Time once again for your Xenonauts 2 monthly development update! Thanks again for your ongoing patience as we continue our work on the game.
Yesterday we released V22 onto our standard Steam / GOG branches for backers to play, as it's in decent shape after the seven (!) hotfixes we have released for it over the last five or six weeks.
Obviously all those fixes and releases took up quite a bit of developer time this month, but there was also a lot of other progress on the project to report. The biggest new feature we've been working on is the updated tactical interface, which is a fairly complex beast given the depth of the tactical combat. The UI now looks better and is much less cluttered and (hopefully) easier to use and understand. Perhaps more importantly, it properly integrates the relevant information for the Morale and Armour systems which were added earlier this year.
Additionally, we started working with a couple of new illustrators at the start of the month to finish off the remaining research art. Three new autopsy paintings have been added this month and the final dropship has also been completed - we also amended the in-mission tiles for this dropship to improve its interior layout and fix some visual issues. Several more enemy units have had their corpse artwork painted too and that job is now nearly complete.
On the 3D front we've now managed to finish and rig all the female civilian models (meaning all the human models are now complete and set up in-game) and several alien armour variants from previous months were also rigged and added. In terms of environment, we're still working on the Xenonaut base biome because there's just so many different base rooms that need to be created, but progress is pretty good and the new assets are definitely looking like an improvement!
Beyond the tactical UI and bugfixes, the coders also found time to implement a proper re-arming system for interceptor weapons (previously the planes would instantly rearm when returning to base) and then do some work to support the final mission. In classic X-Com style, we have decided to make this a two-part mission so we needed to do a bit of work to support this - that all seems to be working. Both maps need further playtesting and visual improvements but in theory it should now be possible to properly win the campaign when we release the next build.
Overall, we feel like we've made good progress this month. We'll start to think about putting out the first iterations of V24 towards the end of next month to let those in the beta play with the final tactical UI and hopefully several more significant improvements too.
Many thanks for reading and for staying up-to-date with our work - as ever please do join us on Discord, the forums or the Steam community if you have any questions.