Hello everybody - it's time for our monthly progress update. There was no update last month because we were in the process of switching our marketing partner, but everything is back to normal now.
Marketing Partnership
Xenonauts 2 is now being published by Hooded Horse, a specialist strategy publisher who we think are a really good fit for the type of game we're making. This publishing deal is purely a marketing partnership, so Hooded Horse have no control over the design of the game, but they'll be handling future community updates and helping build some buzz around the game as we approach Early Access (which is finally approaching, and is planned for the first quarter of 2023).
This means you'll start seeing trailers and updated screenshots for the game in the near future, which should show off the progress we've made in recent months!
Development Progress
Development has gone well over the past two months. We recently released a tactical demo for Steam's Tacticon event, which was well received (it's still available on our Steam page for anyone that wants to play it!) and we're planning on launching our next Closed Beta build towards the end of next week.
The biggest feature we added was Abduction Missions, which are a new type of tactical mission that provides a bit more variation to the game. The aliens have captured a number of civilians and imprisoned them within teleporter pods, and you have a certain number of turns to rescue as many as possible before the timer expires and any unopened pods teleport away.
These missions are no harder than normal missions as only 50% of the civilians need to be rescued for you to win - but you gain resources for each extra pod recovered, allowing the player to earn extra resources by playing more aggressively than normal. Personally I think this makes them a nice change of pace from other mission types.
The other major feature we added was heavily requested by the community - giving grenades arced throw paths, allowing them to be thrown over cover or walls. Implementing a curved arc in an abstract 3D tile grid has been quite a knotty problem, but it's now working pretty well and it definitely opens up a lot more tactical options!
Beyond that, we've added a lot more assets, small features and bugfixes. In brief - achievements and cloud saves are now functional, lots of new terrain tiles have been added including a complete rework of the Xenonaut Base tileset, about twenty new research reports have been written, and three of the important UI screens on the strategy layer have now been reskinned in their final style, and quite a few more things I just don't have space to mention.
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 or just want to chat!