KickStarter Xenonauts 2 - now available on Early Access

[Stavrophore]

Tried the demo. As mentioned, Unity makes the whole thing move slowly and you barely have any option to edit graphic details, but it's a playable "proof of concept" so it's okay. Either way much better than the first one. I wonder how detailed terrain destruction will get, especially if Fusion Launcher-equivalents show up.

Hopefully you do get the chance of getting psionics of your own, OR get mind shields instead of praying to RNG Jesus every time psionic aliens show up.

Psionic in original xenonauts AKA dropping your equipment on the floor or on the backpack,every fucking turn. Anyone who thought that was good should burn in a firepit.

 

[norolim]

Tried the demo too. I like the terrain destruction and the sounds projectiles make when they hit stuff. It all looks very promising, although obviously there are still bugs. Like my units and aliens occasionally shooting through walls.

 

[Mazisky]

Pretty impressive, especially in comparison with the -crappy- Xenonauts "1" graphics

Graphics wasn't that bad, but art was ugly. So it felt visually unappealing.

 

[Goldhawk]

Ah, seems like you guys have a dedicated tactics sub-forum now - I was still occasionally popping in to check out the strategy forums and didn't see this thread got moved!

I'm glad that the reaction to the combat demo has been good. There's definitely still some issues with optimization and some minor bugs floating around, but that's because we're still actively developing the game rather than polishing it - I don't see there being anything there that we can't fix before the end of development. We've spent literally years working on getting all the fundamental systems working properly (particularly the destruction stuff), and we're now getting to the stage where the remaining work is stuff you see directly in the game - new maps, new aliens, new weapons and tech, new gameplay mechanics etc. That's definitely the fun stage of development.

To answer a couple of specific points - the game is indeed in Unity, and the ragdolls on corpses have been disabled for normal death animations but I think they're still enabled for the explosions - I seem to remember aliens being thrown around by the grenade launcher in the relatively recent past. Yes, if we do keep the psionics in the game (and I think we probably will) then we will be adding some defensive items to counteract them. Assuming our Kickstarter isn't a massive failure we should be able to significantly improve on the first game.

 

[agris]

Ah, seems like you guys have a dedicated tactics sub-forum now - I was still occasionally popping in to check out the strategy forums and didn't see this thread got moved!

I'm glad that the reaction to the combat demo has been good. There's definitely still some issues with optimization and some minor bugs floating around, but that's because we're still actively developing the game rather than polishing it - I don't see there being anything there that we can't fix before the end of development. We've spent literally years working on getting all the fundamental systems working properly (particularly the destruction stuff), and we're now getting to the stage where the remaining work is stuff you see directly in the game - new maps, new aliens, new weapons and tech, new gameplay mechanics etc. That's definitely the fun stage of development.

To answer a couple of specific points - the game is indeed in Unity, and the ragdolls on corpses have been disabled for normal death animations but I think they're still enabled for the explosions - I seem to remember aliens being thrown around by the grenade launcher in the relatively recent past. Yes, if we do keep the psionics in the game (and I think we probably will) then we will be adding some defensive items to counteract them. Assuming our Kickstarter isn't a massive failure we should be able to significantly improve on the first game.

I think this was mentioned before, but requiring line of sight for psionics to have any effect would reduce how 'unfair' it feels imo.

 

[Goldhawk]

I think this was mentioned before, but requiring line of sight for psionics to have any effect would reduce how 'unfair' it feels imo.

Yup, that's one way to do it - although I want psionic powers to feel scary and dangerous, and I want psionic aliens to be relatively rare and not necessarily to have to expose themselves to fire in order to cast their abilities (because most aliens don't survive a turn once spotted). One of the mechanics I'm looking into is allowing the psionic aliens to "possess" other aliens on the battlefield that do have LOS on your troops (making them glow purple or something). If that alien is still alive at the end of the player's turn and still has sight on your units, the psionic alien can then perform a squadsight mind control attack against your men.

That might be a nice middle ground where the mechanic doesn't feel too unfair (and the player has some form of counterplay), but a psionic alien is still a mission-changing threat that can safely harass you from the bridge of its UFO for the whole mission when it appears. In any case, we'll see what happens - psionics are definitely an area we're looking at improving.

 

[Haba]

How about more subtle forms of mind control tricks for the aliens? Not directly assuming control or making them panic, but slight alterations. Disabling UI elements or providing false information, for example? I.e. the soldier under the psionic influence isn't able to see the alien he spotted as a threat, for example. Or reporting false HP/morale/ammo count etc.

Or psionic influence that builds up over the missions, so your troops might switch sides later at an inconvenient moment (during a base defence mission, for example).

 

[Althorion]

Seems fun in theory, but I’ve been toying around with similar concept and haven’t been able to make it work for anything but the smallest possible teams. The thing is, hiding/changing UI is more annoying than interesting (think of every time you have missclicked a grenade in nuXCOM and now imagine the game is intentionally made so that happens more often). I have also tried directly replacing orders with similar, but not exact (moving too far, firing full magazines instead of single shots, reloading and wasting ammunition without good reason etc.), but that was even more annoying. So that leaves false information.

But because we have about eight soldiers in team (unless something changed since I last saw the beta), we have two solutions—we either have a cumulative effect over all soldiers, which seems dumb and unintuitive (why aliens interacting with another person makes me know less?); or we don’t. But then we can interpolate true values from all the false ones we have, which can either not really matter (which renders the whole mechanic interesting, but pointless) or very unfun mental challenge of the kind ‘bring your own calculator’.

The one thing where it sorta worked was when player characters used it against the AI, which was then given false info to decide its own movement. Sorta, because that lead understandably to stupid behaviour, which was the point anyway, but I had a feeling that players would hold that against me (‘look, he can’t even implement basic AI properly!’) instead of being washed away by my genius.

So I’m really curious of what can you make out of it, because I fully intend to steal it afterwards.

 

[Haba]

It is definitely something that needs careful balancing so that it doesn't become tedious. It needs to happen infrequently enough that it is not a chore.

And AI needs to be smart as well. I.e. alien doing the "jedi mind trick" shouldn't just shoot the guy he manipulated but rather sneak past him and ambush some dudes further in who are not expecting the surprise. And obviously he shouldn't do that when there are several guys who can spot him.

 

[Althorion]

I’m not sure if the low frequency is the solution, either. If it happens rarely, it’s easy for a player not to have that in mind all the time and then consider that strange behaviour caused by this as a bug or a game playing unfairly—to think that some alien spawned inside a previously cleared building instead of realizing that it mind tricked a soldier not to notice it sneak by.

The problem with subtle solution is that they necessarily can be missed sometimes by the players. And since we tend to play tactics games with perfect information, it feels wrong and ‘glitchy’ for things not to be as they seem to.

 

[agris]

I think this was mentioned before, but requiring line of sight for psionics to have any effect would reduce how 'unfair' it feels imo.

Yup, that's one way to do it - although I want psionic powers to feel scary and dangerous, and I want psionic aliens to be relatively rare and not necessarily to have to expose themselves to fire in order to cast their abilities (because most aliens don't survive a turn once spotted). One of the mechanics I'm looking into is allowing the psionic aliens to "possess" other aliens on the battlefield that do have LOS on your troops (making them glow purple or something). If that alien is still alive at the end of the player's turn and still has sight on your units, the psionic alien can then perform a squadsight mind control attack against your men.

That might be a nice middle ground where the mechanic doesn't feel too unfair (and the player has some form of counterplay), but a psionic alien is still a mission-changing threat that can safely harass you from the bridge of its UFO for the whole mission when it appears. In any case, we'll see what happens - psionics are definitely an area we're looking at improving.

That's an interesting take, so the other aliens are acting as spotters. If that's the case though, I think giving them a glow would be a bit too obvious - as you said, once an enemy is in sight, it rarely lasts a turn. It would be more interesting to not indicate it in any way - except that the host / spotter alien can't attack. That way if multiple aliens have LoS on us, we have to pay a bit of attention to determine which one is the spotter. The purple aura you're considering is like a big exclamation point above their head saying "kill me kill me!".

 

[ArchAngel]

Psionics in xeno1 was one of the main reasons why I only finished it once. Also why I would just bomb all mission sites with those aliens.
Alternative was doing the drop weapons on ground with every soldier every turn which I would not do. Fuck the game that made you do that

 

[Endemic]

Psionics in xeno1 was one of the main reasons why I only finished it once. Also why I would just bomb all mission sites with those aliens.
Alternative was doing the drop weapons on ground with every soldier every turn which I would not do. Fuck the game that made you do that

We all did that in OG X-COM until researching psi ourselves. Unless you preferred the "run one low-bravery schmuck out there first as bait" tactic

 

[ArchAngel]

Psionics in xeno1 was one of the main reasons why I only finished it once. Also why I would just bomb all mission sites with those aliens.
Alternative was doing the drop weapons on ground with every soldier every turn which I would not do. Fuck the game that made you do that

We all did that in OG X-COM until researching psi ourselves. Unless you preferred the "run one low-bravery schmuck out there first as bait" tactic

In OG Xcom you did that thing with bravery or you started everyone with explosives on floor until you found which ones would get attacked more than once (aliens usually needed a few turns to mind control someone or berserk them). Then you would use that guy and have him be a weaponless scout for the rest of the mission (or until he died which usually came early). In Xenonauts your teams are smaller, you cannot just use people as weaponless scouts and aliens would try to mind controls everyone, not focus on only a few guys.

 

[Endemic]

In Xenonauts your teams are smaller, you cannot just use people as weaponless scouts and aliens would try to mind controls everyone, not focus on only a few guys.

I understand your point, just saying that you would still be vulnerable until you researched a defense against it, necessitating those tactics. I'm all for larger team sizes and more options, we'll see what happens.

 

[Modron]

You mean you didn't have meat shields carrying two shields you used to scout and soak up reaction fire?

 

[ArchAngel]

You mean you didn't have meat shields carrying two shields you used to scout and soak up reaction fire?

I did. They were not expandable random soldiers there only to be mind controlled.

 

[Alienman]

Goldhawk Chris, what happened to the Pathfinder game/idea? Always wondered that.

 

[Goldhawk]

Alienman Ultimately it just turned out that moving to a new engine and to 3D was a much, much bigger challenge than we were expecting - e.g. we had to relearn the entire art pipeline pretty much from scratch, etc. Anyway we just decided that totally changing the way we work at the same time as creating a totally new game with an entirely new design was too risky for a small team like us, especially with a bunch of new hires on the team. So the idea still exists and maybe we'll eventually go back to it now we're more familiar with our tools, but making X2 instead was definitely the right move.

 

[Goldhawk]

Incidentally, the Xenonauts-2 Kickstarter is launching on Wednesday 20th June, at 14:00 GMT / UTC - if anyone enjoyed Xenonauts 1 and is planning to buy Xenonauts 2, then doing it on Kickstarter is a great place to do it because they take a smaller cut of our sales than pretty much anywhere else, and we can spend that money on making the game better!

And, hey, having more backers on Kickstarter makes us look more cool and popular and makes journalists and distributors pay more attention to us. Which is always nice

 

[Cyberarmy]

I'll be there.

 

[MasterSmithFandango]

Incidentally, the Xenonauts-2 Kickstarter is launching on Wednesday 20th June, at 14:00 GMT / UTC - if anyone enjoyed Xenonauts 1 and is planning to buy Xenonauts 2, then doing it on Kickstarter is a great place to do it because they take a smaller cut of our sales than pretty much anywhere else, and we can spend that money on making the game better!

And, hey, having more backers on Kickstarter makes us look more cool and popular and makes journalists and distributors pay more attention to us. Which is always nice

I'm in. Any info on what the tiers will be or do we have to wait?

 

[Darth Roxor]

thanks for piling up on the yuge expenses my wallet's already suffered in June

 

[Alienman]

What is coming out?

 

[Goldhawk]

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!