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.
Accessibility
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!
Operation Endgame
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.
Build V24 / Public Release
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.
Xenonauts 2 - May Update
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.
Xenonauts 2 - April Update
Greetings - here is your Xenonauts 2 development update for April…
Bugfixes, Art and Tweaks
This month saw the release of Closed Beta V23 and a series of hotfixes on our Experimental Branch. This has been quite a bit of work since we previously hadn't released a new public build since November, but we are continuing to release hotfixes to fix the bugs found by the community and expect to be able to release it to the standard branches in the next week or two.
There's been a lot of improvements to the gameplay in V23 but many of them have been covered in previous updates. One nice thing we got in relatively recently was the final 3D art assets in place for the enemy Cleaners and male civilians, with the female civilians and some additional armour variants for the aliens due to arrive this month. Given there's multiple civilian outfits for the eight biomes we have in the game, that's a lot of new models - and we're glad it's now done, because getting them all set up has been rather painstaking work!
We've also gone through the research tree and added a few more research entries and some artwork to research projects where it was previously lacking. We've been stuck for a while with the artwork for our alien autopsies / interrogations, as we lost the artist who painted our existing autopsy art due to personal reasons and we'd been hoping he would be able to come back (because he was great) - and while that did not happen, we thankfully have managed to find someone that looks like they are capable of matching his art style. We'll therefore be adding more new research artwork to the game shortly.
Work has also continued on the environments. Recently we started work on the biome that is currently in the worst state, the Xenonaut Base biome. This is seen more frequently now because the Cleaners now attack your base in the opening months, and the Cleaner Headquarters mission also uses the same set of tiles, and it's currently a mish-mash of half-finished assets and different styles we were experimenting with. The new tiles are starting to take shape nicely and hopefully we'll be able to show some of them off in V24.
Among the various bugfixes and usability updates, there's also been various small features added to the game. The autoresolve for the air combat is being upgraded to better reflect what is happening in the air combat, so it doesn't throw out weird results (and if it does you can ignore the result and fight the battle manually). Aircraft weapons now also take time to rearm when the aircraft returns to base, etc.
Power Up
The biggest new feature that we have added this month is something we want to test out for potential inclusion in V24, which is an updated power system for your bases. This will allow you to improve the functioning of a building by feeding it more power - e.g. increase the range on the Radar, the research speed on your Laboratory, etc. As you can unlock better power generation buildings as you advance down the tech tree (as well as more advanced buildings that consume more power) this will hopefully create some interesting choices for the player. However, we just won't know how good the system is until we test it, so we can't make any promises about it being in the final game.
We'll keep you updated on our progress as ever so see you again for the next update!
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.
Xenonauts 2 - March Update
Hello everyone - time for our development update for March. Apologies for this being a few days late - the intention was to time the update to coincide with the release of V23 but we've found a couple of crashes which have pushed the release back. For those interested, we'll be releasing V23 on our Experimental branches at some point this week.
Chris has been focussing on campaign balancing this month, which is always a significant undertaking given a full campaign playthrough is probably 15-20 hours long (i.e. at least two full working days). Each attempted playthrough results in a number of balance changes that need to be made, bugs that need to be fixed, usability changes to be made, gameplay mechanics that need to be checked out because they may not be working properly, etc. This is critical work, but not especially interesting to talk about - we therefore don't have many "big" features to discuss in this update, so here's a general round-up.
Strategic Pressure / Orbital Bombardment
The main new change on the strategy layer is an attempt to introduce more strategic pressure. The Orbital Bombardment mechanic has made a return in a somewhat altered form, and it's now effectively a monthly performance target communicated in a slightly more thematic way. We're aware that the community had some concerns about this mechanic in the past, but this new format shouldn't cause any issues.
At the start of the month Orbital Bombardment increases Panic in all regions by a certain amount (e.g. +25 Panic) that increases as the game progresses. If any region has over 100 Panic at the end of the month it surrenders and is lost to the aliens, so the player must try to generate enough Panic reduction during the month to cancel out the Panic gain. Monthly funding from a region is tied to its Panic, so success means funding goes up and failure means funding goes down.
Panic reduction is achieved by defeating the alien invasion - shooting down UFOs and completing ground missions like Terror sites. These generate a local Panic reduction, but also a global reduction. The regions you are protecting best will have the lowest Panic but even undefended regions will have lower Panic if it looks like humanity is winning the war against the aliens.
The gameplay effect of this is much like the monthly funding evaluations that appear in every X-Com game, but it serves to reduce the amount of damage that can be caused if UFOs spawn repeatedly in undefended regions due to simple randomness, and it also ensures that the game ends more quickly if the player was underperforming (it was always a bit silly that it took 3-4 months to lose the game in Xenonauts even if you never shoot down a single UFO or win a tactical mission).
Base Defence Missions
We've spent quite a bit of time this month fixing gameplay issues to do with the Xenonaut Base Defence missions, as we've introduced a base attack on your main facility by the Cleaners to increase early-game mission variety. While this biome still looks a bit ugly (it hasn't had the visual pass yet) the gameplay is more solid.
The first thing was to get the Sentry Guns set up. These cheap and durable vehicles are only used in base defence missions, and they had some display issues that have now been corrected. Also, their LMGs should now be upgraded appropriately as the player progresses down the tech tree.
The second thing was the spawning / deployment phase of the mission, which had apparently got broken at some point in development. The player can now deploy anywhere in their base at the start of the mission except in rooms where aliens have spawned. Additionally, the alien crews are now correctly splitting into assault teams and choosing the correct type of room to spawn in. Most types of aliens spawn into Hangars as normal, but certain other types (e.g. Reapers) are able to spawn in random rooms due to their ability to climb through vents or teleport.
Other Features
We also spent more time this month on updating various strategic UI elements to our new style, and the updated graphics for the tactical combat UI may well make it into V23 too.
The Air Combat has also had a few more updates to ensure the new formation / deployment system works properly, and we've also set up the autoresolve to allow the player to manually fight the air battle if they don't like the result the autoresolve gives them. This protects players from the situation where the autoresolve unexpectedly destroys all your planes (usually due to low fuel).
The balance here has changed a bit too. There's now four classes of weapons that have different roles: cannons, missiles, torpedoes and energy lances. These have varying ranges, ammo capacities, and damage profiles vs armour and HP. The ability of an interceptor to perform the evasive roll maneuver is now also tied to the weapons they have equipped, so while energy lances are relatively powerful weapons they also make the interceptor carrying them more vulnerable to certain enemy attacks. Finally, we've been working on the blockouts for the final mission this month too. We won't give too much away but there's a few unique rules on this mission that have required a bit of code work too. Hopefully the final mission will be playable in V24 even if the final art pass on the map probably won't happen until closer to release.
That's it for now - thanks for your patience as we continue working on getting the game into shape.
Hello everyone - it's time for the February update! With this update being a bit early and the last one being a little late, we've only had three weeks since the last dev post but a lot has been done in that time.
Releasing a new public build is our main priority right now and so we're actively working on Build V23.
We've mostly been working on polishing the experience and improving the game balance, and we've spent a lot of time playing the game this month to help facilitate that. We've done a lot of work on the Air Combat, as we've been adding various new features to it recently (such as the pre-battle deployment phase and the different formations that UFOs can spawn in) and we've also had to make some quite fundamental changes to the code in order to fix a persistent bug where missile hits would not always be detected correctly.
Although it's frustrating that this issue sapped away quite a bit of time, having missiles occasionally pass straight through their target without exploding is clearly not acceptable in a game where it can mean the difference between victory and defeat!
There's already been a lot of tweaks to the game balance and we'll continue with these as we work on V23. The early-game Cleaner missions are now a research chain that give you a series of standalone missions which occur alongside the alien invasion rather than before it. We've also done a pass on all the UFO / tactical mission crews to ensure the right aliens are spawning in roughly the right numbers at the right time. There's been a load of updates to the tech tree, sometimes to fix things not unlocking correctly but mostly to ensure a relatively steady flow of research and upgrade projects throughout the game. The tech tree is more extensive than in X1 and this can cause problems in some instances, for example if the player is doing too many research projects between ground missions then it can get a bit overwhelming.
We've also fixed a lot of bugs / issues we've encountered while playing the game, and updated various game systems that weren't working quite right (e.g. the Sentry Guns). We've updated some more of the strategic UI to use the new visual style, various new terrain tiles have been added to the game and we've produced the final destruction states on more terrain objects. Windows have continued to be a pain to get working correctly, but when you play a tactical mission on a finished biome like the Polar biome things are looking and feeling good. It'll be nice when we have all the biomes up to that standard, but it's taking a while to churn through all the assets. We're recruiting a rigger to get our new civilian 3D models into the game, and if all goes well we'll have those in V23 too.
All in all, it's been one of those months where we've fixed far too many things to mention individually but relatively few of them are big headline features you can write about in updates like this. Once V23 is out, we're planning to focus on a few more mechanics that set the game apart from the first Xenonauts, as we're in quite a nice place with development now where the campaign is largely functional and all the remaining work is adding in new assets, polishing what we have, and adding things to make the game more distinct from its predecessor.
The biggest thing we want to test is various more significant alien abilities that will hopefully make each alien race feel more distinctive. For instance, we're going to test whether it makes combat more interesting if the regenerating Sebillian aliens enter a "downed" state when killed, and have to be finished off within a couple of turns else they'll get back up again. Or whether Wraiths are more interesting if they can enter a "ghost" state after taking damage and take reduced damage until end of turn (although perhaps only from kinetic damage). Basically what we're looking for is abilities that cause the player to think about how they sequence their actions or encourage them to use a wider selection of equipment than they otherwise would.
That's it for this time - we're hoping to put out the first incarnation of V23 at some point during the week after next (w/c 7th March).
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.
Xenonauts 2 - January Update
Greetings and apologies for the slight lateness of this update - the team wanted to finish a few things before putting it up.
Public Builds
It's worth discussing why a public build hasn't been released to backers recently. We've been working on a couple of big systems that required a significant campaign rebalance once implemented, as well as some systems that required UI updates. We've also been working on the Cleaner missions that happen right at the start of the game. Anything we put out before that work was finished would have been almost unplayable.
Hopefully the next public build will be coming in about two weeks but will likely need several iterations on the Experimental branch before it represents a better gameplay experience than the most recent V22 build.
Armour Up
The first big change we've been working on is the Armour system. For simplicity, we've now unified the way armour is handled in both the tactical and air combat so Armour is a flat reduction on incoming damage (e.g. 30 damage hitting a target with 10 Armour does 20 damage).
However, there's a wider variety of armour penetration and armour destruction on the various weapons in the tactical combat compared to the first Xenonauts, so the player is now presented with more decisions about the best order to use their attacks. We've added a new grenade that inflicts limited damage on units but is excellent at removing terrain and shredding armour, and we'll be experimenting with armour-piercing ammo for ballistic / Gauss weapons this month too.
Air Supremacy
We've done another balancing pass on air combat, as we've added a new type of weapon - the energy lance.
Previously this weapon type lacked any real individual identity and part of the rationale for the armour changes was to give all four types of weapon their own niche:
Cannons are short-range, high DPS (damage per second) weapons with 40 ammo. They do low damage per shot so armour reduces their damage significantly, but they also shred armour relatively quickly. Cannons will kill most things but require you to get in close and stay there, which can be very dangerous against UFOs with powerful weapons.
Missiles are long-range, high damage weapons, but only have 4 ammo. They do excellent burst damage so are great at destroying unarmoured UFOs (e.g. Fighter UFOs) before they can attack you, and can also quickly kill other types of UFO if another weapon is used to strip the armour off them first.
Torpedoes are long-range weapons with excellent armour destruction, but only have 2 ammo and are slow and easily avoided by agile UFOs. Hitting an armoured UFO with torpedos will quickly strip away its armour and leave it vulnerable to other types of weapon. Energy lances are medium range weapons with medium DPS and good armour destruction, and 15 shots. They act somewhat like torpedoes, but trade a shorter range and a slower rate of fire for more ammunition, more versatility, and the ability to hit agile UFOs.
In addition to this, there's been two other major changes to the air combat. Firstly, there is now a "deployment phase" at the start of the air combat where you can set your interceptors up anywhere around the edge of the map, allowing you to group them together or split them and approach the UFO from multiple sides. The type of tactics you want to use are likely to vary based on the type of UFO and the fire arcs of its weapons (and whether it has weapons capable of attacking multiple interceptors at once). You don't get to deploy freely if UFOs on an air superiority mission attack you, however!
Secondly, we've reverted the change where interceptors are always built in squadrons of three. We're back to the original system where aircraft are built individually, and our new approach to balancing the air combat is that UFOs gain some additional HP and Armour for each additional interceptor taking part in the battle. It's still advantageous to send more interceptors into battle against a UFO, but this just gives the player more flexibility in their approach - a single well-equipped advanced interceptor can often now be just as effective as a full squadron of three more primitive interceptors (the latter was almost always better in X1). The convenient lore explanation for this is larger squadrons are more easily detected as they approach the UFO, giving it more time to power up its emergency shielding and prepare for combat. While this may not be entirely "realistic", we feel the gameplay benefits are worth it.
Morale Boost
The other significant new mechanic has been the introduction of the tactical combat morale system. This is a similar system to the first Xenonauts but has a few improvements to make it easier to understand and interact with, and hopefully to make the alien psionic abilities feel less random. There's also now a "Focus Mind" button that allows a soldier to spend TU in order to boost their morale, which gives the player a way to defend themselves against potential morale events or psionic attacks if they want.
The problem here is that our current tactical UI design has been straining under the weight of all the new mechanics and UI elements we've added since we implemented it 2-3 years ago, and having to add Armour / Morale bars and this new Focus Mind button has been the final straw. We've therefore been working on the final tactical combat UI design that brings the visuals up to final quality and properly integrates all the new stuff. This is a massive job because it's one of the most important and complex UI elements in the game, but we think we've found a layout that works well - it displays more information than the current UI does and uses less space to do it!
Odds and Ends
In other news, the Cleaner missions at the start of the game are now a pre-set sequence of four missions with some unique mission objectives to mix things up a bit (as opposed to randomly generated missions that filled a meter that eventually revealed the Cleaner base) a few more screens have had a UI facelift, a few more 3D civilian models and alien armour models have been created and are waiting to be rigged, and we've created some stone ruins to add a bit of variety to our jungle maps.
So, a very busy time for the team and thanks once again for sticking with us.
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.
Xenonauts 2 - New Year Update
Happy New Year and all that! Here's a quick update from the Goldhawk team on work that took place in December - this was a slightly short month owing to team holidays but we're back and on track now.
Morale Boost
The main focus of recent work has been the soldier Morale system which causes soldiers to panic when things go horribly wrong on a mission. We actually planned not to include this in Xenonauts 2 for quite a while, but ultimately we felt the game would be weaker without it and not having it gives us fewer tools when it comes to designing the alien abilities (particularly psionic ones). This system is mostly now implemented but there's still quite a few bugs and edge cases we're working through.
We've made a few improvements relative to the first Xenonauts. The first is that Morale always starts at 100 for every soldier, and the Bravery of a soldier (boosted by the squad commander bonus) reduces the amount of Morale damage taken when something bad happens (a soldier with 0 Bravery takes about 3x the morale damage that soldier with 100 Bravery does). There's now a button that allows you to spend TU in order to gain Morale, and the morale system is a bit more sensible in general. Units are generally only vulnerable to panic if Xenonaut soldiers are dying around them (particularly high-ranking ones) or the unit itself has been wounded, or if there are psionic aliens messing with their heads.
Balancing is still required but overall it should be a little smoother and easier to understand than it was in Xenonauts 1.
Ongoing Art
Work on the updated UI designs and final art assets also continues. We've done an updated layout for the tactical combat UI due to the fact that we added several new features since our current design was done, including the Morale system which now needs to be displayed somewhere.
Our UI artist is working on styling that at the moment, and in the meantime we've finished styling several more of the strategy panels. Work on the 3d models for the human civilians and alien armour variants also continues.
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.
Xenonauts 2 - November Update
As November draws to a close it's once again time for our monthly update. This month we've mostly been working on turning the experimental builds of V22 into something ready to be released on our main Steam / GOG branches. This has involved a total of 6 hotfixes, which might be a record for us!
New Builds
Anyway, V22 is now out. This is the first major update on our main branches since March (apologies for that) and we think anyone who hasn't been playing on the Experimental branches is in for quite a treat given how much the game has changed since then.
The reception to the V22 Experimental builds overall has been very positive, both in terms of comments and the pattern of play that we're seeing from users. Part of the reason that we released so many hotfixes for V22 was that many of our testers have been playing much further through their campaigns than previously, so they're encountering bugs in areas of the game towards the end that haven't yet been tested (or balanced) properly. A couple of the late-game UFOs had broken teleporters that meant you couldn't actually complete those missions, for example. It's very encouraging to see that people are already able to spend 5+ hours playing a campaign, when we as developers know we've still got a lot of improvements left to make.
Content Additions
There haven't been too many new features added this month, unfortunately: the coders have been busy fixing bugs and Chris has been off for a couple of weeks on paternity leave, so there's not been too much time. Nonetheless, a few pieces of new content have arrived - a couple more research projects have been written up, some new terrain tiles have been added and more destruction states set up on existing tiles, various corpse art for the aliens has been done, and a little bit of new UI art has arrived.
We've done quite a bit of work on 3D characters this month too. Now the Xenonaut models are complete, we're working on the final high-quality 3D models for the local civilians in each map. This is quite a big job as there's probably about 30 different clothing items that need to be modelled and combined in different ways to give us all the variants we need to have realistic-looking locals across the many different biomes in our game, but the progress so far is looking good.
We're also starting to work on the rank / armour variants for various aliens, which we want to look a little more distinctive than they did in Xenonauts 1. We've now finished the Psyons and will be moving onto the Sebillians next.
Spacebar Speedup
The one new code feature we spent some time on this month was trying to make controlling multiple soldiers easier during tactical combat. We've done this by setting up the spacebar to accelerate unit movement - pressing space while a unit is moving causes them to finish their move pretty much instantaneously. Pressing space when a unit isn't moving causes the game to mark that soldier as having finished their turn and automatically select the next nearest soldier that hasn't finished their turn (of course, you can re-select "finished" soldiers manually if you want). Once all the soldiers have been marked as finished, space will end the turn. You can now play through a turn relatively quickly if you want, which can often be useful towards the end of a mission.
With December including the Christmas holidays we'll be having another truncated month, but with V22 done we are hoping we can get some cool new features in for testers in January.
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.
Xenonauts 2 October Update
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.
Establishing Shots
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.
Visual Polish
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.
Maps and Missions
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.
Xenonauts 2 - September Update
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.
Improved Tactical Art
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.
Strategy / Air Combat
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.
Other Systems
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.
