Chris

Yeah, we're looking at having the background stuff change as the game progresses. It's something I really want to put in the game, and it's likely I make it happen even if it doesn't necessarily make financial sense, because I think it'd be cool. The old art is nice, but the new design uses a more "tabbed" approach which lets us put more functionality on the screen without cluttering it so much, and not having it look like a spreadsheet - it's tough to do that immersively in the previous design (speech bubbles work pretty well with that idea though). That's the main logic behind it, at least.

Yeah, if you keep badgering me enough I'll add this in.

Glad it's sorted

This is my proposal for the stretch goals. If people like them, they'll go up in a couple of hours along with a survey that allows you to vote for them in order of preference. Thoughts? - Mac / Linux port – The game will be ported onto Mac / Linux platforms for release, and hopefully for beta too. - Female soldiers – We’ll add female soldiers to the game, with 20-30 portraits and modified Basic Armour art. However the battlefield sprites will remain unisex. - Soviet Town terror tileset ($40k) – the current terror tileset is an American town. To fit with the Cold War theme, we’ll put in an alternate tileset for the Soviet bloc countries using Soviet-style architecture. - Military Base tileset ($40k) – this tileset would allow us to put military terror sites in the game, where aliens have attacked a military base and you are sent in to deal with them. - Inside missions – these would be missions where combat squads are sent into large buildings or into underground bunkers to clear out an alien strike team. We can mostly re-use the Xenonaut Base tiles for this, so this will be a $25k item. - Reaper (Chryssalid) Hive tileset ($40k) – in addition to the normal alien base missions, we will add Reaper (the Xenonaut equivalent of Chryssalids) Hive missions to the late-game. These would feature “nodes” that spawned infinite numbers of Reapers. Yes, I have been playing Space Hulk. - Tileset-Specific NPC Allies – we do have friendly AI soldiers in the game, but only one type. This would add different variants – police on the Industrial tileset, farmers with shotguns on the Farm tileset, mujahedeen with AK-47s on the Desert tileset etc. - Vehicle Combat Experience – soldiers level up with experience, vehicles do not. This would allow vehicles to increase their stats (not armour / health) by a maximum of 15% with combat experience. - Pilot Portraits and Callsigns – at the moment, the aircraft are just aircraft. This would give each aircraft a pilot portrait and a callsign, so they seem less expendable. These pilots will not level up with experience. - Human Psionics and Blaster Bombs – We’ve removed these from the game due to balance reasons, and we will not put them in Xenonauts. This stretch goal would bundle the game with a developer-made mod that allowed people to put them back in. - Memorial Screen – This would be a tab on the UI which allowed you to view a list of all your dead soldiers, including the location and time of death, their portrait and number of kills etc. - Proxy Grenades – These are fun. This would add a secondary fire function to all advanced grenades (Alenium grenades upwards) that allows them to be used as proxy grenades. - Motion Detector – This would be a one-hand soldier item that, when equipped, will display a coloured overlay on the battlefield to show any AI movement in previous turn within range of the soldier holding it. - Hire a Level Designer - we will add a lot more map variation to the game before release, but we don’t have a devoted level designer. This will let us hire one. - Tall Grass – There’s waist-high grass in X-Com. This would put it in Xenonauts too, complete with the ridiculous (yet amusing) fire mechanics from the original. The goals that involve the creation of a new tileset cost $40k instead, so if one proves most popular then it will arrive at $90k instead of $75k. This is because tilesets are surprisingly large and are EXTREMELY time consuming and expensive to make – they’re the most expensive component of the game by some distance. Given we’re only going to get about 50% of the money pledged after KS fees and the costs of manufacturing and shipping the rewards, there’s no way we can put an extra tileset in the game for a $25k stretch goal, I’m afraid. If you want to know why, it’s basically because you need a lot of tiles to make a convincing tileset that doesn’t repeat, and every single tile has to be modelled in 3D and rendered out, then hand-painted in three different variants (undamaged, damaged and destroyed) to support destructibility. Plus all the ground maps have to be painted too. It’s a LOT of work.

Right, just drafting up a final list now. Some good ideas here. Thanks for the suggestions.

Amusingly, our hosting mirrors have been slammed to the tune of two terabytes of data over the past 48 hours.

We could add portraits and kills for the pilots, I reckon. I don't want to give them stats, but we could probably add that.

The problem for the boxed copies is I don't even know where to start looking to get them produced...

Nah, you can talk about that in that post, it's a bit different (I've posted there). We can't put that in the poll, unless we stick it under "improved modding options" but even that is a bit wishy-washy...

OK - can you write a list of what features you'd need and I can look at how much work it'd be to link them up to see what we can make possible?

OK, so a few people have suggested a poll where we ask people what features they are most excited about and would like to have put in the game as rewards for us doing well. I think this is a good idea. But first, I need to know what should go in the poll. Here's a few ideas from me: - Mac / Linux port (likely to be at $100k) - Female soldiers (likely to be at $200k) - A new tileset (possibly with a sub-vote about what tileset you'd like - given we already have desert and tundra tilesets coming) - A new alien species? Although we might struggle to find one that has a good battlefield niche / ability that is not already planned. - Vehicle levelling - allowing vehicles to become slightly better with combat experience, although I'm a little unconvinced by this. - Military terror mission? Aliens are attacking a miltary base? - Mission objectives on terror missions - such as protect X civilian (the mayor etc) while the aliens are actively trying to kill them? Other ideas are welcome. I'm not keen to put pilot / aircraft experience in the game though, unfortunately. I think it'll be too tough to balance.

http://www.goldhawkinteractive.com/forums/showthread.php/145-How-to-claim-your-Pre-Order-forum-badge!

Dunno if you have Symantec antivirus working on it too? For some reason that appears to hate Xenonauts.

In hindsight I am very glad we didn't use IndieGoGo - Kenshi are on there and have raised about $1,500 in 9 days. They're not the most established indie project ever, but they've been around for a while and the game looks interesting so I imagine they'd be doing well on Kickstarter too...

We do already have idle animations animated, it's just a question of rendering them and seeing how practical they are. We'll get round to it eventually, although they're a "nice to have" rather than anything else. We might do a big poll to see what goodies people want to put in at the $150k mark etc.

Also, awesome! Thanks guys. I'm heading back to bed for a nap now

Yes. We're looking at that. Hopefully the stretch goals (currently planned to be Mac / Linux versions at $100k and female soldiers at $200k will give people something to aim for) but we are looking at ways to make the tiers more exciting.

poulwrist - fair point. Maybe they need some love too.

Hmmm. We could add a pilot picture to the planes, I guess. That might be a nice add-on.

Stx - that's kickstarter at work, rather than me I'm afraid.

I'm not sure we can get the portraits done for less than $30-40 each anyway, so it might well not be worth adding more in even if one of the other artists can handle it.

Haha, was that you? Nice job

Hmm. We've actually oversold the $200 pledge due to all the existing forum-goers pleding $170 and then asking to have their current pre-order added. Whoops. We'll honour those, but please, nobody else do it Right, time to get working on the stretch goals. And maybe post an update.

There's a 40% chance the cores will explode on a UFO that is shot down.

It's an overzealous Photoshop tool that removed the stupid light blue shallow water from the edge of the landmasses but also took some of the land with it. They'll be in the final version.