Greetings - July is now complete so it's time for this month's update.
Unfortunately, progress on the game this month has been somewhat disrupted by covid. All of the UK-based team members managed to get ill at one point or another, so - as you can probably imagine - this did not have a great effect on productivity.
While this meant we were not able to release Build V24 last month as planned, we are hard at work on it right now. There have been a lot of crashes to fix that have been introduced by all the new systems we've added since V23 but most of those should have been found and fixed. The team is now focussing on adding and polishing new content.
Breaking New Ground
Many of the terrain tiles we've been working on over the past six months have now been implemented and are starting to work their way into maps. This has been mentioned in previous updates but in V24 you should now see new (or revamped) buildings in various biomes such as the Jungle (which now has ancient ruins) and the Desert (which now has trailer park-style mobile homes). Farm maps now have a new type of barn and a storage shed, and the Xenonauts Base Defence missions feature a host of new tiles.
We're hoping to have the terrain tiles pretty much done in the next month or two, barring ongoing visual polish during Early Access. There's still a few base buildings that need tiles done for the base defence missions, and the Soviet Town biome is still incomplete - we're working on the buildings for it right now. Then it's just a case of checking through everything we have to ensure all the assets have the correct metadata set up etc. We've got a wide selection of tiles across a lot of different biomes now, so we should have everything we need to ensure the game has far more maps than Xenonauts 1.
Additional Art
We've also been adding other types of art to the game too - a few new autopsy paintings have been added to the Xenopedia, plus the Stealthsuit now has its final painted art. The UI update continues to progress with the Funding Report and the Xenopedia getting visual updates this month. We're currently working on the designs for the Base and the Base Stores strategy screen, and hopefully we can start to implement them later this month too.
Other Bits
There's not many new features that have been added this month because the coders have mostly been supporting other work. The map editor had become painfully slow due to all the data we've added to maps associated with the alien movement system (all the AI waypoints etc) so quite a bit of time was spent on improving performance there, and there was also work to be done related to the UI styling and functionality. Some of this is purely visual, but there's a few quality-of-life elements in there (eg the Xenopedia is now accessible in ground combat).
One thing we did add is the "tutorial notification" system, which you'll have encountered in other games -little pop-up notifications that appear at certain points in the game to explain information. For example, the first time you get a bleeding wound on a soldier it pops up a notification explaining how to heal them. Spotting a door pops up a notification telling you that you can right-click on the door to open it without walking through it, etc. The first batch of these will be V24 once Chris has had time to write out the text for them.
So that's been the progress over the past month. Not great but not exactly terrible either. Hopefully next update things will have gone more smoothly and we can talk more about our future plans in more detail!
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.