Xenonauts 2 April 2023 Update!

[Chris]

As we approach the end of April, it's time for our monthly update. There's been good progress in some areas this month, but also some areas of frustration.

Cleaner Cells:
The main new mission we've been working on this month are the Cleaner Cells. These are VIP Elimination missions where you're tasked with attacking a hidden Cleaner command post and killing / capturing the leader in charge. If you're successful, all Cleaner activity in that region will stop and Panic will stop rising there.

The other part of the mission is capturing data from the various computers around the map (the same way as in the Intel Hub mission). This is an optional activity, but any data captured will increase the player's progress towards revealing the Cleaner Headquarters - and once that is revealed and destroyed, all Cleaner activity everywhere will stop. Capturing the VIP rather than killing them also provides a bonus to Cleaner HQ progress.

This means these missions are another example of a mission where you can choose how much you want to push your luck. Enemy reinforcements start spawning after seven turns, so most players will have enough time to fight their way in and kill the VIP without needing to fight off the reinforcements - but you can take a risk and try to grab more of the computer data either by staying and fighting the reinforcements for a few turns, or just by spreading your team out more in the early stages of the mission.

Although obviously this isn't *that* different from the Abduction missions or the Cleaner Intel Hub mission, I personally feel it still makes a nice change of pace from the standard crash site / elimination missions, so hopefully everyone else enjoys them too!

Translation:
The other big feature we've been working on is still the translation, which has sucked away a lot of our time and delayed pretty much everything else we've been working on. Frustratingly, it's still not done - although we're a lot closer than we were last month.

I wrote out several long paragraphs of explanation here in my previous draft of this post, but honestly I won't bore you with the details. There's just a lot of work to be done to set up support across a variety of different languages (including non-Latin languages like Russian or Chinese and Japanese), and this is a big and complex game with lots of text in it. Lots of text needs to be loaded or displayed differently in very specific circumstances, so there's been a lot of unpleasant surprises.

We're hoping we'll be done with our end of the translation work next week, but ultimately it's difficult to know what further problems we'll encounter.

Other Work:
We have done a few other things this month though. I've spent a bit of time this month adding more 'character conversations' to the game, which are a nice way to sprinkle a little more flavour into the game beyond the research text. I think they're a nice addition in terms of immersion.

We changed Combat Shields back to working like they did in X1 based on all the player feedback we got on the topic. There's also been quite a lot of bugfixes and small UI updates on the strategy layer too, which are collectively useful but there's nothing individually worth picking out.

That's everything for this update. I've been saying V27 is due out shortly for a while now, but we're hoping to be able to release it this week!

[CaptainSPrice]

You need to also add game language in Polish(Poland), because i know a lot of friends who search atm for a game similar to XCOM, but in Polish language. = lots of future clients.

[Alienkiller]

Hi Devs, thanks for the new Update. The new Cleaner Cells Missions sound great and I´m excited to test them out, with all the other new Stuff the Game gets in and get Reworked / Refited / Upgraded.

The Translation Progress need time, that we know, about 2 Products in parallel Translation from the Publisher (Terra Invicta and now Xenonatus 2). So we all know that we have to Play Xenonauts 2 a lot longer in English, then in other Languages. But 2 translated Languages for the existing Contend are already there: Brasilian and Polish (the one CaptianSPrice announced).

That the Combat Shields get changed Back is a false Step. If it´s what I think (05/15-Scrap with only HP like in X1), then I know what I´m not using anymore. The seperate Armor- and Health-System is like it have to work.

Edited May 4, 2023 by Alienkiller

[CaptainSPrice]

I feel like devs need to focus atm on Maps if they want release it on Alpha