We intend to post monthly updates on our progress on Xenonauts 2 to keep our community in the loop about what we've been working on here at Goldhawk Interactive.
Obviously the big news this month has been our Early Access launch two weeks ago, which has been a great success. Over 40,000 people have supported the project by purchasing a copy of the game, and we're hugely grateful to everyone who has done so.
Critical Bugs & Performance Fixes:
We've spent almost all our time this month fixing "critical issues" with the game. Broadly speaking there's three categories of these issues - crashes, performance problems, and frustrating gameplay bugs.
We've been working a lot of hours recently and have made good headway with these fixes, releasing 1.28b last Friday which addressed many of the worst bugs and performance issues. The sheer number of helpful people in the community willing to provide detailed bug reports really helped with this, so thanks to anyone that did so!
We'll shortly be releasing 1.29 onto the Experimental branches which fixes the memory leak that tanks performance in long play sessions, as well as several other quite irritating gameplay bugs. It also contains a small balance patch to make the game a bit more forgiving on the easier difficulty settings. Assuming no stability issues are found, this should make its way onto the standard branches by the weekend.
Mission Timers & Loading Times:
In the next few days we are planning to start work on adding a difficulty settings option that allows you to tweak the mission timers to your preference (this will include the option to disable the timers entirely).
At the same time we'll also be doing a first pass on optimising the loading times, as we know slow load times are an issue for a lot of players (although the memory leak being fixed in 1.29 will help with this too).
Milestone 2:
We're then planning to spend the remainder of the month working on Milestone 2. This will be the first major update for the game and it will involve changes to the campaign, which unfortunately means it will break save games (although people can continue to play their Milestone 1 campaigns on the Legacy branches if they want).
We'll be focusing Milestone 2 on the air combat balance and the pacing issues in the existing campaign. This is likely to extend the playable time beyond 180 days but it will not yet introduce additional UFO types to the game - it's more likely that we'll be expanding the role of the Cleaners at the start of the game instead.
This should give us a chance to act upon the feedback that the community has provided over the past couple of weeks, while allowing the programmers to focus their time on bugfixes and usability improvements. If all goes well the first Milestone 2 build will arrive on the Experimental branch in the next two or three weeks.
Expanding the Team:
The final thing to mention is that the income from our Early Access launch means we now have the opportunity to expand our team, which should speed up development and help us create a higher-quality game.
The first positions we're looking to fill are that of a Level Designer and a Gameplay Programmer. I've linked the posts below if anyone is potentially interested - we always look favourably on candidates who are familiar with our game!
Overall, July was a great month for the project. Although it has been a very intense few months for us, it's been great to see people playing and enjoying Xenonauts 2 and we're keen to keep improving the game!