Kickstarter - Xenonauts Funding Successful
 

Another runaway success with Xenonauts achieving their $50k funding goal in 56 hours (currently $63k, 28 days to go). Stretch goals have been announced and, or course, check out the early demo if you haven't already. Rather than lay out a specific order, the developers have a poll on prefered stretch goals and will try to add them in order of their popularity:

• Mac / Linux port – The game will be ported onto Mac / Linux platforms for release, and hopefully for beta too.
• Female soldiers – We’ll add female soldiers to the game, with 25-30 female portraits and modified Basic Armour soldier art. Battlefield sprites will remain unisex.
• Soviet Town terror tileset ($40k) – the current terror tileset is an American town. To fit with the Cold War theme, we’ll put in an alternate tileset for the Soviet bloc countries using Soviet-style architecture.
• Military Base tileset ($40k) – this tileset would allow us to put military terror sites in the game, where aliens have attacked a military base and you are sent in to deal with them.
• Indoor missions – these would be missions where combat squads are sent into large buildings or into underground bunkers to clear out an alien strike team. We can mostly re-use the Xenonaut Base tiles for this, so this will be a $25k item.
• Reaper (Chryssalid) Hive tileset ($40k) – in addition to the normal alien base missions, we will add Reaper (the Xenonaut equivalent of Chryssalids) Hive missions to the late-game. These would feature “nodes” that spawned infinite numbers of Reapers until destroyed. Yes, I have been playing Space Hulk.
• Tileset-Specific NPC Allies – we do have friendly AI soldiers in the game, but only one type. This would add different variants – police on the Industrial tileset, farmers with shotguns on the Farm tileset, mujahedeen with AK-47s on the Desert tileset etc.
• Vehicle Combat Experience – soldiers level up with experience, vehicles do not. This would allow vehicles to increase their stats (not armour / health) by a maximum of 15% with combat experience.
• Pilot Portraits and Callsigns – at the moment, the aircraft are just aircraft. This would give each aircraft a pilot portrait and a callsign, so they seem less expendable. These pilots will not level up with experience.
• Human Psionics and Blaster Bombs – We’ve removed these from the game due to balance reasons, and we will not put them in Xenonauts. This stretch goal would bundle the game with a developer-made mod that allowed people to put them back in.
• Memorial Screen – This would be a tab on the UI which allowed you to view a list of all your dead soldiers, including the location and time of death, their portrait and number of kills etc.
• Proxy Grenades – These are fun. This would add a secondary fire function to all advanced grenades (Alenium grenades upwards) that allows them to be used as proxy grenades.
• Motion Detector – This would be a one-hand soldier item that, when equipped, will display a coloured overlay on the battlefield to show any AI movement in previous turn within range of the soldier holding it.
• Hire a Level Designer - we will add a lot more map variation to the game before release, but we don’t have a devoted level designer. This will let us hire one.
• Tall Grass – There’s waist-high grass in X-Com. This would put it in Xenonauts too, complete with the ridiculous (yet amusing) fire mechanics from the original.

More information.

In the base, Kickstarter thread about this on this site people were concerned that all of this funding would lead to useless features. I quite like many of these and almost believe they should be mandatory.

Hire a Level Designer, Indoor Missions, Female soldiers, Tileset-Specific NPC Allies, additional tilesets all sound just fine with me. The pilot stuff sounds ok too just to add variety so that it takes that much longer get bored with the graphics. The Memorial Screen and Blaster Bombs sound like useless projects.

I'm more concerned about Linux/Mac port as there seems to be quite a bit of pressure from Linux community for translations but I see this as a vocal subset pushing for what amounts to a lot of work for a handful of users. (I use Linux at work as its well suited for it but I don't play games on it). We will see though as many of the recent Kickstarters have added this and are doing it though they haven't already built their engine.

The question is more about the features they are going to bring thanks to the extra money.

Their targets list is transparent. And gameplay focused. Which is excellent.

Kickstarter formula is great but after checking might end with budgets being inflated beyond 300 %.


When the target is reached, it would be good if new games features were added. A number of times, they go for goodies etc…

Meanwhile the results of the poll are already on:
http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/…enonauts/posts

Thanks. Good to see I'm in the main line I guess. I missed my chance to vote apparently but the results sound good to me. On the linux side, they are still doing it but I guess if they use a contractor to do it then I care less.

Now we just have to reach to the various goal posts.

You had to jump on the right band wagon. Or accept the list.

The 1000 first backers are likely to be the same who voted the list.

380,000 dollars ultimate target. Do the math. A minority will determine the features in the end.

You didn't have to be a backer to vote on the list.
I voted and I haven't pledge it in the Kickstarter.
This what most people wanted after all… even in the forum, I've sensed that the outcome would be this.
http://www.goldhawkinteractive.com/f…l-Poll-Options
IMO, these are realistic goals, for a game that the developers want to release in 10/2012. If they were going to add new game features I doubt that the game would be ready this year (if indeed it will).

Maybe in a future sequel they will add more gameplay features and improve the former. :)