Xenonauts 2 Monthly Development Update!
Hello everyone - we're now into March, so here's our regular update on what we got done during February!
Milestone 5 Progress
As always, our focus has been on getting Milestone 5 ready for public release. I said in the last update that we're hoping to do this in March and we're still on track for that, although the exact date depends on how smoothly the bugfixes go over the next few weeks, and whether there are any other things worth thinking about in terms of the best timing for the update.
In coding terms, a lot of this month was spent ironing out gameplay / stability issues and tidying up some loose ends regarding new features added in Milestone 5, so although our programmers have done a lot of work there's not much in the way of exciting new headline additions for me to talk about here. However, we did find a few days to improve the shooting path calculations in the tactical combat so the permitted fire paths better match what the player would expect, particularly around doorways and corners, as community feedback suggested this area needed more polish (turns out the system had a couple of subtle bugs that needed fixing).
Writing & Art
Last month was a big month on the writing front - the writing in the game is now largely complete. This means that all research projects now have research text, the phase briefings have been revised, more tactical missions have introductory character conversations, and there should be a more consistent narrative thread running throughout the whole game. Hopefully it's now much clearer why all the factions in the game are acting the way they are.
Finishing this allowed us to send all the new game text off for translation, and we should have localised text ready for Milestone 5's public release (this was another factor that influenced the timing).
We've added some new illustrations to the game over the past month, most of which are just adding flavour art to the new UI popups related to the new Geoscape mechanics in Milestone 5. In our recent 5.13 Experimental update we also added unique illustrations for three of the five strategic operations (which should make it easier to tell them apart) and we're expecting to have the remaining two done shortly.
Community Suggestion Review
Once Milestone 5 is done we'll start looking at what's next. Alongside the last remaining features on our roadmap (Air Combat Revamp, Ending Cinematic, Soviet Town Biome, Mod Tools) we've been reading through the many, many community suggestions that have been posted on Steam, our Discord and our forums during the Early Access period.
We're now reviewing all these suggestions as a team and looking at which ones we can include in the next major update. Although we can't add every suggestion to the game, there's a lot of good ideas here and we want to thank everyone who has given us feedback and suggestions during development - we may not always have responded immediately, but we did read them all eventually!
That's everything for this update - thanks for reading, and hopefully we'll have a big announcement in the next few weeks about the public release of Milestone 5!
