Milestone 4.22.0 STABLE Released!
We've now released a small patch onto the public branches for Xenonauts 2 that contains a few more important stability fixes.

Bugfixes:
* Fixed a translation bug that could cause frequent crashes for people playing the game in non-English languages.
* Fixed a crash that could sometimes occur when the player opens an abduction tube.
* Fixed a crash that could occur if a berserking unit kills another unit that was about to go berserk.

Milestone 4.23.0 STABLE Released!

We've released another small patch onto the public branches for Xenonauts 2 that contains a few more important stability fixes.

Bugfixes:
* Fixed a crash on the Soldier Equip screen when changing equipment. It was previously possible to drag items using both left mouse and right mouse button, occasionally leading to situations where you could be dragging two items at the same time and one would be in an invalid state. We've fixed this by disabling right-click dragging, which we don't think should cause players any inconvenience - but please let us know if we're wrong!
* Fixed an issue where the upgraded Colossus Battlesuit would revert to the un-upgraded version after a battle.
* Fixed the Gauss / Plasma turret base defence buildings and upgrade projects so they have a consistent cost and completion time.
* Added a loading screen tip about how to use TU Reserve (right-click on the desired fire mode or crouch button).
* (Hopefully) fixed an issue where the interior walls of the Western Town restaurant buildings would not render on certain PCs.

Milestone 4.24.0 STABLE Released!

We're continuing to release weekly stability patches for Milestone 4 while we work on Milestone 5. This patch makes a couple of minor balance tweaks and fixes a few more gameplay issues reported by the community.

Balance Changes:
* Weight on Automed Unit reduced from 12 to 8.
* Deviation on missed HEVY shots now occurs within an arc of 50 degrees from the intended target, reduced from 80 degrees.

Bugfixes:
* Fixed a crash that could occur when loading a tactical combat save when fighting inside late-game UFOs (this was caused by smoke tiles being spawned off the top of the map, usually caused by explosions in the upper levels of large UFOs).
* Fixed certain Harvester maps having unwalkable tiles inside the ground floor of the UFO.
* Fixed a (rare) missing move path tile.

Milestone 4.25.0 Released!

We've now released another small stability fix for Milestone 4 to the public branches while we continue to work on Milestone 5. Please do report any further bugs or stability issues as we will continue to release additional hotfixes if necessary.

Bugfixes:
* Fixed a crash that would occur if you selected the MARS / ARES Rangefinder item during a tactical combat mission, then pressed Ctrl.
* Fixed a crash that could occur if you destroyed a Cyberdrone near an environmental item that would also explode (such a vehicle, or petrol station).
* Fixed the Sentry Guns in the Cleaner Base not correctly playing their death animation when destroyed (this issue keeps reoccurring, so we've tried a new approach that will hopefully fix it for good).
* Fixed an issue where units could waste TUs performing an unneccessary rotation if their planned move+shoot action was interrupted by spotting a hostile alien.
* Fixed an issue where an interrupted grenade throw would prevent the soldier re-equipping their weapon, leaving the grenade selected but without the UI showing it.
* Fixed it being possible to walk out into the empty tile directly above a ladder, leaving a unit floating in mid-air.

Milestone 4.26.0 Released!

We've now released another small stability fix for Milestone 4 to the public branches while we continue to work on Milestone 5. Please do report any further bugs or stability issues as we will continue to release additional hotfixes if necessary.

Bugfixes:
* Fixed a rare crash that could occur if a unit was killed during the enemy turn.
* Mesmerise will no longer trigger if a shot from the HEVY Launcher misses the target Psyon, but the blast kills the target anyway.



Xenonauts 2 Monthly Development Update!

Hello everyone - hope you all had a good August. Here's our monthly update on what the team here at Goldhawk have been working on.

Programming
This month our technical director spent much of his month on honeymoon, and the rest of it fixing the trickier bugs discovered in Milestone 4 by the community. Our other senior programmer split his time between bugfixes and working on our updated internal game editor (mentioned in last month's update), which meant we only had one programmer available to work on feature implementation.

Aside from the weekly stability fixes we've released for Milestone 4 and various small usability changes / AI improvements, we added a few useful gameplay features to our upcoming Milestone 5 update. One was a much-requested update to the item sale price system, allowing sale prices to slowly regain lost value as time passes, and another was expanded options for "difficult terrain" which makes it more costly for soldiers (but not vehicles) to walk through and crush plants like hay. This may allow things such as shallow water that can be waded through on the Jungle maps, making the different biomes a bit more distinct from one another.

Invasion Phases
I've spent a lot of time this month on the new "Invasion Phase" system. This divides the alien invasion into five escalating phases, with a narrative event and some artwork and a short conversation with the Operations Director and Chief Scientist at the start of each one.

The goal here is to tie the lore together and explain how the invasion is escalating, what the aliens are doing differently and how the world is reacting to it. It also allows us to more clearly explain the shifting role of the Xenonauts throughout the conflict, starting as an clandestine organisation fighting a secret war against an unknown enemy and ending as an elite military organisation leading the fight against a full-scale alien invasion.

This coming month I'll be experimenting with several mechanical changes that we're hoping to tie to the Phase System, making the Geoscape mechanics a bit less static throughout the campaign. I'm quite excited about these, but I also don't want to talk about them yet in case I disappoint someone - they're still at the prototype phase, and could be changed or abandoned entirely based on playtesting. Hopefully I'll have more to say about this next month!

Other
Other areas of the game continued to progress over the past month. We partnered up with a couple of new illustrators, one of whom painted the new "Funding Report" artwork we've used as the cover art for this post, and the other is working on environment concepts for the tactical combat. We've also added lots of small things like some new 3D weapon models, some updated textures for certain alien combatants, and new tactical biome ambient sounds.

That's everything for this month - thanks for reading!

Milestone 4.27.0 Released!

This is a small stability update for Milestone 4, which fixes a bug that can cause random crashes on both the strategy and tactical layers of the game.

Although we are now fully focused on preparing our upcoming Milestone 5 update at the moment, please do continue to report any crashes or other serious bugs you encounter - we'll continue to patch Milestone 4 if necessary.

Bugfixes:
* Fixed a crash linked to soldier / aircraft items becoming corrupted. However, this crash would not occur at the point where the item was corrupted, instead happening at the end of a tactical mission or the start / end of an air combat (and possibly also on the Armory soldier equip screen). Hopefully this fix will significantly reduce the number of seemingly random crashes experienced by players!

Xenonauts 2 Monthly Development Update! - November

Hello everyone - as we're now into the early days of November, it's time for an update on what we've been working on! The short answer is this: we made good progress in several areas last month, but frustratingly slow progress in one key area that has delayed the Milestone 5 prototype.

Milestone 5 / Strategic Improvements
Our main focus is still on getting the Milestone 5 prototype into a state where we can release it in beta for public testing. We were hoping that would happen last month, but we weren't able to make enough progress on the new strategy-layer mechanics. There were a few reasons for this, but the main one was that we continued to find new bugs that needed fixing after the Unity editor update mentioned in the previous update.

Thankfully, in the second half of the month we were able to better focus on implementing our new Supporter system. This system places four VIPs in each funding region who can be recruited as supporters by the Xenonauts to provide your organisation with a variety of strategic bonuses (more funding, faster research / engineering, etc.). Or they can be turned into panic-generating Infiltrators by the aliens. If you can recruit all of the supporters in each region, you also unlock a special regional bonus.

The Supporter system itself is now mostly functional, but we're still unsure how long it'll take us to connect it to the other game systems. For instance, the Doomsday Counter that is now active in the early stages of the game also ties into the Supporter system (with alien Infiltrators generating enemy Doomsday progress, and Xenonaut Supporters slowing it). We will also need to update the Infiltration UFO missions to turn neutral VIPs into Infiltrators if successful (where previously they simply generated Panic like other types of UFO mission), and so on.

Given what happened last month I'm not going to make any promises about when the Milestone 5 prototype will be ready - I'll just say we're working hard to get it into the hands of testers as quickly as possible.

New Missions
Milestone 5 adds new mission types - crash sites for the Battleship UFO, the two-part final mission (Operation ENDGAME), and two unique plot missions that take place on an alien orbital station (which appear around the point Cruiser UFOs start appearing).

The Battleship assets and crash site maps were completed some time ago, and this month we finished the final art assets and map setup for both halves of the Operation ENDGAME mission. The first mission on the alien orbital station is also at quite an advanced stage, with the custom art assets for that map now complete, but there's still further work to be done on the second orbital station mission.

Thankfully, this shouldn't cause delays - most of the remaining work is custom art assets, and we don't need the visuals to be final for the Milestone 5 prototype builds.

Alien Updates
Last month we added a new type of alien to the game, the Biter. These small insectoid aliens are more of a living weapon than a proper new species, as certain alien units can fire them towards enemy units - at which point they will charge towards nearby hostiles and try to bite them to death. Biters will expire within a few turns of spawning and have very low HP, but a pack of them can still pose a threat - particularly against units equipped with weapons that cost a lot of TU to fire (e.g. sniper rifles).

We also continued to make changes to our existing aliens to better differentiate them from one another. The main cannon on a Cyberdrone no longer acts like a giant plasma rifle, but is instead now a blast weapon that can inflict major damage across a large area (although it is now less likely to instantly kill a heavily-armoured soldier). We'll be finishing up some changes to the Mantid and Sebillian weapons this month too, which I'll explain in a future blog.

Illustrated UI Backgrounds
One of the coolest features in Xenonauts 1 was that the illustrated backgrounds of the strategic UI screens would upgrade as you progressed through the campaign, showing the way the new technological developments you had unlocked were changing your organisation. By the end of the game, characters had futuristic uniforms and the rooms were full of sci-fi equipment. Lots of players thought this really helped immerse them in the game.

Although implementing this in Xenonauts 2 involves repainting our existing (and perfectly fine) UI background art, we've decided the feature is cool enough that we've found some extra budget for it. Handily, the programming for this feature has already been finished, so as soon as the new artwork is done we can just slot it straight into the game. We started the sketch work for the new Research screen background last week, and hopefully you'll be able to see some results soon!

I'll leave the update there for this month - thanks for reading, and hopefully we'll have some good news on Milestone 5 in the coming weeks!

Xenonauts 2 Monthly Development Update! - December 2024

Hello everyone - it's time for the November development update for Xenonauts 2. Read on to see what we were working on last month!

Milestone 5 Prototype Update
November was a productive month for us. All the core systems for Milestone 5 are now complete and we're currently in the process of testing the initial prototype, which we'll hopefully be releasing onto the Experimental branch later this week.

As always, the first Experimental build for a new Milestone is likely to be a pretty rough experience - although all the major new gameplay mechanics are present there'll probably be a lot of bugs, balance issues, and missing pieces of content that need to be patched in. If you'd rather have a more polished experience then it'd be best to wait until the final version of Milestone 5 arrives on the standard branch early next year!

Before we move on, I just want to be clear - although players will be able to unlock the final mission and complete the campaign once Milestone 5 is out, this will not be the final update for Xenonauts 2. We still want to add more polish to the game, so we're planning another major update before the 1.0 release.

The Testing Process
Most of our work this month has been addressing the numerous gameplay and stability issues encountered in our testing. Each new batch of fixes has allowed us to play further into the game, and we're currently testing the last month or two of the campaign (so fighting Battleships and doing the final mission).

So far we've been doing "strategic" playthroughs that involve auto-winning the tactical battles for speed (the average campaign is 30+ missions), but once we confirm it's possible to complete a "strategic" playthrough we'll shift to playing a full campaign including the tactical missions. Most game-breaking stability / balance issues tend to occur on the strategy layer, so hopefully this will go smoothly - but whether we release the prototype this week as planned really comes down to how many issues we encounter.

One major benefit of this testing is that all of these campaign playthroughs have given us plenty of opportunity to playtest and iterate the new strategy mechanics. We actually found the first iteration of the new Geoscape mechanics weren't quite as engaging as we'd hoped, so we expanded them a bit more and came up with something stronger! Speaking of which...

Updated Geoscape Mechanics
I personally think the updated Geoscape mechanics are a major improvement on what we have before, giving the player more things to interact with and a wider selection of possible strategies without being too overwhelming.

Players now gain a certain number of Operations Points per day (representing the off-screen work carried out Xenonaut agents), which can be spent on Strategic Operations or recruiting Supporters. Strategic Operations provide powerful instant effects, such as allowing the player to reduce Panic in a specific region or receive some extra cash / alien materials. They are not the most efficient way to spend Operations Points, but can still be very useful in the right circumstances!

Each of the six funding regions contains four Supporters, which represent key figures in the local government who can become aligned with either the Xenonauts or the Aliens. If they fall under Alien control and become Infiltrators (usually caused by successful Infiltration UFO missions), they will generate additional Panic in the local region each month - but if convinced to join the Xenonauts they will instead slightly reduce Panic in that region each month and provide a permanent bonus to your organisation.

Additionally, each region has a unique "region bonus" that is unlocked if you recruit all the supporters in that region (e.g. the North America bonus improves the quality of your starting soldiers, while the Soviet Russia one reduces your upkeep costs, etc). However, most regions also contain a single Elite Supporter who provides double the bonus of other Supporters of the same type; prioritising recruiting these Elite Supporters from the various different regions can be an alternative to racing towards a specific region bonus.

Although I think these additions work well, my own personal opinion only counts for so much - we'll be really interested to hear what the community think of the new systems once the prototype is out!

Other Additions
We also had time to work on a few miscellaneous things this month. Firstly, the tactical combat now properly supports objects falling, so we've been able to enable destruction on building roofs. Explosions can now collapse these and cause units and items to fall onto the level below.

The illustration work is now complete on the updated Research screen background art, and this month we'll be creating the "advanced" versions of this that are unlocked as you progress through the game and gain access to more advanced technology.

We're continuing to revamp the visuals of some of the weaker parts of the tactical combat. We started work on some new models for the Sebillian aliens, and we've also updated the appearance of quite a few assets in the Farm biome. Neither of these updates are currently present in Milestone 5 but both should be patched in before we finalise it.

We've made some further AI improvements and written some custom AI for the new missions added in Milestone 5, one of which is a wave defence mission. A few updated sounds have been added to the tactical combat for the new Biter alien, and also some new unique movement sounds for the MARS / ARES / Sentry Gun vehicles.

We also set up the proper Game Over screen for the various types of victory and loss. The final victory cinematic isn't ready yet, but the new UI has unique art / text / music / campaign stats / etc so still it's a lot more atmospheric than the plain popup you got in earlier versions of the game.

That's it for this month - stay tuned for the Milestone 5 prototype, and we'll be back with another update in the new year! Happy holidays!