Hello everyone and welcome to 2023!
December was a good month for the project even though it was curtailed by the Christmas holidays, as we released V25 and then opened the game up to the first wave of open beta testers. We didn't add many new features as most of our time was spent gathering community feedback and fixing bugs identified by our new (and old) testers, so I'll instead talk more broadly about what we're going to be working on in the next couple of months.
Open Beta
The first thing to say is that the open beta has already been extremely helpful. We started by inviting a small group of new testers (50) and asked them to post up their initial impressions of the game, and report any bugs / issues they encountered so we could fix them.
The response has been really good so far. Thankfully, the initial response to the game has been almost universally positive (i.e. nobody saying that they didn't enjoy the game, or that it felt too similar to Xenonauts 1 to be worth playing) but we've also received a lot of useful feedback about what people do and don't like about the game. Stability is generally pretty good but there's still a LOT of bugs reported that we're currently working through - every bug fixed makes the game feel better to play!
As we release future builds we'll be inviting new players to join the Open Beta so we can maintain a continual stream of "first impressions" posts, but we'll probably only be inviting 50-100 people for each new build. However, if you're not lucky enough to get an invite, fear not, we have a surprise coming that you'll find out about in a couple of weeks.
Upcoming Work
The dev team will mostly be spending their time working on the surprise, which we’ll share more details on Soon(™). Another primary goal is to get the tutorial implemented - veteran testers have already said they would find it helpful, so I imagine new players will be entirely lost without it! This is a quick 5-minute sequence that covers the plot events immediately prior to the start of the game, and introduces the player to the key controls for the Geoscape and tactical combat.
In other news, we're also going to be improving the difficulty settings so that people can better adjust the challenge to their level of expertise, further balancing work, and working on fixing as many of the reported bugs / usability issues as possible.
The project is entering an exciting period now and I wanted to say thanks to everyone continuing to read and contribute. Hope everyone had a good holiday!