Chris

Yeah the new Geoscape UI will have a bit more space for this because the messages won't be directly overlaid onto the map, so there's no incentive to get rid of them ASAP like there is at the moment.

The research progress is deliberately clouded, unlike the manufacturing where you have an exact estimate of completion time. This represents the greater element of unknown in new research compared to building something that is already planned and known. I think that's a good thing really!

I've always been scared of Tasmanian Devils since I saw the cartoon, so I nuked the site from orbit.

As you can see in the terror sites, even with the spawning exclusion zone you frequently take losses just stepping off the Chinook. Also, a fair portion of the aliens deliberately spawn inside the crashed UFO every time. That's what they're trying to defend, why would they leave it?

Sorry, what's the proposal? We replace the existing vehicles with drones? What would be the difference? Haven't read the whole post, so perhaps I'm being dim here.

I don't really want to draw too heavily on the existing alien lore simply because I don't think most of the players will be familiar with it so won't get the references if I did make them, and I'd rather write the story myself and not be constrained by the existing alien lore. Xenonauts is set in a fictional history, so there's no need to be too reliant on existing culture. From a design standpoint the story is secondary to the game mechanics anyways, although that doesn't necessarily mean we'll neglect it. I think some of the assumptions you've jumped to are a bit unfair - blaster bombs were removed because any indirect fire weapon makes the game less tense and unbalanced, as you don't have to expose yourself to enemy fire. Not because we can't be bothered to put in the pathing. I'm pretty happy with the Xenonauts music too, I think it'll measure up to the Firaxis stuff fine. I also don't think we need that much differentiation from Firaxis, as I think the games will play quite differently anyway. And as a game designer I'm not going to do anything purely for the reason of setting us apart from our competition - it has to add to the players' enjoyment of the game too, and not unbalance things.

Yeah we're holding off major updates till we update the UI, then we'll add all the usability / polish stuff. Should be a lot more graphical and cleaner second time round!

There should be diminishing returns with each scientist beyond the first - the second works at 99% efficiency etc. Perhaps it isn't functioning?

If this isn't in already, it'll be in the next build. I think the public demo does contain aliens killed in the crash, but it doesn't limit them to only spawning in the UFO. So they usually spawn outside it in random locations. This is fixed in the dev build now.

That might explain the slight surge in donations today - thanks for the link!

Yeah, we are back in development and making some good progress. I imagine I'll post a forum update in a few days explaining what we're hoping to have in the next update (post-Kickstarter).

I sometimes wonder what you guys are smoking, and if I can have some of it

We'll be adding some new ones shortly - we've got the message that there's not enough maps in the game from the Kickstarter, don't worry

So you're assuming that games make more sales prior to release than they do after release? Without wanting to be rude, I'd suggest that you're the one with the information problem.

Also, funds aren't running dry - we had more money in the bank before launching the Kickstarter than we did at any previous point in our history of the development. We could have carried on without the Kickstarter but we thought we'd be able to make a better game by raising the extra funds from one. The assumptions you've been making are basically all wrong, and you've consequently drawn some rather bizarre conclusions from them. And finally, I'm essentially "acting the victim" here because you're a pre-orderer and I'm acting in your best interests to make you a better game at the end of release, and yet you're complaining about it. You can argue with me as much as you like, but I'm the one in possession of the facts and you're the one with an argument based on assumptions and conjecture. Your advice to me a few posts back was not to ask the community what they think on things they don't know anything about - so having explained my position in detail, I'm going to begin not listening to people by not listening to you any more. You've made it abundantly clear you don't understand our basic mindset or goals, so while your advice may be well-meaning and I appreciate that you've been civil in delivering it right the way through this thread, it does not relate to the reality of the situation. Yes, the game has taken longer to develop than we thought. We're sorry about that; here's an explantory link.

Wiglaman - your arguments do have a certain twisted logic to them, but your economic arguments strike me as weak because they both assume the worst case financial scenario (that the game won't sell many copies when it comes out because we've done a Kickstarter - likely incorrect because a large number of people will wait for reviews to decide whether to buy it or not, so there's plenty of incentive for us to make a good game anyway) and that we're only interested in short term financial gain rather than building a sustainable business. I quit a job earning $80,000 plus bonus to set this studio up - if I was only interested in short-term money generation then I wouldn't be a game developer. You can actually say that about most game developers, as even if they are artists or coders they can generally earn a lot more and have more social hours plying their trade in other industries.

I suppose we probably should put ourselves in the game actually, just so you guys can add us to your squad and have us die horribly

Tom Isoor wouldn't be a problem to put in the game. We'd just want confirmation in the case of Ben Dover and so on. But we're not doing callsigns - the game only supports first and last names, and we don't want to break with the existing game too much by having a soldier with a callsign already set recruited. You can always rename your soldier to Major Isoor though.

Nope, I wrote a semi-serious post parodying the arguments of people who seem intent on criticising us, but then I realised it was best if I didn't leave it up all considered. I feel better for having written it though

Wiglafaman, if we'd set the stretch goal to be "130k, a bigger studio" then we've had been crucified for it. We were getting slated on the RPS comments boards because apparently this should be a fundraiser for Xenonauts, not a fundraiser for Goldhawk. People were getting annoyed we weren't spending the money on "the game". The studio is something abstract that doesn't add any value to the game, as far they're concerned. This is why we didn't put it in as a stretch goal. Also, what if we hadn't hit that stretch goal? Then would we not be able to have a physical studio? It'd just be giving the haters more ammo. I also don't see why you need clarity of where the money goes in the stretch goals. It all just gets spent on the game, so whether it's spent on bringing the team together or paying freelancers to do the work doesn't really seem relevant. Admittedly it would stop people complaining about how expensive some of the features are, but they all seem to be in the "every penny raised above 100% funding should be spent only on implementing stretch goals!" brigade so I doubt they'll ever be happy. Also, you seem to be implying that we shouldn't ask the community what they want in the game. We set all the options in the questionnaire as choices, because they're things we think would add to the game if implemented. Over a thousand people voted to let us know what they think would improve the game - essentially, adding more tileset variation. So the vast majority of people that played the game would rather have more varied levels than, say, a motion detector. But you're telling me I shouldn't be listening to them? We should come up with a game design entirely divorced from reality to preserve our "coherent direction"? As if somehow putting in more tilesets instead of motion detectors would irrevocably change the feel of the game and undo everything that we have done so far? Even if that was the wrong choice to make, it'd only make up about 1% of the final gameplay experience so it's being blown out of all proportion. Anyway, if over a thousand people are telling me there's not enough tile variation in the game, I'm inclined to listen. I think it'd be pretty stupid of me not to - they're probably on to something. Finally, as Akavit has said, there also seems to be a complete disconnect between people's expectations of how much the game should cost to make (seemingly mostly because it doesn't have AAA graphics) and how much it does cost. A "reskin" of X-Com must be cheap to make, because X-Com is old. But in fact we have to make X-Com, but improve on it in every way, just to even be considered standing still. We don't get the credit for spending money improving things because expectations have increased, but if we miss out a feature that X-Com had (like proxy grenades, which I see as a very low priority feature) then everyone jumps all over us. Also there's this weird attitude that as we've gone on Kickstarter and raised more funds, somehow the people who have already pre-ordered the game have lost out. The only net effect of the Kickstarter is we'll have more money to develop the game, so they'll get a better game at the end of it. But again, they've found something to complain about. I know this happens to all game developers and I'll stop moaning now, but hopefully you understand that if we had done what you were suggesting there would have been an equally large number of people on the internet being angry at us for the opposite reasons. So we just did what we thought was best.

We can't win, can we? If we don't post up stretch goals, we're out of touch and not doing the cool stuff the other Kickstarters are. We're rubbish at marketing because we can't motivate the Kickstarter community like everyone else does, and we've given no incentive for people to donate above the funding amount. We're idiots because we've left money on the table. If we do post up stretch goals, then we're amateurish because we're either compromising our artistic integrity by adding new features that weren't in the earlier design, or we're leaving ourselves open to attack because our stretch goals are overpriced (or the community didn't vote the way people wanted, so they have a bee in their bonnet about it). We're money grabbing bastards for trying to take the money people are potentially making available to us. Wiglafman - I really don't understand how us saying "if we hit X funding, we'll add a new tileset" is somehow leaving you worse off than you were before? You're not obliged to try and make that happen. If I said to you "I'll give you $10 if it rains on Thursday" would you be annoyed with me if it didn't rain on Thursday, because you've "lost" that money? The new tilesets aren't a feature that have to be in the game, or were going to be. We were already going to have 7 tilesets in the game it'll potentially go up to 9 if we raise enough money in the Kickstarter. Why are you so angry about that? Yes, we could add all the stretch goals to the game to make it more exciting and immersive, but we're a small team and we don't have the resources to do it. If we raised enough money on Kickstarter we might be able to, of course, which would make the game better for everyone - but that's exactly what you're criticising us for trying to do. In hindsight, I really wish we hadn't offered stretch goals either. The amount of flak we've taken for trying to be open about what we want to do and to offer backers a small bonus if the Kickstarter goes well has encouraged me not to bother in the future - it just seems to be seen as a weakness to attack by a small but not insignificant part of the internet. None of the features on the list were going to be in the final game - and in fact if I'd never mentioned them at all I doubt anyone would have noticed they weren't present. Lesson learned the hard way.

I've updated the project status page now. That did need an update. I've got too much on my plate to revamp the website much, but there will be a news update in the next couple of days too.

@ Jean-Luc: Indeed, it's always gone with the territory. The only problem is that Kickstarter makes it a much more public sort of thing. If someone pre-ordered the game and then did his internet rage thing about it, I could happily tell him to go screw himself and offer him a refund if he wanted one, with few consequences. Although I generally don't get many internet rage emails so it doesn't come up much. But having a public argument with backers on Kickstarter could well lead to a mass exodus of funding, so you've got to be much more careful there. Plus there's all the dangers of a variable price point and the entitlement that goes with it (not always unjustified entitlement, of course), and it does sometimes feel like a minefield. Not to mention the Kickstarter backers will be less familiar with the game than those who specifically went looking for an X-Com clone and found our site, so their expectations are more varied than our normal audience... @thothkins - I imagine telling people they're not our target audience would just mean they (and a number of other people) would just cancel their pledge. That's not desirable either!

*Edited to remove emotional venting* I feel much better now.

Hmmm. None of the stuff in that list is able to be done at present, I'm afraid. That's not to say that we couldn't add it - but I don't think we could do so easily. It's a fairly significant amount of work because those systems aren't really linked in any way at the moment and tying them together would be as much work as implementing more game central stuff (which we should be concentrating on instead). Because of that, I'm probably going to have to rain on your parade and say that I doubt this will make it in. I'm happy to support modding, but I don't think these changes would be worth the time - particularly as it does seem quite specialist modding functionality that I'm not sure many other modders would use if this project did take off. Far less useful than, say, allowing weapons to have different ammunition types and far more effort. Sorry about that!