Xenonauts 2 - October Update

Xenonauts-2 October Progress Update

We've had a very busy month here at Goldhawk HQ, so this is going to be quite a long post! I'll be giving a general update on our progress but mostly I'll be talking about our plans for the beta.

In general I want to apologize for being relatively quiet here on Kickstarter and on our forums over the past four or five weeks - the harder we're working, the harder it is for me to find time to answer questions or write updates. And with the closed beta approaching we've been very busy indeed!

Closed Beta Release Date

Although I never announced it formally, my target date for the beta was always 7th November - but unfortunately we're not going to hit that date. Thankfully the delay won't be quite as bad as I initially feared, though, and we're now aiming for Wednesday 28th November (the alternative was the 9th January but we managed to avoid that).

We primarily want to test the game and fix problems during the closed beta, and we'll move into Early Access once the game is fairly stable and fun to play. This means you shouldn't expect the early beta builds to be a particularly enjoyable gameplay experience - that's the end goal of the beta, not the starting point!

The focus of the very first beta build is just going to be whether all the core systems are present and functioning correctly for everyone. It will contain the full strategy layer - the Geoscape, base building, interceptable UFOs flying around, air combat, fighting crash site missions, Research and Engineering projects, saving / loading, etc. However, we're going to limit the campaign to being about two weeks long (e.g. just the two smallest UFOs will spawn) - as I said, the purpose of this first build is testing!

The playable period will then be extended with each new beta build we release. The next build will likely bring in the Corvettes and Fighter UFOs, and the build after that might bring in the Terror Sites and Alien Base missions, etc. By the time the third or fourth build rolls out you should be able to properly play a good section of the campaign and we'll start polishing up the game balance.

This approach should make it easier for us to hit our Nov 28th target and also better align the community feedback we receive with our priorities - e.g. we need to check the foundations of the game are working properly before we start collecting feedback on anything else.

General Progress Update

So what have we been working on in the last month? We've added quite a few small features and new weapons (e.g. X-Com style Proximity Grenades have been added) but the two biggest things are the new inventory / item system and creating the first major batch of maps.

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