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Hello everyone - it's been a busy month here at Goldhawk, and there's a lot to talk about in this update! 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!

@Solver those are great ideas. I notice that they mostly have an ulterior characteristic rather than being pure damage dealers. A lot of support-type actions. Although you've not got a healer in there, which seems the obvious choice, to me at least. Along that line of thought, a support-class alien could just be one that uses psi to buff friendlies or lower the stats of enemies. Anything from TUs to morale. If psi is the mechanism, then the alien doesn't need to be toting at gun. The Psions from Enter the Breach were just floating octopuses. @ApolloZani yeah those poisoned headcrabs were the worst. And by worst I mean best. Having an annoying enemy is good design - if it can get you really riled up but still want to play so you can smash them to bits. @Xeroxth fair point that the aliens aren't exactly making a covert war what with that giant death ray in the sky. I guess I'm trying to scope out what the feel of the game is going to be. XCOM:EU had the Etherials and their assembly of different races. XCOM2 had something like the storm trooper vibe. But I don't think X2 is going for either the zoo or the SWAT team. Like I said, I don't know what the vibe is, apart from cold war alternative universe. I use the term 'realistic' aliens to mean the type of aliens you would expect to see. Douglas Adam's Hooloovoo is probably the best alien I've ever heard of, a super intelligent shade of the colour blue. Great imaginative sci-fi and really, truly alien. But it'd make a crap enemy in a computer game. You need something that looks like it belongs in ground combat. Normally I'd be against a conservative recommendation, but in this case I think the aliens should be, for the most part, on the less extreme side of things. For the bread and butter aliens, just give them a few backwards facing joints, maybe a spine that doesn't form a straight column or a tail or something. But if you start filling the game with quadrupeds ... at some point it risks the feeling that you're fighting an invasion of horses or something. And for something like a crystalline alien, just think what it would look like fighting against a rock. I think it is important to remember the perspective of ground combat, it is a top-down view in a tile-based environment. That is how you see the aliens, so the really imaginative ideas kind of need to take a back seat to what is easy to animate in a computer game. Having said that, I think that for the special boss aliens, the ones that aren't clone-grown Earth-ready foot soldiers, the visual appearance should be really mind blowing. These would be the true extra terrestrials, with homes vastly different. These few could be the crystals or the AI mainframes or the gas clouds.

Some ideas for aliens that are, behaviour wise, a bit more interesting than "soldier with a gun" (of which you still need to have several types). Shield Drone. Something like the light alien drones, but stays close to friendlies, and can project a shield around a friendly alien in range. So you either fight the tougher, shielded alien, or try to first take out the agile drone. Heatlamp alien. No gun, but has a damage aura some 3 tiles around it, so it just damages all enemies within range, doing more damage if it's closer. Somewhat low damage overall, so it's not an instakill, but you want to get rid of these before they get too close. Dangerous due to their area of effect ability, their weakness can be low TUs or HP. Fire-using alien. Fire was very underused in X1. You can have an alien that, by itself or with a gun, causes fires, which would be fun due to the unpredictable spread of fires in some biomes, and generally being a completely different type of hazard. The second-form alien. Upon being killed, it produces a weaker form of itself, or splits into two smaller aliens, or something else along those lines, the idea being that it creates a new, smaller threat. Mobile shield robot. The alien version of your shield soldiers essentially. Doesn't buff anyone else, instead it's just a big shield that aims to stay between your soldiers and other aliens (probably said to be remote-controlled in-game). Unarmed, but with very high HP, requiring you to shoot around it or to take it down with concentrated mass fire.