the map (not particularly funny when you were trying to find the last alien in an alien base, etc). Now they instead have an ability called Cloaking Field, which reduces Accuracy by -2 for each tile of distance when shooting at a Wraith. However, Cloaking Field is disabled for the remainder of the turn when the Wraith takes damage from any source.

The second is the Cyberdrone, a late-game alien unit which has heavy frontal armour and rotates in the direction of any sound - gunshots, footsteps, explosions, etc. Using multiple soldiers (or just throwing grenades behind it) allow you to expose the weaker rear armour and can make it easier to kill.

Hopefully this illustrates what we're trying to achieve - basically to make the player think more closely about where to position their soldiers and what attacks or equipment to use. While these abilities still require quite a lot more testing and polishing, once we have them working properly the gameplay will hopefully be richer and the aliens more memorable.

[h2]Soldier Equipment[/h2]

In V24 soldiers have an equipment slot called the "special" slot (also known as the "undersuit" slot). This is basically an additional item slot where you can carry one item that gives the soldier a particular bonus - e.g. extra armour plates to boost survivability, a tactical visor to boost Accuracy, a mind shield to boost defence against psionics, etc.

As this system hasn't added as many interesting choices to the game as I'd have liked, I've spent this month updating the soldier inventory. Soldiers now have a Primary weapon, a Secondary weapon, and a single 5x5 "vest" grid which contains all the additional items they want to carry into battle (ammo, grenades, extra weapons, etc). Importantly, all the items that previously went in the special slot are now 2x2 items that fit into the vest grid like any other item.

I've been playtesting this over the past few days and I think it's a really fun change. The backpack wasn't really being used that much before, but now vest space (and the carrying capacity of the soldier) are much more important, even at the start of the game. Is it worth giving up that spare ammo magazine and two grenades for +5 Accuracy? It all depends on how you want to set up your soldiers, and it's a system I'm looking forward to discussing and balancing further during the open beta.



[h2]General Development Progress[/h2]

Other than my work on the two systems mentioned above, most of my time this month has been spent discussing the gameplay experience with our community and ironing out various smaller gameplay / usability pain points in the campaign. General feedback on V24 was pretty good but there's clearly quite a few aspects of the game that are interfering with people's enjoyment of it; many of these should be improved in V25.

There's been several content updates to the game, too - the Engineering screen has now been re-skinned into our new UI style, the updated Arid biome is now present (with eight entirely new maps), and the dropships have been retextured in the tactical combat. We've also been busy planning out the tutorial and creating the map required for it, and we'll start work implementing that in December.

Finally, we've been working on the load times for the game, and have hopefully now fixed the issue where Windows would think the game had frozen and invite you to terminate the process if you had alt+tabbed out while the game was loading.

So overall a rather productive month. I'll wrap up this update there, and hopefully we'll be seeing some of you in the open beta during December! Since we'll be closed for the holidays, December's update won't be published until the first week of January.

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.