Easter Progress Update

[Chris]

It’s now mid-April and the days are ticking by at an alarming rate. We’ve been extremely busy at our end, working on a variety of things. For the past week or so I’ve actually been the bottleneck, as I’ve demanded everyone work harder and they have. I’ve ended up being buried under the results.

Our plans for the future are (as many of you already know) to do a Kickstarter. There’s been some discussion about how we can get around the US citizen requirement that Kickstarter has, and after exhausting a lot of possibilities over the past month I think we’ve finally hit on one that works. My thanks go out to our forumite Kilrathi, who is a corporate attorney over in the US and has helped us set up a US company and is in the process of setting up a corporate bank account for us.

This, while costing us a few hundred dollars, is a safe option for us – I can have full control over the bank account and Kilrathi is therefore not on the hook taxwise at all. It has, naturally, involved a LOT of form filling for the both of us, but I’m about to run off to get the final forms signed before FedExing them across the world. I imagine it’ll still take a couple of weeks for everything to come together, but Kilrathi has been a fantastic help and it goes to show that where there is a will, there is a way!

The plan is to release a public build of the game to accompany the Kickstarter, so anyone who is interested in pledging money is able to see what we have done so far before they make their call. I think the game is sufficiently complete for people to get a feel of what we are aiming to achieve with the final version, and I think this will dramatically increase the funding we receive.

We will be sending this build out about a week early to the press so they can write previews on it. Most journalists don’t want to cover Kickstarters anymore, so letting them combining the Kickstarter with a preview should ensure we still get good coverage. There’s been quite a lot of interest from various sites in getting their hands on a playable version of the game too, which is good.

The net effect of this is that we’re going to have to have the “final” version done relatively soon so we can have a couple of days of bugtesting on the forums before we get it out to the journalists. We’ll then have a week of extra bugtesting before public release of the build.

This public build will be V10. It is likely to include the following features over V9.31:

• Enhanced launcher which will allow you to play the normal game or load a “Quick Game” (which launches straight into a terror site) for those who just want to try a quick battle. It will looks prettier, and also include direct links to our manual, bug reporting forums, and our preorder / Kickstarter page.
  
• The standalone builds will have an installer.
  
• The town tileset will be set up properly, though the art still won’t be entirely complete as not all the tiles have been painted over yet.
  
• We’ll hopefully have added an alien support drone to the game, which will appear in the Terror Site.
  
• UFO signals should display their proper size, rather than Medium.
  
• We should have a few more Xenopedia images, and we’ll finish formatting and scaling the text in it too.
  

That’s what we’ll be working on for the next few days. You can see much of what we’ve been working on in the past couple of weeks in Build V9.31, but the one major thing that we’ve been working on and have not released is the base defence missions.

I’m pleased to say that, from a code perspective, these are pretty much complete. We’ve now worked out a system where the walls and doors display correctly on each side of each room depending on whether or not there is another structure there (accounting correctly for the 2x1 buildings too). These are currently loading up blank grey placeholder rooms, but we’ll be moving onto those tiles as soon as the Town is done.

The major innovation in the base defence missions is that there is a central command centre that must be protected at all costs, and that you can arrange your troops within it (it is a 2x2 building) freely before the start of the battle. We’re just tweaking the unit arrangement system a bit so it’s immediately obvious which tiles you can deploy units to for free, and then we’re largely complete.

There is also a system where most rooms have “key props” in them, which can be destroyed in battle. At the end of the battle the number of surviving key props is totalled up to give a health % for each structure, and any damaged building is set back to that % construction completed. This means that most buildings can be knocked out of commission for a few days as a result of a base attack. This system has been implemented in the ground combat but not linked to the Geoscape yet.

Unfortunately our AI coder is moving house this week so our progress on that front hasn’t been as fast as we’d like, but I’m going to make that a priority again after we get the Kickstarter build out.

Overall, things are going well – but the next couple of weeks will be very important for us and we’re going to need to make them work.

[Sathra]

This is awesome news. Looking forward to seeing and bugtesting the results. And pouring over the previews in minute detail for any misconceptions...

[Buzzles]

What's the gap been timewise between the last public preview build (7.1?)?

I suspect RPS will be all over this new preview, probably PCG UK as well.

[Chris]

Eurogamer Expo was end of September so it's been about 6 months now. That wasn't freely downloadable though.

[Jean-Luc]

Kudos to Kil.

@Base defense

Will the aliens actively try to reach and destroy the command center or will they just be wrecking things as they go until they stumble upon it (or not)?

[Chris]

Right now it's the latter. In the final version it'll be the former.

[franconbean]

I Await the implementation of terror missions with baited breath (base defence also, to see how the "Key prop" thing works out). This project has me super-excited and I can't wait for the finished product.

[Lostwell]

Wow, You guys really do move very quick! Very exciting. Is a final release still looking on schedule for fall/winter of this year?

[rs311]

Hi Chris,

First of all, a big thank you to you and the rest of the team working on this game. I'm eagerly looking forward to the public build when it's complete.

Just a question on base defense: If a base structure like a living quarters is damaged and taken offline after a base defense mission, will that affect its ability to accommodate the soldiers/scientists/engineers currently using it?

Thanks

[Gorlom]

Expanding on rs311's question about base defence:

Will aliens be able to bust out captives from the alien containment cell?

What impact will disableing the medicalbay have? will soldiers wounded in the base defence be extra likely to die? Will soldiers that was already wounded be resources in the medical bay and get killed when the items representing them are destroyed? Or will they partake in the mission to defend the base as soldiers with less starting HP?

[Hellstormer]

That sounds amazing - I hope all goes well and as planned.

[Chris]

RS311 - the key structures can't be damaged. This includes hangars, garages and living quarters. It'd cause no end of trouble in the code.

Gorlom - there aren't any alien containment cells; it's not a distinct building. We've merged it with the lab, so the aliens won't appear on the map. Injured soldiers will fight in the base defence, wounded ones do not (they're assumed to be taken into the underground bunker with all the other personnel).

[Gauddlike]

What is the difference between injured and wounded then?

[MrPyro]

RS311 - the key structures can't be damaged. This includes hangars, garages and living quarters. It'd cause no end of trouble in the code.

As a thought, you could always just charge the player money for damage to these structures, but not have the reconstruction time to avoid the hideous code problems.

[Gauddlike]

That could work out.

Record the damage percentage then just bill the player for "replaced equipment" to that same percentage of the total building cost.

[Chris]

Injured soldiers are above 50% health and can be sent into battle. Wounded are below 50% and cannot fight. And I want to avoid there being a monetary cost to fighting a base defence mission - I think that'd just add insult to injury if you ended up fighting a bunch of base defence missions in quick succession.

[jimbobfury]

Chris, Gauddlike and myself spotted that you've started making a few tweaks to the weapon accuracy values in v9.31, and they definitely seem like a change for the better to me, with the chances of landing a shot being much less of a safe bet.

One thing this reminded me about was something I raised back in January. At present, it seems that if one of your troops makes a shot from behind cover, the cover they should be benefiting from actually gets taken into account for the shot calculation, lowering the accuracy of the shot. You said previously that you'd have to look into this, and I just wondered if you'd had any thoughts as to how you can solve the problem?

Also, is there any way that modders can access the code which dictates how effective cover is? I'd be interested in buffing it's effectiveness so that the choice between making a flanking move or just firing over a hail of shots in the hope of picking an enemy off became a real consideration as at present, it seems easy enough to do the latter.

I know these kind of balance issues may be addressed later, but I just wondered if it was moddable in the meantime.

[Gauddlike]

Injured soldiers are above 50% health and can be sent into battle. Wounded are below 50% and cannot fight. And I want to avoid there being a monetary cost to fighting a base defence mission - I think that'd just add insult to injury if you ended up fighting a bunch of base defence missions in quick succession.

I forgot you said somewhere that the base facilities would be damaged but free to repair didn't you?

That does make it not fit if some facilities cost money but took no damage while others took damage but cost nothing.

[Chris]

Jimbob, not yet. It turns out the accuracy calculation is borked anyway - Xenonaut soldiers are hitting far too often as is, so we need to work through that first.

The cover value for every item of cover in the game is set individually and can be edited in the Sub-Map editor.

[jimbobfury]

Thanks very much for the reply, Chris. Shots in 9.31 definitely seem less accurate than in earlier versions, but good luck getting to the bottom of the issue so that all of the different factors for a shot are being calculated correctly.

And that's great to hear about the cover values. Thanks for the info.

[Yevgeniy]

Beautiful news... %)

[rs311]

That could work out.

Record the damage percentage then just bill the player for "replaced equipment" to that same percentage of the total building cost.

That would cause a problem if the player had insufficient funds to pay for the repairs, although it's not entirely impossible to go into debt... but that's an entirely different story

[Szabtom]

Hooray for the Kickstarter, long live Kilrathi!

[Da-Fort]

Will the aliens actively try to reach and destroy the command center or will they just be wrecking things as they go until they stumble upon it (or not)?

Would be nice to have a single alien form that just smashes everything. Then again maybe not.

[thothkins]

it would certainly give you something to think about. You may wat to defend your command center - assuming the base is lost when it goes- but with a large enough cost attached to facilities or a delay in R&D you would have to get out there and stop them.