Milestone 3 Patches:
A lot of our time has been spent fixing bugs in Milestone 3 recently, with five patches being released in the last month. Many of these issues were minor problems caused by our Unity 2022 upgrade, but there's also been fixes for various older bugs and some improvements made to the foreign language translations of the game too. These updates should have collectively improved player experience quite a bit.

One highlight was finally finding a fix for a long-standing bug that turned the screen black whenever any unit fired a weapon. This bug only affected a small number of users and there was a workaround (disabling the "camera shake" setting), but it made the game basically unplayable for anyone who did not know that - so it's definitely a relief to have it fixed!

New Maps & Environments:
We've also been hard at work on the content for Milestone 4, and the new maps needed for the largest UFO crash sites are the biggest component of this. These are progressing well - we're aiming to have 3 large maps per biome when Milestone 4 comes out, and we're about 80% of the way there now. In addition to this, the update will also contain numerous new Alien Base maps that were made the previous month.

Furthermore, a new environment artist contractor has joined the team to help us improve our existing environments and eventually finish off the Soviet Town biome that we plan to add to the game before final release. We've already updated the command room in the ATLAS Base map so it more closely resembles what we have in our artwork (with a command table and proper wall screens), and now we're working on some underground earth textures for use in the Alien Base maps.

I'm planning on using these to address one of the gameplay issues with the Alien Base maps - that all the walls are indestructible (even the ones between rooms). Under this new setup all walls will be destructible, so it'll be possible to destroy both internal walls and the external ones around the edge of rooms. Doing this will reveal the earth tiles behind the walls, and these themselves will also be destructible.

This should allow more realistic gameplay where powerful weapons and explosives will be able to gouge holes in the walls, and theoretically it would also allow players to dynamically "mine" through the earth and breach other rooms if they sufficiently powerful weapons. Be aware this idea is still at the testing phase so I can't promise it will definitely work as planned... but all our testing so far looks good!

Alien Visual & Audio Improvements:
Our updated Androns have now been finished and will be marching into battle against humanity in Milestone 4. We've also retextured the basic Sectons, as these are the first aliens that new players encounter but previously had fairly basic textures. We're currently retexturing the Wraiths so their basic non-combatants have a simple military uniform rather than being completely naked, and this month we'll be creating an additional Wraith variant with heavier armour that will appear towards the end of the game.

We're also in the process of hiring a contract audio engineer to improve the game's sound design in general, which will include creating some new sounds for the aliens to try and give them a bit more character (like new injury / death sounds, or unique footsteps etc).

Smaller Improvements:
We've also completed several small features this month that were requested by the community. Firstly, the dropship screen (where you can position your soldiers within the dropship) now shows the soldier role icons on the green soldier tiles, making the process much more straightforward than it was previously.

Secondly, we've finally got "destruction linking" working properly, which allows us to have walkable tiles placed on top of large multi-tile objects like shipping containers and have them remove themselves if the underlying object is destroyed. This means there's now a lot more objects in the game that allow you to land on top of them and walk around (shipping containers, caravans, buses, certain fuel tanks, etc), and fewer cases of aliens mysteriously standing in mid-air on invisible tiles.

Work was also done on the end of turn camera, which now better shows regeneration healing and Bleeding Wounds damage on any visible units at end of turn. We also rewitten the item assignment logic that occurs after a completed mission, because players were getting some strange loadout problems when running a second mission with the same dropship (some weapons not starting with a clip loaded, etc), which was just down to the primitive way in which the game assigned items to your soldiers if there wasn't enough to equip the whole squad.

Finally, a surprisingly popular request was an upgrade for the basic Combat Knife weapon that is available for your soldiers, so we've designed an upgraded Energy Knife that will unlock off Alien Electronics and should allow the weapon to remain relevant for much longer.

Conclusion:
That's everything for this month - lots of smaller tasks that together represent good progress on the project. Hopefully we'll have an early version of Milestone 4 out for testing on the Experimental branch later this month!

Milestone 3 Release:
The biggest news in February was the release of Milestone 3, which launched in conjunction with a Steam promotion and contained many significant upgrades and improvements to the game. We were concerned there might be stability issues arising from our migration to Unity 2022, but in general the release went smoothly. This is in no small part due to the many people who helped us by testing the build on the Experimental branch, so a huge thankyou for that!

However, most of our time over the past couple of weeks has still been spent fixing bugs reported by the commmunity. Over the past couple of weeks we've released a couple of patches onto the Experimental branch, and if testing doesn't reveal any further bugs then we'll release them onto the main Steam / GOG branches some time next week.

Milestone 4 Planning & Harvester UFO:
Our next big update will be Milestone 4, which we're expecting to have ready for early testing on the Experimental branch in roughly six weeks. This will be another major content update centered around the introduction of a new UFO, in this case the Harvester - the penultimate alien craft in the game (the Battleship is the largest UFO and is due in Milestone 5).

We're therefore already working on the content necessary for this. Aside from the obvious work required for adding and balancing a new UFO, there's quite a bit of extra work required here because the Harvester is so much larger than the Abductor and Cruiser UFOs that it requires an entirely new set of maps. We're aiming to have three new maps per biome for this UFO, which means a total of about 25 new maps will also be added in Milestone 4. 

Androns & Updated Aliens:
Milestone 4 will also see the re-introduction of the Andron alien race. We removed these prior to our Early Access launch because the models and animations looked pretty bad, but we've now created a new set of models / animations for them. I think they've come out well, and are now some of the best-looking aliens in the game.

In gameplay terms these remain heavily armoured, fearless robotic enemies, but unlike in previous incarnations they now carry standard alien weapons (either rifles or machineguns) rather than having an integrated cannon arm - this makes it much easier for players to gauge how much threat any Andron unit poses, because you can now actually see the gun they're using.

We're also likely to revisit a few of the existing aliens before Milestone 4 arrives and either retexture them or update their animations, as some of the aliens definitely look better than others right now!

Colossus Battlesuit:
The most important research project unlocked off the Harvester is the Colossus Battlesuit, the "ultimate" suit of armour available to the player, so this is something else we'll be looking into this month. We want this to be a powerful asset that offers exceptional protection, but not something you want to equip on literally every soldier in your team - so it needs some disadvantages to go alongside its strengths. I've not yet decided exactly how this will be done yet, so hopefully we'll have more details for you in the next update once we've had a chance to test some of our ideas!

That's all from me for now. As always, thanks for reading, and I'll be writing another update at the end of next month!

The idea is that they will be able to add new features / fix bugs and release patched versions of the Xenonauts .exes, which will be distributed on these forums or via Steam Workshop. They will not be official Goldhawk-endorsed releases, but may be incorporated into future official patches.

This will also make things easier for non-programmer modders, as a few Community Coders could make moddable areas of the game that are currently hardcoded. Essentially they can act as enablers for the wider modding community as well as modders in their own right.

If you are interested in becoming a Community Coder and would like access for the source code, these are the requirements:

• You are a good coder, so you know your way around git and have a programming degree or a coding job in the industry or so forth. There are two reasons for this:
  
  • Our codebase is a mess and you are unlikely to be able to achieve much if you do not have good coding skills.
    
  • We want to ensure you don't end up breaking everything for the other coders on the project (and they don't break everything for you).
    

• You are willing to sign a NDA / agreement which states:
  
  • The source code remains our property and you will not discuss / distribute it outside the hidden Community Coder forums. We'd rather not have it leaked across the whole internet!
    
  • You may freely distribute any executables compiled from the code provided it is on a non-commercial basis.
    
  • We're allowed to (and will) sue your ass in the UK if you break either of those rules
    
  • The work you produce from the source code can be used by Goldhawk for any purpose without requiring permission or attribution if we so choose (you do not lose the right to distribute it if this happens).
    

If you're happy with those terms, please send me an email with your details and we'll consider and hopefully accept you. It'd be really great to have a larger team than just Solver working on this sort of thing - I'm sure the rest of the community would really appreciate it!

Milestone 3:
The biggest piece of news is that Milestone 3 is out on our Experimental branches for testing, with the goal of releasing the final version of Milestone 3 onto the default Steam / GOG / Epic branches on February 19th.

There's an extensive changelog for Milestone 3 which you can read here, but this new build ticks off a number of content items on our roadmap: the Cruiser UFO, both alien and human Fusion Weapons, the third interceptor aircraft and third dropship aircraft, plus the ARES (an upgraded hovering version of the MARS).

We're currently hotfixing the game on a daily basis to remove crashes and AI hangs encountered by our community, and we'll be focusing on smoothing out the game balance once the worst of the bugs are dealt with.

Unity 2022 - Load Times & Borderless Fullscreen:
The biggest single task we've completed on over the past couple of months has been upgrading to Unity 2022, which Milestone 3 now runs on. This has been quite disruptive, but worthwhile - the update has enabled us to reduce load times by ~30% across all parts of the game, and we're hoping to further improve that to a ~50% reduction in the coming months.

The game now also properly supports Borderless Fullscreen mode, allowing you to freely Alt-Tab without issues (something a LOT of people in the community had been requesting). Players should encounter fewer issues with multi-monitor setups than before too.

The upgrade should also help speed up development somewhat. I won't bore you with the technical details, but code compiles much faster in 2022 relative to our older version and there's much more powerful debug tools available, so we'll collectively be spending a lot less time twiddling our thumbs while we wait to test our work.

AI Upgrades:
The other major task we've been working on is AI improvements. The AI now has access to more information about the battlefield around it, and it's making much more sensible decisions in combat about where to position its units and how to attack.

However, we're still keeping a close eye on the AI because further tweaks or bugfixes may be required - even minor issues in the AI settings can cause AI units to do bizarre things in certain situations. But the good news is that these issues should now be easy to fix, and it's just a case of testing the game enough to find them all.

Specific AI improvements have been also made to the civilians (who were famously suicidal in older builds) and for melee aliens like Reapers, which had been struggling to attack effectively.

New Assets:
As well as the new content I already mentioned has been added for Milestone 3, we've been adding lots of new maps to the game and have also added a significant number of new 3D models for various soldier weapons that had previously been using placeholders. The research art for the new research projects is also largely complete and should be finished by the 19th.

We're also starting to work on updates that won't appear until Milestone 4. Kickstarter backers will remember pre-Early Access versions of the game contained the Andron alien race, but they were removed due to issues with their models and animations. The updated Androns have now been designed and are in the process of being modelled up so we can reintroduce them in future.

This is part of a wider task to create additional variants of existing aliens. The Wraiths in particular don't have enough 3D model variants to represent their different ranks, so we've designed a more heavily armoured Wraith variant that will appear in the later UFOs, and also designed a proper uniform for the basic "civilian" Wraith you encounter acting as a pilot or engineer inside UFOs (currently they just appear naked).

Conclusion:
Overall, it's been a productive couple of months for the team despite the disruption of the Christmas holidays. The Unity 2022 upgrade and the AI upgrades were both large tasks so it's nice to have them done, and I think Milestone 3 is going to be another significant upgrade for the game - once testing has ironed out all the kinks.

Thanks for reading, and please let us know if you encounter any bugs or issues when playing on the Experimental branch!

However, we did release several early test builds of Milestone 2 on our Prototype branches this month so we could gather early community feedback on our ideas. The build is now shaping up nicely and we're expecting to move it over to the Experimental branches in the next week or two, where we'll continue to fix bugs and polish it until it's ready for general release.

Artist Recruitment:
Before I start talking about the new features, I quickly want to mention that Goldhawk is hiring a couple of additional 3D artists for Xenonauts 2. If you are potentially interested in joining our team as an Environment Artist or a Character Artist / Animator, please check out the posts below!

• Recruitment - 3D Environment Artist (Remote, full-time / part-time)
• Recruitment - 3D Character Artist / Animator (Remote, full-time / part time)

New Missions & Early Game Update:
Two common issues raised in player feedback about the Early Access launch version of Xenonauts 2 were that the pacing of the campaign could be improved, and the role of the Cleaners (and their storyline) could be expanded.

We therefore added quite a lot of new content to the opening section of the game in Milestone 2. There's now more Cleaner missions in the early game, including three new mission types - Rescue Soldiers, Convoy Ambush, and Rescue VIP - and the process of locating the Cleaner HQ has become more organic. Now you gain progress toward the HQ location simply by winning the Cleaner missions that spawn on the map, with extra progress earned if you capture prisoners for interrogation or if you recover optional Cleaner Data from the map.

I've also rewritten the dialogue around the tutorial and opening section to make the plot more interesting (and do a better job of involving the Cleaners), and I'll be continuing this process while Milestone 2 is on the Experimental branch.

Soldier Armour - Heavy / Light Variants:
We playtested a number of changes to soldier armour in the prototype builds, but the only improvement we decided to keep was creating Light and Heavy variants of each type of soldier armour. This replaces the existing ballistic plates modules from Milestone 1 with a checkbox that toggles between these heavy / light variants.

Heavy armour simply weighs more, but offers greater protection that the lighter variant. This gives the player a lot more flexibility, and avoids the situation where your newly researched advanced armour is actually worthless because it's too heavy for many of your soldiers to use (as they can just use it in the lightweight configuration if needed). Feedback so far seems to suggest players consider this a big improvement over what we had before.

Interceptor Weight System / Air Combat Rebalance:
We've also taken a look at the air combat in Milestone 2. The biggest change is to how aircraft equipment works, as aircraft slots can now hold any type of item / weapon but each aircraft has an overall weight limit that the equipment loadout must stay below. We've also added a fuel pod item that boosts the aircraft range, and an armour plating item that boosts survivability. The UI for this system still needs work, but overall it feels pretty solid already.

Some work has also been done on the UFOs themselves. We've introduced a new early-game unmanned UFO called the Probe, which is much weaker than the Scout and initially serves as a basic introduction to air combat before being used as the first type of escort craft for larger UFOs (as Fighter UFOs are too deadly to use as escorts early on). The existing UFOs have also been rebalanced to try and make them more distinct from one another.

New Maps:
Our new level designers started work in September, and their first task was to address the lack of UFO crash site maps in the Dockyard biome. We've now got five new maps to support this, and we're working on expanding the number of Jungle maps too. After that, we'll get to work creating more maps for the new mission types added in Milestone 2.

(Community) Mod Tools:
We've also continued to develop the foundations for modding. We've finished implementing the mod management systems, and the "mods" panel is now accessible from the Main Menu screen in Milestone 2. Unfortunately the modding tools themselves require more work at our end than we expected, so we're still in the process of planning that out. We're making steady progress, though, and the game should have a solid set of modding tools in place before launch.

And that's everything that I can think of - thanks for reading, and I'll write another progress update at the end of the month!

The map uses quite a few placeholder graphics but is intended to let us test a few things:

- Map sizes relative to the number of aliens in it

- A more open style of map

- The new UFO wall hiding mechanics

- The size and interior layout of the proposed new Light Scout UFO

Future maps are in the works, there'll probably be at least one more this week that will showcase the new style of the Farm maps with big LOS-blocking hedgerows. If you're lucky, we'll get the first test map for the alien bases out this week too. The Xenonaut base defence missions may appear in the next couple of weeks too, as Aaron's done a lot of new tiles for them.

The intention is that we'll iterate the maps with community feedback until we know what size works best for each UFO type, what the best UFO layout is etc, and take on board specific comments on each map so we build up a decent library of hand-crafted and playtested maps for release that are fun to play through.

In the next few weeks we'll be adding more functionality so we can test "scenarios" as well, which will involve setting a specific number of alien units and a specific number of Xenonauts with specific equipment on certain missions to see how easy / hard they are. This will require further amendments to the levelsetup.xml code and the AI code, but we're working on those.

There's also a bunch more tiles in the updated version, as well as as updated Submap / Level editors for those who like making your own maps. Enjoy!

Milestone 2:
The biggest news this month has been the official release of Milestone 2, our first major update since our Early Access launch. I discussed the many upgrades made in Milestone 2 in our previous update so I won't cover them again, but getting everything ready for this release took up most of the month.

Our thanks go out to all the testers who were reporting bugs and giving gameplay feedback on the Experimental branches over the past couple of months, as it has been incredibly valuable!

Broadly speaking, all this testing meant Milestone 2 launched in pretty good shape - but we've already patched a few major bugs and put out a fix for the funding situation being overly restrictive on the easier difficulty settings. We're continuing to monitor stability and balance issues, so please do let us know if you're encountering problems and we'll consider further patches!

Milestone 3:
Although Milestone 2 is barely out the door, we're already hard at work on Milestone 3. This update contains the alien Cruiser UFO, which is crewed by aliens carrying deadly Fusion weapons. If you can successfully capture one of these Cruisers, you can unlock the final interceptor and dropship aircraft, plus another tier of infantry weapons and an upgrade for the MARS that turns it into a hovertank.

We'll also be continuing to work on the alien AI and the air combat, and we're hoping to add various minor community-requested features into this update too (e.g. the ability to autosell "junk" items after combat). Finally, we're expecting Milestone 3 will have significantly improved loading times compared to earlier versions of the game!

Unity 2022 Upgrade:
These faster load times will be happening partly because we're in the process of upgrading from Unity 5.5 to Unity 2022. We've already done the necessary technical work for this, but there's always teething issues with a major engine upgrade, so I expect we'll have to spend a couple more weeks fixing things up before things are fully back to normal.

Players should see faster load times and better performance when this work is complete, along with proper support for multiple monitors and borderless windowed mode etc. It will also make development work more efficient, as the codebase compiles much more quickly etc. Finally, it'll also bring us one step closer to mod tools - as some of the work we'll be doing upgrading our internal editor tools could be re-used to create a more effective mod editor.

I think I'll wrap things up there. If all goes well, we might have an early prototype of Milestone 3 ready for people to play on the Experimental branch by mid-December (if not, it'll be early January). Thanks for reading!

Although the update is content complete and we were originally planning to launch it today, we've decided to push back the release by a week because the Steam Autumn Sale is starting today - it's never a good idea to push out a huge update that might cause stability issues just before a major sale. A second benefit is that delaying the update also gives our localisation partners time to translate the new content.

However, anyone that wants to try the new update can switch onto the Experimental branch right now and start playing. Your save games will carry over to the public version of Milestone 2 once it releases, as the only changes we'll be making in the next week are bugfixes and translation updates.

A big thanks to everyone who has helped us test Milestone 2 on the Experimental branches over the past four weeks, we really appreciate it!

Milestone 2:
Our main focus this month has been Milestone 2, which is undergoing testing on the Experimental branches. This is now feature complete - we're concentrating on bugfixes and balance changes while we wait for a few more maps / art assets / research texts to be completed. We're expecting to be able to release it onto the default Steam / GOG branches a couple of weeks from now, about halfway through November.

Milestone 2 contains a lot of updates, including several new types of tactical mission, a new UFO type, and some significant changes to the early part of the campaign to expand the role of the Cleaners (there's more details about this in our previous development update).

Air Combat Rebalance:
One thing worth mentioning in more detail is our rework of the air combat. We've implemented a more freeform equipment system for Xenonaut aircraft and then rebalanced the air combat itself so it rewards skillfully maneuvering your aircraft in a similar way to the original Xenonauts, while also trying to remove a few of the more abusable tactics (e.g. it's no longer possible to continually use evasive roll to circle-strafe around an enemy).

This means the overall balancing pass has touched almost every part of air combat. We've tried to create distinct identities for all the different types of weapons you can fit on your interceptors, make the different UFOs pose different challenges to the player, and added some new UFO weapons and aircraft equipment to increase variety.

Of course, many people prefer to simply autoresolve the air combat - and this is one of the ongoing balance issues we're aware of in Milestone 2. Making the game playable for people who only use autoresolve has led to the air combat being a little too easy for people who use only manual autoresolve, so we're going to be working to fix that over the next week or two.

AI Improvements:
We've also started upgrading the AI this month. We begun by focusing on the civilian AI, as they currently don't behave in a very realistic way - as MANY players have noticed! I'm not sure if we'll have a patch ready for Milestone 2, but if not then we should have noticeable improvements in place for Milestone 3.

Additionally, many of the issues we've found with the civilian AI were caused by problems with the general AI model - which means fixing them will make the aliens a bit smarter too!

Loading Times & Unity Upgrade:
Another thing we've been actively working on is improving loading times, with the eventual goal of reducing load times by roughly 50%. The good news is that we're making steady progress here, but the bad news is that players are unlikely to see any improvements until Milestone 3.

This month we experimented with stripping some further data out of our saved game format and found this sped up loading times by 25%-30% on our current (very outdated) version of Unity. However, when we tested this change in a more modern version of Unity, we found something interesting: load times were sped up by 25%-30% even if we disabled our change. It turns out recent versions of Unity have optimised that part of their loading process already.

As upgrading Unity will also bring a lot of other improvements to the game (e.g. better performance, proper support for borderless window mode, etc), we're planning to do that as part of our plans for Milestone 3. In the meantime, we're working on multithreading as a way to deliver the remaining ~25% loading time reduction.

Conclusion:
Although there's plenty of smaller things I could talk about, I'll end things here. I think we've had a productive month overall, and personally I've particularly enjoyed seeing progress towards fixing some of the largest remaining problems raised by players at launch (slow loading times, bad civilian AI, the air combat needing more work).

As always, thanks for reading - I'll write another post next month!

Expanding the Team:
This is mostly because the development team has expanded significantly over the last couple of weeks. When we launched into Early Access the team here at Goldhawk was only three full-time employees (one designer and two programmers) and there's just not enough hours in the day for a team that small to run a project of this size effectively, even if you're all working evenings and weekends.

In practice this has resulted in a situation where we've collected a lot of useful gameplay improvements / suggestions and bug reports from our community, but we've only been able to tackle the most urgent of those issues. This is frustrating for both the team and for the players, as the other tasks are still important things we want to fix - they're just not as important as the stuff we actually have been fixing.

As the only way to make a serious dent in the task lists was to get more manpower, this month we hired one additional full-time programmer (who is actually an old friend that worked with us on the original Xenonauts) and two more highly-experienced part-time programmers. Many thanks to anyone that applied for a position on the team after reading our last update - we really appreciated seeing so many enthusiastic people reaching out to us!

Furthermore, we've also hired an additional full-time level designer / QA assistant, and two part-time designers who will be helping with the level design and game design / balancing respectively. Our goal is to respond to all community bug reports within one working day, to start delivering new maps with each major update, and generally to be able to respond better to player feedback and suggestions. I've been spread WAY too thin over the past few months.

Improving the Game:
We've continued to improve the game over the past four weeks, adding community-requested features like the option to modify the length of mission timers and the ability to break apart / merge together airborne squadrons, plus successful fixes for the memory leaks in the game and all sorts of other gameplay bugfixes.

However, work on the game has been slower than normal due to all the recruitment we've been doing - if you're a small team, it takes a lot of time to be reading through CVs and code samples / portfolios to evaluate applicants, it takes time to interview candidates, and it takes time to get employment contracts signed. And most of all, it takes time to get people set up on the project and get them up to speed on our huge codebase or to teach them how to use a complex tool like our level editor. Time spent on this will quickly pay off, but it does slow things down in the short term.

This has affected Milestone 2 most badly. We're now hoping to release this onto the Experimental branches at the end of next week or the beginning of the week after. 

I'll also mention the loading times briefly here, as I know they are important to many people. We took a look at them earlier this month but it quickly became clear any serious attempts to speed these up would change the structure of the saves and therefore break save game compatibility. As a result, we've pushed this work back to Milestone 2 (as each new Milestone build is likely to break save games anyway, due to the significant balance changes).

Community Mod Tools:
One thing we did spend a bit of time on this month is the mod loader and Steam Workshop integration, which is now nearly complete. However, we've not yet started work on the official mod creation tools and it may be a few months until we do given our focus is currently on upgrading the core game.

If anyone is potentially interested in helping design a GUI that hooks into our code so modders can more easily edit the game files, please take a look at this thread!

Conclusion:
That's it for this month's announcement. We've made decent progress but most of our time this month has been spent expanding the team so we can make faster progress in future. Thanks for reading, everyone!

Here's what we've been up to this month and what we have planned for the coming month!

Critical Bugs & Performance Fixes:
Almost all of this month has been spent fixing critical bugs like crashes or anything else that ruins the gameplay experience for players. We actually thought the game was pretty stable going into Early Access, but going from a pool of twenty to thirty regular testers to having tens of thousands of players exposed a LOT of issues we were previously unaware of.

The last couple of weeks have therefore been rather intense, as we've had to patch the game numerous times to address these issues. Thankfully the worst of this should now be behind us; we released 1.28b on Friday which improved performance and has fixed the bulk of the critical bugs. Work continued over the weekend and we've now fixed the memory leak players have been encountering and also (finally) managed to find and fix the annoying bug where terrain objects would sometimes get destroyed but not visually update (leading to units being able to shoot or move through what appeared to be a solid object).

Our immediate priority is to finish up the last couple of crashes we're aware of, and fix a couple more serious gameplay bugs - e.g. grenades missing when displaying 100% chance to hit. This should leave the foundations of the game in good enough shape to move on to other tasks.

Loading Times:
Once that is done, we'll be starting work on optimising the load times - hopefully this will happen towards the end of this week. There's not much more to say on this point beyond the fact that we're aware of the issue and we'll be working on it soon.

Milestone 2:
We're then planning to spend the remainder of the month working on Milestone 2. This will be the first major update for the game and it will involve changes to the campaign, which unfortunately means it will break save games (although you can continue to play your Milestone 1 campaign on the Legacy branches if you want).

As the programmers have a lot of bugs and usability improvements to be working on, I'm planning to focus on the air combat balance and the pacing issues in the existing campaign for Milestone 2. This is likely to extend the playable time beyond 180 days but it will not introduce additional UFO types to the game - it's more likely that we'll be expanding the role of the Cleaners at the start of the game instead.

The first Milestone 2 build will likely arrive on the Experimental branch in the next two or three weeks, where it will go through a number of iterations based on player feedback before being released onto the standard branches.

Expanding the Team:
Finally, the income from our Early Access launch means we can now expand the team to speed up development. The first positions we're looking to fill are that of a Level Designer and a Gameplay Programmer. If anyone is interested in applying, I've linked the job posts below:

• Level Design job post
• Gameplay Programmer job post

Overall, July was a great month for the project and we've really enjoyed seeing people playing the game we've been working on for so long. We look forward to delivering more upgrades in August!

Marketing & Communication:
One of the main things we've been working on is how we can keep you guys better informed about our progress. I'm therefore pleased to announce a new face is joining the team to help us out on this front - Paul, who you will see posting under the name "nervous_testpilot".

I've known Paul for a long time now, as he was originally one half of Mode 7 Games (who made tactical games such as the Frozen Synapse series and Frozen Endzone) who I leaned on for a lot of useful advice back when I was developing the original Xenonauts. Since then Paul has moved into the publishing world and has published various smaller games under the Mode 7 brand, such as Tokyo-42 or The Colonists. He's therefore the perfect person to help out by handling our marketing, sales and communications work so I can focus on getting the game finished.

What does this mean for you? I've written some updated posts that outline what mechanics are currently in the game and what is planned before release (similar to the threads we had up during the Kickstarter) which will be unhidden early next week. We're also aiming to have project updates every two weeks focusing either on the development progress that has been made or diving down to analyse a specific new mechanic in more detail. The Steam page and our website is going to be updated with fresh media, and we'll start monitoring the Steam forums and posting our updates there. You should start to see a bit more coverage about Xenonauts 2 in the news media once we announce our Early Access date, and in general we'll be taking a more active approach towards telling people about the game. 

If anyone is particularly keen on Discord, we're setting up a Discord for the game where the updates will also be posted (although the forums will remain the primary community hub). If anyone wants to join that, the link is here:

• https://discord.gg/fG4Xr6q

Gameplay Improvements:
What have we been working on over the past month in game development terms? Lots and lots of things. Let's start by talking about artwork, because we're making progress on several fronts there.

One of the things I feel is important is to replace some of the placeholder art that people encounter early in the game. We've got new background painted art on the Research and Engineering screen (as well as updated character art), and we've also had some additional art painted up for a couple of the early research projects. One specific painting that represents the Orbital Bombardment mechanic (i.e. a space station vaporising a city from orbit) turned out pretty well, I think!

We're also working on the designs for the new UFO. We've reverted to the X1 style of UFOs, but we're not planning to just re-use the old designs. The Probe UFO shown above is just a revised version of the old Light Scout from the original game, but most of the designs diverge more heavily than that. Again, I think new artwork goes a long way to making the game feel fresh and interesting even if the fundamentals remain familiar.

Finally, I've spent the last couple of weeks talking to some external artists about improving the visual appearance of the ground missions in X2. Although these experiments are still at an early stage, it does seem like we can make some substantial improvements to the visuals by changing our texturing style (the ground textures in particular could be improved a lot). We'll have to see how things progress, but some of the test scenes are looking really nice - with a nice X1-inspired handpainted feel, but with a more "high-res" 3D feel. Let's hope we can translate that into the game in the next few months!

On the coding side of things, we've spent quite a bit of time getting the new UFO hull-hiding system set up in the ground combat. This is the system from X1 that makes the walls of the UFO disappear when you see the interior of the UFO, giving the "cutaway" feel. This is a complex system at the best of times, but we're also trying to incorporate destructibility into these UFOs in a similar way to the X1 Fire in the Hole! mod (essentially there are specific breach points on the hull of each UFO that can be blasted open). This work still isn't finished, but things are going well so far and we're hoping we'll be able to start work on the final UFO models in the next week or two.

We've also been working on a number of smaller systems. We've set up the systems for night detection on the Geoscape, so the game will load a night mission if the Geoscape night shadow is over the mission site (all the night missions mechanics are still subject to testing). We've done a bunch of work on the soldier equip and dropship equip screens to improve the usability there. The anomalies / events spawned by UFOs as they fly around the map now contain the full variation of text that we have in X1, but now also have biome-dependent tags so we can disable events like forest fires or shopping malls being strafed from happening in the middle of a polar region, etc.

I personally have spent most of my non-management time working on the threads about our plans for the game and the research text for the plot research, which so far is 12 research reports / plot-related pop-ups. There's probably another 5 or 6 optional research projects that I need to write that will unlock an alternate ending (for people who like reading research text). These form the foundations of who the aliens are and their capabilities and intentions, which then feeds into all the other research text. I'm aiming to get the early game research text done in the near future so the first 10-15 researches are all properly written up - again, I think it's important that the initial content is in place even if the entire research tree isn't written.

Builds:
The build I promised in the last update hasn't yet materialised, largely because the ground combat maps are in serious flux at the moment. There are several big changes happening to the levels are the moment which means I'm not that keen to spend time on our existing maps, as there's a good chance I'll have to throw my work away shortly:

• The biggest one is updating the designs and sizes of all the UFOs once the "hull hiding" system is in place. It's likely that the UFOs end up being significantly bigger, which will affect all the maps and require a redesign.
• I need to run through all the maps and re-export them to set them up properly to support night missions (as each map now has settings that define whether it can support a day mission or a night mission). Until I do this, no night missions will work.
• The visuals are potentially subject to some serious upgrades, which will probably also mean the level design will change.
• Finally, we need to set the maps up to support multiple possible UFOs and dropships that are spawned in at the start of the mission depending on what happened on the Geoscape. At the moment the dropships and UFOs are baked into the maps (a legacy from the days when we only planned one dropship) so if we want to support another dropship we need to make a copy of every single map where we swap the Chinook out for the new dropship, which is way too much work to be worthwhile (this is why the advanced dropships are currently disabled in the tech tree).

Hmm, having written all that out, I realise now it probably makes more sense to release the next build as soon as possible using the old maps while they still work - because it's going to take us a while to work through all that code and make all the new maps! Maybe we will try to put out a new build in the next week or so then. I'll have a look into how feasible that is this afternoon, although it'll still feature the old UFOs in ground missions and the night missions won't function, etc.

Anyway, that's more than long enough - there's lots going on here even if I'm not paying much attention to the forums right now!

Not long now!

Playtesting:
If you already have access to Xenonauts 2, either as a Kickstarter backer or as part of our Steam Playtest group - now would be a great time to play the game and let us know your thoughts. The content will be the same as for the Early Access launch, but there's still time for us to fix bugs and make minor balance tweaks to make launch day a bit smoother!

New Content:
We've obviously been fixing a lot of bugs and adding small polish features to the game - the Early Access build has already been hotfixed 11 times, and we'll continue this right up to release (this includes finally fixing the long-standing memory leaks in the game). However, we've been adding more content too.

I've spent significant amounts of time on the research reports over the last couple of months, which means almost every research project in the game now has text and art (which is a LOT of projects). We've also added art for several engineering projects that previously did not have them.

In terms of gameplay, we've set UFOs up to have variable Geoscape speeds so it's not always as simple as "this type of interceptor always can / cannot catch this type of UFO", improved the air combat autoresolve, and also set the UFOs up to have different interior variants so crash sites don't play out the same every time. We've also rewritten the code for targetting with grenades and medikits as it was previously very fiddly, and they now snap to tiles instead which is much cleaner.

Finally, we've continued to work on the translations for the game. There's a lot of UI in the game so this continues to be a bit of a pain, but it's obviously an important thing to get right.

Summary:
That's pretty much everything. Our plans for this month aren't hugely surprising - we're going to be frantically fixing bugs and adding polish prior to release, and the two weeks after release are likely to involve frantically fixing bugs that we didn't even know existed prior to launch!

Still, it's an exciting (and exhausting) time for everyone on the dev team, so hopefully we'll see some of you around for our launch on the 18th!

Early Access Launch Date:
The first thing to mention is we now have a date for our Early Access launch. I don't know exactly when it will be revealed because our marketing partners Hooded Horse are handling the announcement, but we're just focused on getting the game as good as possible for that date (which is really not that far away)!

Please be aware that the Early Access version of the game is going to cut off after about 60-70% of the full campaign. This is still a big chunk of the game - depending on how quickly you play tactical missions, you could easily spend 10-15 hours playing a campaign before you hit that point. Ultimately we had to make a decision between spending our time working on polish and bugfixes that affect the whole game, or fixing various issues (and adding some missing content) that only relate to the final section of the game.

In the end we thought people would prefer to play a 15+ hour chunk of Xenonauts 2 that would hopefully leave them impressed and keen to play the final game, rather than release the entire campaign in a less polished state that they might enjoy less. We will be adding back the removed content during Early Access, once we've had a chance to test it and polish it up to the standards of the rest of the game.

Current Goals:
Our current goal is to make sure the playable parts of the game are as enjoyable as possible. One important goal is to ensure all the research text and art in the playable sections is ready, so I've been working hard on that (along with a number of illustrators). We're also working on lots of bugfixes and usability improvements, and adding little quality-of-life features requested by the community - e.g. you can now rotate soldiers when arranging them inside the dropship on the strategy layer. If there's any time left over, we'll try and add some new maps too.

We're not going to be making any further large changes to the game until after the Early Access launch, as we want to avoid introducing new bugs. It's always important to have the game as stable as possible on launch!

Completed Work:
Now I've discussed our future plans, I'll quickly summarise the work we did last month in the space I have left:

• We released Closed Beta build V27 onto the Experimental branch, along with four hotfixes that fixed a LOT of bugs. We'll be hotfixing a few more issues this week and then hopefully releasing it on the Steam / GOG main branch.
• More work on the translation.
• As mentioned above, quite a lot of work on the research text / research artwork.
• We did some more work on the new Geoscape icons.
• We fixed the memory leaks in the game, which were causing performance issues and eventual crashes if you played the game for an extended session. This involved upgrading a copy of our codebase into the most recent version of Unity (as the version we're using is so old it doesn't have the tools required to easily find memory leaks), which is good news - after the Early Access launch, we'll probably upgrade the main project to this new version of Unity too. This should improve performance and compatibility, as well as making the lives of the developers easier.

There's a few more smaller things we worked on that probably aren't worth talking about, as this post is already rather long. That's all I have for this month, so thanks for reading the post and I'll make another post once our release date is announced!

Cleaner Cells:
The main new mission we've been working on this month are the Cleaner Cells. These are VIP Elimination missions where you're tasked with attacking a hidden Cleaner command post and killing / capturing the leader in charge. If you're successful, all Cleaner activity in that region will stop and Panic will stop rising there.

The other part of the mission is capturing data from the various computers around the map (the same way as in the Intel Hub mission). This is an optional activity, but any data captured will increase the player's progress towards revealing the Cleaner Headquarters - and once that is revealed and destroyed, all Cleaner activity everywhere will stop. Capturing the VIP rather than killing them also provides a bonus to Cleaner HQ progress.

This means these missions are another example of a mission where you can choose how much you want to push your luck. Enemy reinforcements start spawning after seven turns, so most players will have enough time to fight their way in and kill the VIP without needing to fight off the reinforcements - but you can take a risk and try to grab more of the computer data either by staying and fighting the reinforcements for a few turns, or just by spreading your team out more in the early stages of the mission.

Although obviously this isn't *that* different from the Abduction missions or the Cleaner Intel Hub mission, I personally feel it still makes a nice change of pace from the standard crash site / elimination missions, so hopefully everyone else enjoys them too!

Translation:
The other big feature we've been working on is still the translation, which has sucked away a lot of our time and delayed pretty much everything else we've been working on. Frustratingly, it's still not done - although we're a lot closer than we were last month.

I wrote out several long paragraphs of explanation here in my previous draft of this post, but honestly I won't bore you with the details. There's just a lot of work to be done to set up support across a variety of different languages (including non-Latin languages like Russian or Chinese and Japanese), and this is a big and complex game with lots of text in it. Lots of text needs to be loaded or displayed differently in very specific circumstances, so there's been a lot of unpleasant surprises.

We're hoping we'll be done with our end of the translation work next week, but ultimately it's difficult to know what further problems we'll encounter.

Other Work:
We have done a few other things this month though. I've spent a bit of time this month adding more 'character conversations' to the game, which are a nice way to sprinkle a little more flavour into the game beyond the research text. I think they're a nice addition in terms of immersion.

We changed Combat Shields back to working like they did in X1 based on all the player feedback we got on the topic. There's also been quite a lot of bugfixes and small UI updates on the strategy layer too, which are collectively useful but there's nothing individually worth picking out.

That's everything for this update. I've been saying V27 is due out shortly for a while now, but we're hoping to be able to release it this week!

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

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

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

Regular beta players should note that we've now tied some of these usability changes to difficulty level. If you're playing on the harder difficulty settings then you'll no longer see the enemy healthbars (unless you manually choose to enable them) and rotation when firing weapons does now cost Time Units by default, etc. Please bear this in mind when reporting bugs in future!

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

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

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

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

More recently I've also been working hard on the strategy balance and trying to improve the air combat a bit. Now the campaign options are finished and hopefully translation is too, we're turning our attention back to V27 and hopefully we'll get that out about two weeks from now.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

We've made a few minor additions to the gameplay this month, including new research art and a reskin of the Geoscape panels related to launching and managing aircraft squadrons on the Geoscape. Players will hopefully appreciate the latter in particular as the updated Launch Aircraft panel now displays the equipped weapons on the selected aircraft, something that has been requested frequently by our community!

The biggest feature we've been working on is the tutorial, as a proper tutorial is an absolute must if we want anyone other than harcore X-Com / Xenonauts fans to be able to enjoy it. It's also a good way to allow us to introduce the Xenonauts and the Cleaners / aliens at the start of the game, and generally help set the scene without relying on a massive text dump. Unfortunately it has been rather time-consuming to implement though!

As of today the demo is functional from start to finish, but there's still quite a bit of polishing left to do. I'm expecting it to be in fairly decent shape by the 6th but we'll be continuing to make improvements to it in future builds too. Beyond that, we've mostly been working on stability fixes. There's been another couple of hotfixes for V25 this month and we've got another one on the way shortly.

Next month we're going to be continuing to fix and address the gameplay problems / feedback provided to us by the V25 testers, and we'll probably put out V26 towards the end of the month. We'll also be evaluating supporting translation, as we need to make a decision about whether we'll be supporting that or not before we announce an Early Access date.

And that's everything - thanks for reading!

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 we're going to be working on in the next couple of months.

Open Beta:
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 recieved 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 been 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, you'll still be able to give the game a test via our public demo!

Public Demo:
Xenonauts 2 is going to be participating in the upcoming Steam Next Fest that runs from 6-13th February 2023, and we're going to be putting out a demo that will allow you to play the first couple of months of a campaign (usually about five or six tactical missions).

This should allow people to get a taste of the full game, and hopefully get everyone excited for our upcoming Early Access release!

Upcoming Work:
As such, the dev team will mostly be spending their time on improving this demo this month. Our primary goal is to get the tutorial implemented, as if experienced players feel it would be helpful then 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.

We're also going to be improving the difficulty settings so that people can better adjust the challenge to their level of expertise, balancing the game, 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!

Public Releases:
We continued patching V24 this month, eventually releasing V24.7b onto the standard Steam / GOG branches. 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.

Alien Abilities:
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, which is 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. 

Soldier Equipment:
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.

General Development Progress:
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 tatical 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!

If you want to sign up for the open beta, please post in the previous update thread. I'll be DMing people Steam keys via these forums when the open beta starts.

General Progress:
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.

Playtest / Open Beta:
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!

(I will however be making special exceptions for forum regulars. If you're someone who posts here semi-often and you'd like access to the Playtest, just post in this thread and I'll send you a Steam key when we do the first batch.)

That's everything from me until next month - thanks for reading!

Just to be clear - if you want to get into the playtest, please just post something here saying that you're interested.

Please don't post any of your personal details up, as I'll be DMing you a Steam key here on the forums when the time comes!

A lot of this month has been spent on testing, bugfixing and polishing, so most of the progress this month is on improvements that were already underway. Grenades in particular have continued to sap a lot of our time as we keep encountering all sorts of weird edge cases with them where the arcs go wrong or don't make sense (somewhat to be expected when you try and put a curved arc onto an abstract tile grid) but I think we're nearly there now.

The main changes are:

• The Soldiers screen on the strategy layer has now been reskinned in the final UI screen. The Research screen comes next.
• We've finished the tiles for the Xenonaut Base biome, and these now need to have their destruction effects added. We're finishing up a few loose ends on the Jungle, Farm and Dockyard biomes at the moment and then we'll move onto the last two biomes that need work, the Arid and the Soviet Town.
• I've written another 10 or so research reports.
• Lots of small improvements to the ground combat that aren't technically bugfixes - for example, we've updated the fire paths so miss shots fly off up into the sky much less often, which makes grenade launchers and the MARS rocket launcher much more useful.

As for our Early Access plans, they're still unchanged. We're planning for a EA release in the first quarter of 2023 with February roughly pencilled in as the date. Our goal is to have the entire basic campaign playable from start to finish by this date, although there is likely to still be a few rough edges (some research projects not having artwork, perhaps difficulty settings not enabled, etc) in the game at this point.

Anway, I'm in the process of playtesting V24 now and it seems like we're on track for a release next week. There's not really much more to say beyond that; it's been almost five months since our last public release so hopefully everyone will see a big improvement!

I'll be writing a much longer post later this month explaining our plans for Early Access in detail, so I'll just focus this post on what work we did last month. 

Abduction Missions:
The biggest feature we've been working on are Abduction Missions, which are a new type of tactical mission intended to provide a bit more variation to the ground combat. In these missions the aliens have captured a number of civilians and imprisoned them within teleporter pods, and you have a certain number of turns to free as many civilians as possible - once the timer runs out, all surviving aliens and any pods that have not been opened teleport away.

You win the mission by rescuing at least 50% of the civilians, so these missions are no harder than a "normal" mission where you kill all the aliens. However, you receive a small amount of money resources for each opened pod and killed alien (as they do not teleport away) so the player can potentially obtain more rewards on these missions by playing more aggressively than normal. Personally I think this makes them an interesting change of pace from some of the other mission types.

These were way more effort than I was expecting them to be, but they're basically done now (just ironing out a few bugs) and so should be included in V24.

Grenades:
We've now done the final part of the grenade implementation - setting them to use arcs, so they can be thrown over walls or intervening cover. This is surprisingly tricky from a design perspective (arcs and abstract 3d tile grids don't go together well) and even more of a pain to implement, but we know it's an important feature to a lot of players.

We're just fixing up a few bugs and some issues with the visualisation, but this feature is also pretty much done and should be in V24.

Achievements & Cloud Saves:
Achivements are now complete, including artwork, and set up on Steam and GOG. You'll be able to earn them (well, most of them) starting in V24.

I'll also shortly be turning on Steam cloud saves, but because our save games were previously absolutely enormous (up to 20mb for some tactical saves) we've spent some time optimising the files so they are much smaller. They should now only be about 20% of their previous size, so only a few mb each, and won't totally destroy anyone stiill on a metered connection.

Terrain Tiles & Maps:
Last month I spent a bunch time fixing all the problems with the UFOs in the game, using a new tool to find and fix all the line of sight "holes" which could cause the interior space to be revealed by soldiers who were still outside. I also fixed the non-walkable tiles that occasionally appeared inside the UFOs, and finished setting up the styling on the Harvester and Battleship UFO interior spaces.

I've also added a LOT of new terrain tiles to the game. These will be most noticeable in the Xenonaut Base biome, which is now mostly complete and looks much more polished than it did in our last public release (there's just a few more rooms left to complete). This is also reflected in the Cleaner Base plot mission, which has been completely restyled and now looks much better than before.

UI Updates:
We're continuing to work towards having the strategy UI refresh complete for our Early Access launch in February. I've implemented the new visual style for the Main Base and Stores screens, and we're nearly done with designing the Soldiers screen. Once that is complete we only have the Research, Engineering, Aircraft and Soldier Equip screens to implement.

Additionally, we're working on an updated visual style for the Geoscape map itself. This won't be dramatically different but we want a map that looks a bit more distinct from the one in the first Xenonauts, and is just a bit neater and less noisy. We're still at an early stage of this but I'm hoping it'll come out well!

Campaign / Tech Tree:
In preparation for V24 I'm doing another balancing pass on the campaign. One small thing we implemented here was the ability to randomise the spawn times of missions and UFO waves, which has helped make things less predictable, and in general I've just been working through the game and ensuring everything unlocks correctly so you can actually make it to the final mission.

I'm looking to get the tech tree locked down for the Early Access release shortly, as there is still quite a bit of art and writing that needs to be added. However this month I did write all the research entries for the entire alien / Cleaner plot chain from the start of the game right up to Operation Endgame (this was about 15 entries in all). This means the hardest part of the writing is now done, as "normal" research entries are less narratively connected and much faster to write.

I think that's everything. We are working on V24 still but I'm not going to give a firm date for when it'll be released as I'm conscious I've got the demo to sort out first. But hopefully in the next couple of weeks!

Why? Sadly covid has been everywhere in the UK recently and all of the team based in the UK managed to get it last month, and on top of that I also had to deal with food poisoning last week too. Seperately our Tech Director had a house-related disaster that meant he needed to take an extended holiday, and as we're a small team that resulted in a lot less working hours than we'd expected.

Although this meant we were not able to release Build V24 last month as planned, we are hard at work on it right now. There's been a lot of crashes to fix that have been introduced by all the new systems we've added since V23 but I think we've found and fixed most of them now, so we're now at the stage of adding and polishing the new content.

The biggest thing I've been working on this month is adding many of the terrain tiles we've been working on over the past six months or so into the game and putting them into maps. I've mentioned many of these tiles in previous updates but in V24 you should now see new (or revamped) buildings in various biomes such as the Jungle biome now having ancient ruins, the Desert maps now having trailer park-style mobile homes, a new type of barn and storage shed in the Farm maps, and a whole lot of new tiles in the Xenonaut Base Defence missions.

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), and 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 did.

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.

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 other things benefit the player (e.g. 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 - the 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 I've 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!