Xenonauts-2 Publicity & Progress

[Chris]

Just a quick post to let the forum community know what our short-term plans and behind-the-scenes progress is! 

Upcoming Releases:
Firstly, our biweekly release schedule is still on track and there should be a build on Tuesday next week (28th Feb) as promised. It probably won't be too big an update on what we already have given that we only put a build out two days ago, but we're going to try our best to stick to this biweekly release schedule as development continues.

Publicity & Community Building:
Secondly, I want to say that it's really cool to see the forums nice and lively again. Everything was kinda quiet until about a month ago, but the steady progress on the free builds and the new website seem to have helped. We want to continue to build up the community around the game and as such we're going to be starting our publicity work tomorrow (the current build does not seem to have any show-stopping bugs in it).

There's potentially going to be a bit of problem getting news coverage because GDC starts in three days and tends to dominate headlines for quite a while both before and after it happens, but hopefully we'll get some traction - the game is free right now, after all!

We're also going to be hitting our mailing list with an announcement for the first time tomorrow. There's about 6,500 on the mailing list at the moment so hopefully we'll see some more veteran players joining the forum to help us test the game and give their thoughts on development.

Strategy Layer Progress:
There's not a lot of point talking about our progress on the ground combat given it can be seen in the regular public releases, but the strategy layer is also progressing well. At the moment we have most of the UI screens done and things are correctly linking between them (missions are spawning items, items are unlocking research, research is creating new items for the stores, soldiers are equipping items from the base stores, etc) in a lot of cases. 

However, there's still quite a lot of tidying up to be done there and we need to finish putting all this into the Game Editor rather than using hardcoded entities. Unfortunately, because the strategy layer is so interconnected it isn't yet playable in any real sense ... we need to have *everything* in place before it'll work properly. We're getting close to it, but we're not there yet.

We're going to divert some additional resources to working on the strategy layer after we release our next public build next week. At this point we're literally just dumping the Xenonauts 1 tech tree and UFOs and UI screen backgrounds etc into the game, as our objective is just to get the strategy layer operation as fast as possible so we can start linking it to the ground combat.

I'm not sure we'll immediately release the strategy layer in the public builds, but having the game linked up properly will make even standalone missions more interesting - it means that your soldiers will have names and portraits and the mission-end screen will show stat-ups, etc. I'll keep you posted on the progress, but if all goes well we might start showing off screenshots etc of the strategy layer in two or three weeks.

That's everything from me for now - things should be getting pretty exciting over the next month or so!