Search the Community

Hi! I just went to kickstarter page and backed the project with US$20. It said it would give me access to the latest builds and beta, plus a silver medal here on the forum. I only got one email from kickstarter saying that I'm a backer, nothing else. Where do I download the builds, and how do I get my medal?? Please someone help. thx a lot!!

OK, so the time has come to bite the bullet and do a Kickstarter for this project. If you're unsure as to why we'd want to do this, it's mostly because a variety of games have done very well out of it - Doublefine and Wasteland 2 being the two most famous Kickstarters so far, but much smaller games like FTL have also raked in a lot of cash too. FTL is sitting at $150,000 at the moment. To put that in perspective, that's substantially more than we've taken in pre-order revenue over the entire lifetime of this project. The major difference between us and the other projects announced so far is that they are generally brand new games very early in the development cycle, whereas we're towards the end of ours. This is a disadvantage in the sense that we're not exciting new news in the same way as they are, but it's an advantage because we've got loads of nice art to show off and there should be less doubts about whether we can pull off making a game. Because we're an existing project, we're going to take a slightly different approach. My plan is to make a playable demo of the game available to everyone, so people can see for themselves how the game looks. Our pitch in the video is basically going to be "We're getting to the end of our development cycle, and we'd like to raise a load of money so we can make the game as good as it can be". This is a pretty honest pitch - we're going to need more money than we have now if we're going to make Xenonauts an exceptional game. We're on track to make it a good game - perhaps even a very good one, but we're constrained by cashflow on some of our ideas. Anyway, the flip side of this is that next weekend we're going to try and release the basic version of the build that we'll be releasing to the entire internet. The idea is this build will contain the gameplay in the game until a couple of weeks after the Corvettes appear, which will allow the player to get laser weapons and Wolf armour, and then it'll spawn a couple of scripted events - a terror site and then a base defence mission. Once the base defence mission is over, the demo will end. The hope is that it'll show off the best parts of the game to everyone, and convince them to pay up. It should also give journalists something to write about. Once the key features are in place, we'll just keep iterating it until it's basically bug free and then go ahead with the Kickstarter. We're going to be working pretty hard at this end to make the game as fun as possible so we can make as good an impression as possible. We're going to try and implement these features: Ground combat: - Slopes / Hills (important for house roofs, and the future arctic / desert tilesets) - Base Defence missions (generating a proper recreation of the player base) - Terror Missions (using the town tileset, which is admittedly very basic at the moment, and having no UFO on the map) - Adding the Andron alien race for either the Base Defence or the Terror mission (hopefully) - Giving the National Guard so AI Geoscape: - Finishing the air combat UI implementation - Balancing the air combat so that the Corvette is a bit more of a challenge and it is a bit more varied - Adding more of a research tree, allowing you to research alien corpses and the like - Making it a bit more obvious on the Aircraft Equip screen when you're manufactuing an aircraft We'll want you guys to test both the current and the next build as thoroughly as possible. The public build needs to be as stable as humanly possible when it is released, so we can make a good impression with the gaming public. Thoughts welcome!

Would it be possible, when selecting the 'Quick Battle' option, that the game would already start a new game, select a difficulty (say, normal or veteran) and place the base for you on the Geoscape? All of this could be done without user input and would not need to be shown on screen. Basically for instance when I click on "Quick Battle," the game would automatically create a new game, select "veteran" difficulty, and place a base for me at the southern tip of South America (or wherever) named "ALL YOUR BASE" (or whatever). The end result being, when the user clicks on "Quick Battle," it throws them directly into the Terror Site mission without having to navigate through the game menus and place/name their base on the Geoscape before getting into the action. Just seems like a good idea for the press/kickstarter release if it wouldn't be too difficult.