KickStarter Xenonauts 2 - now available on Early Access

[MasterSmithFandango]

The planned rewards are listed in this thread: https://www.goldhawkinteractive.com...513-xenonauts-2-kickstarter-coming-20th-june/

They're still up for discussion, but the highlights are:

• everything is in £ because Kickstarter won't let us put it in $
• I flirted with the idea of physical rewards I didn't go for them because we don't actually make any money off them and they're a pain in the ass to deliver
• a Early Access copy of the game is £18 (should be due around November), whereas at final release the game will be $29.99
• £25 and up gets you access to the 3-month closed beta, where the game is going to be pretty rough and we'll be concentrating on getting it ready for the Early Access launch (i.e. we want to gate out the people who don't understand unfinished games still need work)
• stuff above that gets you extra copies of the game for your friends, or putting yourself in the game as a soldier with increasing amounts of customisation until our artist is actually painting your face from a photo

We're missing a reward tier at £100 because I can't really think of anything else to add in, so we're discussing potentially adding backer-designed background events to the event ticker etc. Or we might just drop the tier entirely. Happy to listen to your thoughts on the matter too!

Agreed on the physical rewards - As nice as they can be it tends to take more effort than they're worth.

As to the 100 pound tier - maybe this is obvious, but why not use one of the 35 pound options as the 50 pound option and bump the 50 and 75 tiers up a notch?

And I loved Xenonauts, love the direction X2 is going, and look forward to backing.

 

[Goldhawk]

Thanks - and thanks to the people that said they'd back above, too. It really does make our lives much easier.

As to why we don't just bump up the £35 option, my thinking there was that the second copy has to be at £35 otherwise it's offering the player pretty bad value (e.g. 2 x £18 copies) and therefore the £50 reward would have to be putting your a soldier with your name and nationality in the soldier pool. Problem is, £50 is like $66 and that seems kinda expensive if you've got no use for the second copy of the game you get for free.

I think it's mostly awkward because we have to do everything in £ - if we were working in $ then there wouldn't be an issue because £75 is currently bang on $100, and it wouldn't look like there's a "missing" tier. To be honest though I think the majority of the cash will come from people backing at the £18-£50 range, so I won't stress too much if we end up abandoning the £100 tier.

 

[SausageInYourFace]

Backer portraits for soldiers as reward tier? I usually name soldiers after friends and family anyway. Not that I could afford it but it might be worth it if you could sent an army of you exgirlfriends to their doom against alien invaders

 

[Haba]

• I flirted with the idea of physical rewards I didn't go for them because we don't actually make any money off them and they're a pain in the ass to deliver

How much exactly would a physical reward have to cost to be both profitable and worth the extra hassle? Say, a boxed copy, for example?

 

[Goldhawk]

How much exactly would a physical reward have to cost to be both profitable and worth the extra hassle? Say, a boxed copy, for example?

That's an interesting question. Looking at the prices for the X1 DVD copies, we paid £742 for 250 DVD copies once we'd reclaimed the appropriate VAT. So about £3 / $4 each, although £1.10 / $1.50 of that was the cost of the printed manual. I don't think we'd do a printed manual if we did another DVD copy, simply because it took me a surprisingly long time to write the damn thing and I remember it being particularly boring. So the unit cost would be $2.50 per copy for a DVD copy without a manual. The postage cost for international shipping is about £2.50 / $4 for a DVD copy, because they're much easier and cheaper to mail than pretty much anything else. I'd add an extra 10% on top for the cardboard mailer box and other sundry costs, giving me a total cost per unit of $5.50.

How much we'd need to sell them for to make it worth it depends on how many we sell. I think we sold about 250 of them for Xenonauts 1, so let's be generous and assume the Xenonauts 2 kickstarter would sell 500 of them. If I'm not writing the manual I'd probably say that it'd take me a week to arrange the printing and designing the box, setting up the installer for the game, finding a good supplier and then working with them to get the product delivered to our office, sticking them in envelopes and organizing the collection of the parcels for the mailout and then dealing with customers post-Kickstarter who have moved or didn't receive their parcel etc.

Let's assume my time is worth something like $200 a day - a somewhat arbitrary figure, but let's roll with it. In that case, 500 DVD copies would cost a total of $3,750 to produce and deliver. So that's £5.50 / $7.50 each. Pricing them at £15 / $20 would probably make it worthwhile? That's about $6,000, although we'd have to pay VAT on any orders shipped to the EU - which would probably reduce that down to about $5,000. But I'd say that was still worthwile. Would people be interested in getting a DVD copy of the game (without a manual this time) at that price, or is it too expensive?

 

[Goldhawk]

Backer portraits for soldiers as reward tier? I usually name soldiers after friends and family anyway. Not that I could afford it but it might be worth it if you could sent an army of you exgirlfriends to their doom against alien invaders

Yeah, the custom portraits are a reward tier too - but getting a custom portrait painted from an image is an expensive tier and there's only 20 of them available. The portrait editor tool that allows you to create a custom portrait from some pre-set layers is available at the £75 / $100 tier, but I'm seriously considering including that in the £35 / $50 "name a custom soldier" tier instead. I kinda figure we might make more money convincing people to raise £25 pledges up to £35 rather than £50 backers up to £75.

 

[Haba]

I think normal DVD jewel case is pretty uninteresting for collectors.

I'm more thinking along a proper boxed copy with correct dimensions so it can go along with my copies of UFO Enemy Unknown and Jagged Alliance's. Much more expensive to produce and ship, of course. But personally I'd even be willing to settle on just the box, some lite manual/thank you note and steam key.

How much I'd be willing to pay? For a really good game that I'd proudly display (and with a cool looking & solid feeling box)? 200€? 250€? Less if there are uncertainties.

Maybe there would be a business case for some company to do small batches of premium quality boxed copies for indie projects.

 

[Alienman]

Dvd is fine for me, but without manual it feels a bit lacking.

 

[Goldhawk]

Yeah, I see where you're both coming from. To be honest I don't think doing cheap physical copies for the Kickstarter is a great idea because I suspect your views are fairly typical and what we produce ourselves is likely to be too low-quality to be a proper collectors item.

However there is definitely a market niche for proper premium physical copies - in fact, I think I recently saw a company that specialize in making exactly that. If enough people in the Xenonauts community are interested in a limited run for a "proper" boxed edition of Xenonauts-2, I think that's something I'd be happy to look into around release. I suspect that would work out better both for the collectors and for us as developers.

 

[Alienman]

A life size Andron.

 

[udm]

Yeah, I see where you're both coming from. To be honest I don't think doing cheap physical copies for the Kickstarter is a great idea because I suspect your views are fairly typical and what we produce ourselves is likely to be too low-quality to be a proper collectors item.

However there is definitely a market niche for proper premium physical copies - in fact, I think I recently saw a company that specialize in making exactly that. If enough people in the Xenonauts community are interested in a limited run for a "proper" boxed edition of Xenonauts-2, I think that's something I'd be happy to look into around release. I suspect that would work out better both for the collectors and for us as developers.

You have my sword.

 

[Cyberarmy]

You have my sword

And my axe!

 

[Goldhawk]

The Kickstarter is now up: https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/69341191/xenonauts-2-strategic-planetary-defence-simulator

As I mentioned before, any support people can give us is always appreciated and especially so during the early stages of the Kickstarter! I'll be popping in here answer questions over the next few days, and if any of you guys are members of other gaming communities that might be interested then feel free to post our Kickstarter up there and point me towards it if you think people would welcome my presence there.

 

[ArchAngel]

The Kickstarter is now up: https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/69341191/xenonauts-2-strategic-planetary-defence-simulator

As I mentioned before, any support people can give us is always appreciated and especially so during the early stages of the Kickstarter! I'll be popping in here answer questions over the next few days, and if any of you guys are members of other gaming communities that might be interested then feel free to post our Kickstarter up there and point me towards it if you think people would welcome my presence there.

So instead of making bases around the map like in Xeno 1 now you get a main big base in Iceland?! And build what around the map? How big?


EDIT:
If I understood this right outside your main base you only send agents to be a kind of spies and you send one per continent?! How does that even make any sense.. how is one agent supposed to cover a whole continent?

Seems geoscape is worse than nuXcom 1/2 . You took some ideas from nuXcom and Long War and made it worse.

 

[Darth Roxor]

In

 

[Blackstaff]

So it's possible to vote for the stretch goals here :

https://docs.google.com/forms/d/1YdfuLdkwQ4-g2ADuWYJqjD8SnTB29vDB21Py7_KVQ30/

I personaly first went for more conditions to combat, locational injuries, weather and geoscape in particular.
May KS be with you, Goldhawk .

 

[PanteraNera]

So instead of making bases around the map like in Xeno 1 now you get a main big base in Iceland?! And build what around the map? How big?


EDIT:
If I understood this right outside your main base you only send agents to be a kind of spies and you send one per continent?! How does that even make any sense.. how is one agent supposed to cover a whole continent?

Seems geoscape is worse than nuXcom 1/2 . You took some ideas from nuXcom and Long War and made it worse.

I wouldn't necessarily say it is worse than XCOM 1/2.
You can read more about base building here.

 

[Goldhawk]

EDIT:
If I understood this right outside your main base you only send agents to be a kind of spies and you send one per continent?! How does that even make any sense.. how is one agent supposed to cover a whole continent?

Seems geoscape is worse than nuXcom 1/2 . You took some ideas from nuXcom and Long War and made it worse.

At the moment the setup is that you have a main, off-map, base that holds your staff. On the Geoscape you build interceptor bases that contain radars and interceptors and work like X1 "interceptor" bases do. Aside from a few balance tweaks the Geoscape basically works the same as in X1 in interception terms, assuming you did the optimal thing and had one "main" base and a whole bunch of "satellite" interceptor bases that just contained radars and hangars.

Additionally, you're able to assign staff to regions to perform various actions within that region ... like improving relations etc. There are also specific events that pop-up on the map that you can assign soldiers to in order to receive some kind of reward. In the long term we'll likely unify these two systems together, probably by making your Agents actually move around the map like interceptors do (except more slowly and without fuel limits) to reach these missions. But yeah, that system's not finished and it'll probably go through quite a few iterations until we find what works best.

It's also possible we'll go back to X1-style base mechanics, particularly now the Kickstarter is doing well and it wouldn't be a problem to rework the art if there was a compelling reason to do so. In many ways the main argument for this would be if the Field Agent system worked well and you wanted your secondary bases as a hub for both aircraft AND soldiers.

 

[Goldhawk]

Thanks for backing, Darth Roxor and Blackstaff

 

[Infinitron]

Hey Goldhawk, do you guys have an official YouTube channel?

 

[Goldhawk]

Hey Goldhawk, do you guys have an official YouTube channel?

Not that I'm aware of, although maybe I created one long ago and never used it. Why do you ask?

 

[Infinitron]

Hey Goldhawk, do you guys have an official YouTube channel?

Not that I'm aware of, although maybe I created one long ago and never used it. Why do you ask?

Bit weird that all of your trailers and Kickstarter pitch videos and so on are only available from third party sources.

 

[Goldhawk]

Hey Goldhawk, do you guys have an official YouTube channel?

Not that I'm aware of, although maybe I created one long ago and never used it. Why do you ask?

Bit weird that all of your trailers and Kickstarter pitch videos and so on are only available from third party sources.

That's a fair point. Maybe I'll look into it when things calm down in a couple of days.

 

[Alienman]

Man, it's really off to a good start. Gonna pledge later after some gaming.

Good luck!

 

[SenisterDenister]

This is a long post, but please bear with me. I feel like I should put a little context here, I had first purchased Xenonauts a long time ago back when it ran on a service called Desura when it was still in alpha development, back before it was even put up on kickstarter. I'm pretty sure we had talked on Moddb back when you were still posting development updates there. I still play the game with the community mod on Steam, too. I like this genre of game very much and I'm glad that, despite the popularity of the new XCOM titles, which I also enjoyed, a team of developers felt it was better to make a new game in the vein of the original. With Open XCOM I still play TFTD regularly. I had downloaded and played the free demo from Good Old Games and while it all runs very well I'm a bit bored with the aesthetic since it's just an updated version of the original game, which leads into my question; will the developers add new environments or settings to this to make it weirder or strange similar to Terror From the Deep?

I understand that I'm adding a lot of exposition here, but I'm a migrant from Duck and Cover and I didn't realize that the Xenonauts developers posted here so I'm really excited about that.