Hello everyone - it’s time for our monthly Xenonauts 2 progress report! This month we've got a shorter update for you, because we've been working hard on getting things ready for the Steam Next Fest demo we'll be releasing for the event - this contains a fully playable slice of Xenonauts 2 limited to the first fifty days of a campaign.
We've made a few minor additions to the gameplay this month, including new research art and a reskin of the Geoscape panels related to launching and managing aircraft squadrons on the Geoscape. Players will hopefully appreciate the latter in particular as the updated Launch Aircraft panel now displays the equipped weapons on the selected aircraft, something that’s been a frequent community request!
The biggest feature we've been working on is the tutorial, as a proper tutorial is an absolute must if we want anyone other than hardcore X-Com / Xenonauts fans to be able to enjoy Xenonauts 2. It's also a good way to allow us to introduce the Xenonauts and the Cleaners / aliens at the start of the game, and generally help set the scene without relying on a massive text dump. Unfortunately it has been rather time-consuming to implement though!
As of today the demo is functional from start to finish, but there's still quite a bit of polishing left to do. I'm expecting it to be in fairly decent shape by the 6th but we'll be continuing to make improvements to it in future builds too. Beyond that, we've mostly been working on stability fixes - another couple of hotfixes for V25 this month and we've got another one on the way shortly.
Coming up
Next month we're going to be continuing to fix and address the gameplay problems / feedback provided to us by the V25 testers, and we'll probably put out V26 towards the end of February. We'll also be evaluating our translation needs, as we need to make a decision about which languages we'll be supporting before we announce an Early Access date.
And that's everything - thanks for reading!