The launch of Xenonauts 2 has been a huge success so far, with over 30,000 people buying the game since Tuesday. It's been an amazing (and exhausting) experience for us here at Goldhawk and we want to offer a genuine thankyou to everyone that has supported us!

With so many people playing the game, we've also been provided with an enormous amount of feedback about the good and bad parts of the current Xenonauts 2 experience. Although we're still sorting through this, I wanted to quickly discuss a few issues that have come up repeatedly and explain how we're planning to address them. They are:

• Bugs & Stability
  
• Performance & Loading Times
  
• Timed Missions
  
• Similarities to Xenonauts 1
  
• Modding Tools

Fixing any crashes, hangs and other game-breaking bugs is our highest priority issue. The sheer number of people playing the game means lots of bugs have been found, and we've set everything else aside and are working hard to fix them as quickly as possible.

I think we're making good headway on these stability issues given the small size of our team, but we're not quite there yet. We appreciate your patience while we work through these issues - we've only got two programmers and they need to sleep once in a while!

There's been a lot of complaints about the loading times in the game. This is something we were initially planning on optimizing further closer to final launch, but based on community feedback we'll be moving this work forwards,

In the meantime, it may be possible to reduce loading times by installing Xenonauts 2 on the fastest hard drive you have available (as load speeds in our game are governed largely by the hard drive speed).

Also, we suspect there is a memory leak in the game. If you've been playing for a couple of hours and loading times or general performance feels a lot worse than at the start of your play session, please reboot the game and it should return to normal (we will be looking into the memory leak once the crashes are dealt with).

Although many people enjoy the new timed missions in Xenonauts 2, there's also a sizable group who very much dislike the concept. We are going to be adding campaign options that allow you to adjust these timers, allowing people who enjoy the missions to tweak the timings to their own preferences and those who dislike them to remove the time pressure entirely (e.g. by increasing them to 99 turns).

Again, this was originally planned for later in development but based on player feedback we have decided to bring it forwards. Of course, we'll also be continuing to balance and improve these missions throughout Early Access - so hopefully far fewer people will want to skip them in the final game anyway!

While many people do already feel like Xenonauts 2 is distinct enough to stand apart from its predecessor, not everyone agrees with this.

While I do understand this view, I think it is important to remember that Xenonauts 2 is not yet finished. There's a lot more improvements and content planned for Early Access, and the game will feel less and less like the original Xenonauts (and more and more superior to it) with every new update.

It's probably also worth pointing out that the original Xenonauts wasn't particularly well received when it first launched into Early Access back in 2013 (thankfully before the days of Steam reviews), but the community feedback and sales revenue allowed us improve the game dramatically - and I'm sure the same will be true for the sequel!

Although the entire game isn't editable with a text editor like the first Xenonauts was, we've still designed Xenonauts 2 to support modding and have already done a fair bit of work under the hood to ensure that they will work properly with the game.

However, manually editing the compressed json files used by the game with a text editor is not the most straightforward process. As such, we've been chatting to members of the Xenonauts 1: Community Edition team about the possibility of taking an editing tool we developers created a few years back and building it into a community-led standalone modding tool.

It's therefore possible that modding tools might be arriving much sooner than expected - but we can't make any firm promises here, as we're still just exploring the possibility at this stage!

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Finally, in addition to the points raised above, you can see what our longer-term plans for Xenonauts 2 are on the Development Roadmap outlined in our previous update!

This is the second half of today's stability patch for Xenonauts 2, with a couple of minor gameplay improvements thrown in as a bonus. We're concerned these fixes may potentially introduce new bugs into the game, so we're releasing this build onto our Experimental branches before we push them out to everyone on the standard branches.

Milestone 1.24 can be accessed by switching onto our Experimental branches (instructions on how to do so here). However, please be aware that Experimental builds have slower load times and worse general performance than normal builds, as they contain a lot of extra logging to help us find and fix crashes when they occur!

Milestone 1.24 Changelog:

• Item sell prices now increase / decrease correctly per item sold even if you sell in a stack, meaning there is no longer any benefit to hoarding items in your stores to sell all at once.
  
• The items on escort UFOs are now also recovered if you win the crash site. This means you can now get the bonus Alloys and the Fighter Datacore items when you shoot down a UFO that has alien Fighter escorts.
  
• Added a new settings option to disable Camera Edge Scrolling in the tactical combat (i.e. the camera moving if you put the mouse near the edge of the screen).
  
• Fixed an issue where the game would fail to load up at all if the /My Documents/ directory was inaccessible for some reason. 
  
• Fixed a bug where the Cleaner Cell missions would not register when a unit carrying the VIP steps into a dropship for the first time, and did not automatically end the mission with victory like it should (although it did register if that soldier moved a second time within the dropship).
  
• Fixed an issue where you could stack Extra Armour modules on the MARS if you were playing in a non-English version of the game.
  
• Attempted to fix the lockups some people were experiencing in the strategy section of the tutorial.
  
• Fixed an AI hang that could occur during the alien turn.

It would be greatly appreciated if some players were able to switch over to the Experimental branch and let us know if they encounter any problems with the new build!

We've released another stability patch for the Early Access version of Xenonauts 2. We'll be releasing two patches today, and this is the "safe" update that everyone will recieve immediately.

The second update will come in a few hours and will arrive on our Experimental branches for some testing before general release - but we'll explain that in full when we release it!

Milestone 1.23 Changelog:

• The random number generator seed is now randomised by default when you load a save, as the saved seed appeared to be confusing some players. Saved games will no longer play out exactly the same way every time when you load them, unless you manually deselect the "Reset Seed" checkbox in the bottom right of the Load Game screen (doing this is often important if you're testing to try and reproduce a bug).
  
• Fixed a crash at the end of Terror Sites and Landed UFO missions that would occur if the mission timed out while the dropship was in flight towards it (you can now just continue playing those saves).
  
• Fixed a crash that would occur if you were holding Shift while attempting to use a grenade or medikit.

EDIT - this build was temporarily reverted due an issue with loading older save games. It has now been fixed and the name has been updated to Milestone 1.23b

This is only a minor update to the game, but it may help players that are struggling with the early-game Cleaner missions. We're working hard on fixing the remaining crashes in the game and hopefully we'll be releasing another stability patch tomorrow!

Changelog:

• Reinforcements in the Cleaner missions now spawn less frequently - the initial wave of reinforcements still spawn at the same time as before, but now you have 5 turns before another wave of reinforcements spawn (previously this was 2 turns). This means fighting through the reinforcements to finish the mission should now potentially be possible.
  
• Fixed an error in the "Armour Destruction" tooltip that was making it unreadable.
  
• Removed any reference to "Closed Beta" from the game version to prevent confusion.

We're releasing another stability fix for various issues encountered by our players on launch day. A big thanks to all the people who took the time to report the various issues they've encountered today so we can fix them!

Changelog:

• Esc now skips the starting cinematic.
  
• The starting cinematic now correctly obeys the volume sliders.
  
• The Settings menu is now available in the tutorial.
  
• Fixed the game refusing to load at all if you had older saves from the demo or from old backer builds still in your save directories.
  
• Fixed a crash that could occur when using explosive weapons (e.g. the HEVY / grenades) beyond their maximum range.
  
• Fixed a crash that would occur if you added quotation marks (" ") to a soldier name and then tried to start a tactical combat mission.
  
• Fixed a crash when hiring new soldiers if you'd deleted the default Rifleman loadout.
  
• Fixed a crash that could occur if you built your first base in Greenland. As a temporary fix for various related issues which we can't address in a quick patch, you're no longer able to build a base on Greenland. These will be fixed properly in a future build, at which point you'll be able to build bases there again.
  
• Fixed an issue where players would lose all their manufactured soldier items if they lose an Abduction mission due to not opening enough of the containment tubes before the timer runs out.

Hello everyone. We've just a very small patch to fix a crash that could occur if players tried to rebind keys while playing in a non-English language!

It's finally time to defeat the alien invasion - Xenonauts 2 is AVAILABLE NOW in Steam Early Access!


Our plans are to spend roughly 9 months (subject to change) in Early Access, during which we'll be delivering regular updates with new content, improvements, balance changes, and fixes.

We've put together a roadmap that outlines our current plans for these updates:

• Additional Tactical Maps
  
• Soviet Town Biome
  
• Air Combat Revamp
  
• Alien / Civilian AI Revamp
  
• Cruiser UFO
  
• Harvester UFO
  
• Battleship UFO
  
• Operation ENDGAME
  
• Ending Cinematic
  
• Alien - Androns
  
• Alien - Reaper Bull
  
• Alien - Eternal
  
• Alien Psionics
  
• Ultimate Interceptor
  
• Ultimate Dropship
  
• Ultimate Armour
  
• Fusion Weapons
  
• Hovertank
  
• Mod Tools
  
• Fullscreen Borderless
  
• Community Suggestions

Of course, we'll also be listening to community feedback during this process and we may change the roadmap or add new things based on what the players want. We're looking forward to working together on improving Xenonauts 2!

You can make suggestions, report bugs or just chat about the game on the Steam forums, our Discord server, or our developer forums.

https://store.steampowered.com/app/538030/Xenonauts_2/

The wait is (almost) over!

Xenonauts 2 will release into Early Access on July 18, 2023.

Hello everyone - May is now over, so it's time for our monthly update to explain the progress we've made.

The first thing to mention is we now have a date for our Early Access launch. I don't know exactly when it will be revealed because our marketing partners Hooded Horse are handling the announcement, but we're focused on getting the game as good as possible for that date.

Anyone whose been spending time on our Discord will at least know that we’re not planning on launching in Q2. However, you won’t have much longer to wait - watch this space; the invasion will begin sooner than you might think!

Please be aware that the Early Access version of the game at launch is going to cut off after about 60-70% of the full campaign. This is still a big chunk of the game - depending on how quickly you play tactical missions, you could easily spend 10-15 hours playing a campaign before you hit that point. Ultimately we had to make a decision between spending our time working on polish and bugfixes that affect the whole game, or fixing various issues (and adding some missing content) that only relate to the final section of the game.

In the end, we thought people would prefer to play a 15+ hour chunk of Xenonauts 2 that would hopefully leave them impressed and keen to play the final game, rather than release the entire campaign in a less polished state that they might enjoy less. We will be adding back the removed content during Early Access, once we've had a chance to test it and polish it up to the standards of the rest of the game.

Our current goal is to make sure the playable parts of the game are as enjoyable as possible. One important aspect is to ensure all the research text and art in the playable sections are ready, so I've been working hard on that (along with a number of illustrators). We're also working on lots of bugfixes and usability improvements, and adding little quality-of-life features requested by the community - e.g., you can now rotate soldiers when arranging them inside the dropship on the strategy layer. If there's any time left over, we'll try and add some new maps too.

We're not going to be making any further large changes to the game until after the Early Access launch, as we want to avoid introducing new bugs. It's always important to have the game as stable as possible on launch!

Now I've discussed our future plans, I'll quickly summarise the work we did last month in the space I have left:

• We released Closed Beta build V27 onto the Experimental branch for Kickstarter backers, along with four hotfixes that fixed a LOT of bugs. We'll be hotfixing a few more issues this week and then hopefully releasing it on the Steam / GOG main branch.
  
• More work on the translation.
  
• As mentioned above, quite a lot of work on the research text/research artwork.
  
• We did some more work on the new Geoscape icons.
  
• We fixed the memory leaks in the game, which were causing performance issues and eventual crashes if you played the game for an extended session. This involved upgrading a copy of our codebase into the most recent version of Unity (as the version we're using is so old it doesn't have the tools required to easily find memory leaks), which is good news - after the Early Access launch, we'll probably upgrade the main project to this new version of Unity too. This should improve performance and compatibility, as well as make the lives of the developers easier.

There are a few other small things we worked on that probably aren't worth talking about, as this post is already rather long. That's all I have for this month, so thanks for reading the post, and I'll make another post once our release date is announced!

Now that April is behind us, it's time for another monthly update. There's been good progress in some areas this month, but also some areas of frustration.


The main new mission we've been working on this past 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!


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.


We have done a few other things though. I've spent a bit of time this past 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 - see you next time!