Xenonauts-2 September 2022 Update

[Chris]

Hello everyone - time for our monthly update. This month we've been working hard on the tactical demo we put out for Steam's Tacticon event earlier this month (still available on our Steam page for anyone that wants to play it), and we're now concentrating on finally getting Build V24 out. If all goes to plan that will be arriving towards the end of next week.

A lot of this month has been spent on testing, bugfixing and polishing, so most of the progress this month is on improvements that were already underway. Grenades in particular have continued to sap a lot of our time as we keep encountering all sorts of weird edge cases with them where the arcs go wrong or don't make sense (somewhat to be expected when you try and put a curved arc onto an abstract tile grid) but I think we're nearly there now.

The main changes are:

• The Soldiers screen on the strategy layer has now been reskinned in the final UI screen. The Research screen comes next.
• We've finished the tiles for the Xenonaut Base biome, and these now need to have their destruction effects added. We're finishing up a few loose ends on the Jungle, Farm and Dockyard biomes at the moment and then we'll move onto the last two biomes that need work, the Arid and the Soviet Town.
• I've written another 10 or so research reports.
• Lots of small improvements to the ground combat that aren't technically bugfixes - for example, we've updated the fire paths so miss shots fly off up into the sky much less often, which makes grenade launchers and the MARS rocket launcher much more useful.

As for our Early Access plans, they're still unchanged. We're planning for a EA release in the first quarter of 2023 with February roughly pencilled in as the date. Our goal is to have the entire basic campaign playable from start to finish by this date, although there is likely to still be a few rough edges (some research projects not having artwork, perhaps difficulty settings not enabled, etc) in the game at this point.

Anway, I'm in the process of playtesting V24 now and it seems like we're on track for a release next week. There's not really much more to say beyond that; it's been almost five months since our last public release so hopefully everyone will see a big improvement!

[Tengri]

I can't seem to access the demo on Steam?

Xenonauts 2 steam page has no demo access button. When searching for Xenonauts 2, I can see a demo version under the drop list search list but pressing it only re-directs to the main Xenonauts 2 page. 

My region is UK/EU.

[odizzido]

Cool, thanks for the update

[Alienkiller]

Cool to hear that. If you wanna try the new Version as Open-Beta-Tester post your Interest in the Oktober Update 2022. There all Interesst People (which wanna help the Main-Beta-Testers and Devs) get collected.