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Was anyone [apart from the devs] with this game from the start? If so, what was it like?

I must say development of this game has been incredibly slow and from feedback on the forums, improvements are made in tiny baby steps when there are miles to go. So I'm curious what your over/under bets are for if/when this game will finally be released. We really need a true XCOM game soon (XEU was somewhat fun the first time through but meh, no more for me). Actually, UFO Extraterrestrials Gold is getting me by during the wait.

We missed our Three Builds to Beta deadline for hitting beta a few weeks back. Moderately depressing, but it served its primary purpose - to focus development on defined milestones and deadlines, rather than everyone getting work done in their own time. We've not hit beta yet, but I don't think we're too far away now. However, on the of the major realisations I had in the last month or so is that not all betas are created equally. Some people think beta means the game is literally ready for release when beta happens and the product only needs polish; others have a more liberal interpretation where the coding is pretty much all done and the primary purpose is to fix crashes and get the balance sorted too. Therefore the "beta" section has been subdivided into phases. Here's my proposed roadmap for getting there and what is involved at each stage: ALPHA: (The period of development where the game is actively under development and is so unfinished that the game / tech tree is deliberately limited so players cannot get too far into the game). V17 - Stability. V17.x should allow us to concentrate on our sprint to beta, so it will not contain any new features and we'll stop releasing new iterations of it once it is confirmed stable. This will give people something to play with while we get on with the work of finishing the alpha. BETA PHASE I: (The game is mechanically complete and the tech tree is fully unlocked. This part of development is focused on balancing the game to the point where it is enjoyable to play and eliminating crash bugs; game mechanics are subject to change during this phase. People who play the game will need to be prepared to deal with frequent crashes, but they'll have far more of a chance to influence the final shape of the game than in any other part of development.) V18 - This build will contain the following items: Full research tree unlocked, allowing the player to get their hands on all in-game armour, weapons, vehicles and aircraft. All projects will have Xenopedia descriptions but not necessarily art. All UFOs / alien bases are spawning the correct items to allow the player to progress along the research tree The final ground combat UI will be in place; effectively it is identical to the current one in functionality but will look prettier. Preview here. We'll have our first try at the Desura file reduction stuff to try and get the build working properly for everyone. The alien base tileset will be properly set up in the game, with some proper maps generated so we can test the map sizes etc to see what works best. Hopefully all the alien sprites will be in the build so there won't be any more invisible / missing aliens. There will be placeholder maps for all UFOs and alien bases (these won't look good but will let you test the difficulty of the number and type of alien within them). During Beta Phase 1, the following will all be added at some point: The final UI screens for all parts of the game will be implemented. This includes the new UI for all the Geoscape screens. The Geoscape map will be revised so it is no longer missing parts of the world, plus more cities will be added to it. All units will be rendered out and put in-game. All the 3D models for the various terrain tiles of all types should be rendered and put in-game, though they may not have been painted over in 2D. All building / prop tiles will be set up in the game correctly, allowing us to catch misset sprite issues before release and allowing people to build maps of their own without risking having the dev team change the sprites Placeholder for final mission. If it's fun, we'll get the map painted up. Lots of bugfixes, to the point the game doesn't crash any more. BETA PHASE II: (The game is enjoyable to play, stable, and can be completed; essentially the game could be released at any point within Beta Phase II, once the art is done. This is the "polishing" phase, where usability issues are addressed, final assets are added or improved and more minor balance issues are addressed - for instance, a particular UFO type might have too many aliens on aboard for its position in the difficulty progression. The game should be fun and shouldn't crash much, but the game mechanics should be pretty much locked down at this point. Lots of PR will happen before this point.) The final artwork for the research will be painted and added, as the Research tree will be locked down at this point (except for research / build times). All ground tiles will receive their 2D paintover. More ground maps will be generated to maximise replayability. The final launcher will be put in place. Finishing the file reduction process to make the game as easy as possible to deal with. Producing an official Soviet Weapon example mod, and looking at community mods to see if any are worth bundling with the game. Adding full tooltips and explanatory pop-ups to the game to make it as easy as possible for new players to learn the game mechanics. Adding various keyboard shortcuts or tweaking the interface to make the game as easy as possible to use, though not changing the functionality. RELEASE: (Woo! We're finally there! At this point we release the game on Steam, stop providing any kind of product support and sail a yacht made of gold to Panama.) If you think there are features I've missed off this roadmap, please list them here and I'll see if they need to slot in somewhere. I'm going to put together a proper project roadmap for the project shortly, that includes the release dates and features for each build we released. Quite possibly linked to a wiki description of that system, so everyone can see at a glance what has changed since they last played. And so if people moan about how development is slow, you can point them at that. Also I figure we can get some PR out of it too.

Hey everyone, since I got on board this ship I found myself constantly checking the forum for alpha updates (I don't normally obsess this much over a computer game but I can't help it). I was just wondering if it would be possible in Chris's updates about the project to add a "next on xenonauts alpha" section that will discuss what's in line for the next build I have to emphasize that this won't necessarily obligate him or his crew in anyway. Just so we can have something to clutch our expectations into.