mercy

The two screens in the first post are pretty good. Better make that your art style. Big surprise. You need to entirely redesign your concept of how a successful GUI looks like. Look at XCOM: Enemy Unknown window, button and font sizes, that's a pretty good direction. Forget tiny fonts.

I just saw the game. :-oooooo Jesus guys. This GUI design is horrendous: you put everything onto one window, when you should have created clickable buttons leading to different sub-screens and at least 3x larger fonts everywhere. :-oooo Can't believe you dared to put this thing out for sale. :-oooo Wow.... Probably it was all because of the programmer gone. Jesus. Glad, I don't have to waste time with this. Bye.

Good to hear Xenonauts sells, and hopefully will be selling well.

- "Xenonauts Lost" on debrief screen changed to "Xenonaut Casualties" (because they may still survive) Does this mean you can go back for them later and land just to collect your own people? Or did you mean injured people, out of action?

- Added a significant number of new maps from the community for the farm and desert tile sets This appears to be the single most important feature that picked my interest. There was never a UFO game that had user made maps before release. Hail to fantastic diversity! YEAH!!

Might have bumped their ankle on the ramp getting on the vehicle.

Look & Feel evaluation based on: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=k9GCgvvQCT4 Very nice sound effects all over the Battlescape! Monthly performance screen: Great idea bringing back the XCOM datasheets in a new graphical representation, country funding this way looks clearer, more fun. Painted backgrounds looks nice! Fonts are too small. This is not a company financial sheet, were you want to hide values, this is a game, where fonts & numbers should be BIG like when Bingo or lottery draws are shown on TV. Geoscape looks OK now. Personnel / Training screen: Fonts could be 2x bigger. Lots of unused space on those sheets. Same goes for Research screen. Light Drone Wreckage screen: Increase font size 2x 3x, text is way too much, maybe break it into more paragraphs or just try to be economic with words? Writing only interesting & enigmatic phrases? "As the name implies ...[..]" This first paragraph is completely unnecessary stating the obvious like: "Looks like a cow of height, appears to have four legs, excretes at the back, eyes front and tongue suspected at front as well. It has been seen using a walking movement and our scientists suspect the creature "Cow" is capable of limited acceleration called running.." It should have been: "Saucer shaped recon drone equipped with light weaponry." -- Dogfight looks so curious in current state I would cut it out of the game entirely and replace it with the UFO DEFENSE solution. Try to increase sprite size of everything there by 2x or 3x or 4x? Player seems to have trouble selecting tiny craft icons. Frankly interceptors are not really easy to see. Battles at crash sites is still the strongest part of this game. Painted background look nice. Few other parts, some screens, sub-par soldier equipment screen and sub-par base building screens and the data-sheet management screens detract from entertainment value mainly by their looks and small fonts dangling in large sheet-spaces.

Undeniable progress with so many builds here. However I want the absolute best the GoldHawk Team is able to do, so will only buy, after a few Release Candidates V30.X Stable. Will wait till then.

Alien bases now include strong locked doors which can be blasted through This sounds very exciting! Also ablative armor.

Based on Aug 3, 2013 Early access: Aug 1, 2013: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=B6gnADbp-vU If you have locked down art, you can still finish the game with balance and good AI plus working, reliable features. The look is also important however: - Nice looking tile art and alien ships, beautiful environments!! - Hidden Movement screen is very good, as well as the research screen shown here on this forum. Vehicle Equipment is also nice. - Geoscape looks okay, you made a good decision to add that rectangle pattern filter/raster thing overlay. Country borders are a nice job. That big ugly green blotch representing the ship is a huge off-turner: you should add some dark lines of detail and some green highlights onto same green ship icon. - Your strongest attraction is the awesome Battlescape environment art, I would advertise this game excessively showing battles. - Excellent Alien Autopsy screens!!! You see the discrepancy, where the GUI and equip screens look so weak - with the New Tech Discovery screens looking medium quality/okay - and the autopsy is Top Notch? See the detail, shadows, highlights, textures on the autopsy screen? I would at the very least use the nice Alien Armor detail level/style seen on the Sebillian Autopsy screen for covering current plain GUI surfaces elsewhere. You should re-work GUI surface to have that awesome Sebillian Scales detail/style/look in other words 3D rendered elements! It can be done in Photoshop too if one is an old veteran. - I would increase font Size on most Screens = rework to make space for bigger letters or just set font "Tracking" <-AV-> to negative values. If a player can't read sh** on those screens because eye straining tiny font design the enthusiasm for "I want to play this" quickly abates.. to "meh..." - Air battle: ought to replace those green "Line of Sight" cones with animated ones that become more transparent/fade out with increasing distance from ship radar equipment. - Green and Red boxes need to be replaced with cool looking path indicators, see rectangles in UFO: Defense - Cross-hair is too big and ugly, obstructs target and anything when placed over: See nice cross-hair in UFO: Defense Cross-hair should embrace the target, meaning only have "cross-hair" pixels at the four corners and maybe a pixel line under or at the top to make it feel the "cross-hair" or in this case selection rectangle covers/embraces the target. The current concentric circles are too much. - I would redo the Battlescape GUI, currently it looks like too inept, it must have a greasy, rusty metal or worn muddy look, more 3D or more like worn F-16 cockpit instruments. - Soldier injury list screen after battle and Assign Soldiers to craft plus the various equip weapon GUI sections with the hand drawn soldiers look weak and might scare off buyers, because it appears 16 year old's doing Photoshop exercises with hand drawn line-art and filling surfaces up with plane color. Plain GUI surfaces should have 3D rendered lighting effects, grease, rust, tiny shadows where rust has eaten into the metal or scraped paint, highlights. Review Planescape Torment and Baldurs Gate 2 GUI.

Seeing a recent state might change some variables in me favoring buy decision.

How long until STEAM DEMO?

The only positive thing of Steam - if we can call steam positive - that . Of course if you are using MODs custom made in any game, then because of update the MODs are deleted. In current state however Steam Xenonauts greatly benefits from this auto-update, compared to Desura.

Nope. I think the scientist's head piece is well balanced. In fact the whole research screen now looks excellent. I found nothing to criticize. Good job!

Can't wait till the Steam demo.

While waiting for a big official content update /DLC / patch for XCOM: EU I started a Superhuman XCOM: UFO DEFENSE + latest UFO Extender v1.30 and XCOMUtil v9.7. In most cases the aliens slaughtered my 10-14 soldiers sent to investigate crashed UFO-s. Also they quickly arranged a visit to my only base converting it to a slaughterhouse. I tried to defend 3 times and not one of my soldiers survived. Earth was lost.. Lot of enhanced features were added to the latest UFO DEFENSE (I guess you can call it super-XCOM-MOD), XCOM:EU-like shortcuts are configurable making the gameplay-speed fast. Compared to XCOM:EU the tactical freedom (real-world bullet-tracing for example so you can shoot friendlies accidentally) and the fact soldiers are capable of carrying a lot of gear is clearly apparent. 30 soldiers dying on my base one after the other by the hands of ruthless sectoids and Cyberdisks reminded me of XCOM:EU ironman mode and how Lt. Gorman in ALIENS must have felt.

I have all hopes in OpenXCOM. Those guys really develop the game further. I wish they could code a sort of revolutionary scaler that renders original XCOM pixels in double-size with a new pixel-accurate gradient-scaler routine, refining detail. I wonder what the awesome OpenXCOM coder Team could do in Unity 3D when they could get 3D artists and animators + particle FX people.

During dogfights: One UFO should beat the crap out of our (multiple) fighter(s). Multiple UFOs are unnecessary. Make a bigger UFO as a Bigger Threat instead. A new, never before seen bigger UFO is much more exciting and stirs up our Hunter Instincts = okay it destroyed my fighters, but I will get the sucker later for sure!! Awaken the many thousands of years old feelings of Revenge in the player. Make human drama. Emphasize that humans are basically SANDWICH-es to Aliens. Our fighters chasing a herd of smaller UFOs are unrealistic and looks ridiculous, also from design standpoint it feels a forced, lame, cheap, uncreative, not very clever decision. If you can't change anything - e.g. your hands are tied - you will make this game BLEH. Make clever design decisions that slaps the players in the face so they are stunned from the blow and the icy cold of fear creeps along their spine into their hearts. UFOs possess super-technology, we are neanderthal humanoid-chickens compared to them. UFOs are able to speed across your FOV in a fraction of a second as you can see on some specially slowed down video recording frames, they are visible as a blurred streak on 3-4 frames top. Those recordings are really disturbing, because of UFO speed and displayed supremacy. You could send the player "to sleep" by generating regular encounters THEN make a strange, rare, strong UFO appear an Interceptor Butcher, in different sprite color, maybe having a slowly blinking insidious glow around it, like the unknown & frightening alien ship in Privateer 1. Sort of like a Predator Ship but specialized to be Interceptor Hunter Class, that can be shot down VERY RARELY and if the player succeeds, they encounter a new human-hunter alien species with the strength/shooting & death dealing skills of Predators. You could defend your already built in elements - that you could make existing aliens tough for example -, but you also could relax the player with a regular UFO game experience, then suddenly create an unexpected TWIST that turns around everything players have seen up to that point and have gotten used to in XCOM1-2/EU like games and create a totally unique experience in Xenonauts never before seen anywhere else!! Only if you really wish to break the ice in this genre. Firaxis said they are working on something totally new and awesome compared to the usual content ending with their Slingshot DLC. Do you want to release a just another UFO game "Oh yeah and there is Xenonauts as well.. nothing exceptional, okay lets talk about the new Call of Duty where the action is.." or Would you like UFO fans talk about Xenonauts for years and have a lot of new converts MODding the hell out of your game? Do something exceptional that gets their attention!

Looks fantastic on WinXP SP3. I have the latest K-lite codec pack installed.

We really have to praise the Xenonauts Dev Team for the LOTS OF UPDATES!!!! A great many Kickstarter games and games elsewhere suffer from NO UPDATES. What is going on???? What are the developments??? Lack of news makes people crazy. Goldhawk Interactive however makes sure there no lack of updates and the developers are answering on forums here, giving nice news, making the customer service of this development team EXEMPLARY!!!!!! Thank You!

Wow!! This looks very promising. Commendable work!!

Slight color changes PSD files: Final GUI MOD Base Screen: changed window backgrounds, rotate button. (this does not yet have a painted background, it's just a layout!) Laboratory Screen:Window backgrounds, buttons, hire/fire scientists screen changes. Workshop screen: made selection and clipboard fields conform to Base Screen Topbar. Window background, buttons. (Funds and date+time field untouched.) Barracks soldiers hire screen: slight militarization of window colors, made them conform to background art palette. Barracks soldiers manage screen: Added names highlight. (Advanced gradients would look nicer, but require more time & effort.) Stores screen: Window colors conform to background art resulting in slight military style. "No items", Sell and Transfer screens too. Soldier Equip screen: Weapons color enhancement, selection conforms to Base Screen Topbar. Windows styled a little more military-like. Vehicle Equip screen: Weapon color enhanced, selected fields, buttons. Aircraft Equip screen: made weapons appear more badass, selection and window colors. Dropship screen: I forgot the Right and Left arrows and left them unchanged in the PSD. 50% salary reduction as punishment! Updated arrows on Dropship screen.

You did good work and can make it look more impressive by immersing people into the world of XCOM. Light colored windows with black text: - might remind players to workplace excel todo's & suffering. - don't look like a game, but look very much like SAP application or the TPS report from Office Space . - reduce immersion in game. Look what Master of Orion 3 designers did. Leaderboard example: make it colourful http://techblog.dallasnews.com/govision.jpg Transparency examples: 1. http://www.blogcdn.com/www.switched.com/media/2011/03/dam.jpg 2. http://images.collectorz.com/movie/features/play-episodefiles.jpg Immersion examples: http://4.bp.blogspot.com/-6ha_hl8IAWE/T2yltGIrM1I/AAAAAAAAA5k/AmGxyaZyHg8/s1600/IMG_0659.PNG Imagine this with white text windows: http://media.vcstar.com/media/img/photos/2012/03/30/197046_t607.JPG

Nice and clean look! Good work. In order to make these look more like a game, not a corporate medical analysis software i would - make the weapon backgrounds a little transparent - make all text stat screens a little transparent - make text have stroke and fill color - bring out the contrast on the weapons colors a bit. Like this: http://img248.imageshack.us/img248/9213/transparent7soldierequi.jpg Basically the UFO Defense dialog box way: http://openxcom.org/wp-content/gallery/v0-4/18102011_manufacture.png

Overwatch MOD: XCOM ToolBoks by bokauk Delay was the most hated feature of overwatch and there isn't a Squad Overwatch button. The OverWatch MOD - solves these issues by killing the delay when selecting overwatch and hunker down and now i can hold one button pressed and the whole squad goes to overwatch, lightning fast! Really speeds up the game and is fun! Also i can now enable free camera rotation in any increments. 16 degrees feels nice usually. Modifying the default Zoom in and Zoom out distances are also a godsend. More zoom in is nice and just a little more zoom out is needed to get a better tactical view. Disable disappearing corpses looks awesome, bodies littering the floor, now the maps looks like a real battlefield! Critically wounded will penalty: Should your soldier become less of a mental cripple after a grave injury? Now you can lessen the amount of permanent mental shock (Will damage) after getting critically wounded by aliens. Rookie Hire Gender probability: Very nice feature. I instantly set it to 75% girls, and having a Charlies Angels girl squad because the girls are sexy in the Texture Modded military outfits. Must-see! The Military Retexture Pack by kolt16 adds a new level of realism plus cool look to the soldiers, a must have for an XCOM commander. Which country rookies shall come from the most and into which class they should graduate is also a feature, maybe other people love it.