Xenonauts 2 - Development Update

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A new development update for Xenonauts 2:

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Xenonauts 2 Monthly Development Update!

Hello everyone - with July finished, it's time for us to give our monthly developer update on what we've all been working on here at Goldhawk.

Milestone 4
Although we released Milestone 4 last month, we've continued to patch it with bugfixes and balance updates. As many players found the game too punishing, we've been making the lower difficulty settings a bit more forgiving. Thanks to everyone who has given us feedback, and we'll continue to monitor it while we work on Milestone 5.

Fixing bugs has also been relatively time-consuming this month. With many new players coming from both Tacticon and the recent Steam sale, we've received a lot more bug reports than normal and we've made fixing them our priority. Some of these were obscure stability bugs, but many were small gameplay issues - e.g. we've fixed a bug where soldiers could lose 1 or 2 TU when their rotation was interrupted by spotting an enemy. Continuing to iron out these sort of small annoyances should improve the experience for everyone.

Unfortunately, a large influx of new players combined with Milestone 4 being overly difficult and having some stability issues when first released means our Recent Reviews on Steam aren't as positive as they were previously. If you are enjoying the game and haven't left a review, please think about doing so - and if you've left a negative review, just know we're working hard on improving the game and we hope you'll give Xenonauts 2 another shot once it leaves Early Access!

Air Combat UI
One of the parts of the game we're working on for Milestone 5 is the air combat, with a particular focus on the visuals. This month we've done some initial work concepting the final UI style for the air combat, and even though we're still exploring the visuals we thought we'd share a concept with you -- please don't read too much into the information on the screen, it's all WIP!

The other area of the air combat that we'll be working on for Milestone 5 is the air combat section of the tutorial, as a lot of players bounce off the interception minigame because the game currently doesn't even explain the controls. Hopefully a better tutorial and improved visuals will allow more users to enjoy that section of the game.

It's probably also worth mentioning that the Geoscape UI is also not yet final (which is why it still looks so similar to the first Xenonauts), and we'll be tackling that once the Air Combat is done.

Rescue Civilians
Another system we implemented in Milestone 5 this month was the ability to order civilians off the battlefield, as many members of our community have been requesting this since our Early Access launch. The system is simple - soldiers can order adjacent civilians to evacuate with a right-click, which causes the civilian to run back towards the player's dropship where they can flee off the map edge.

By default civilians will skulk around the map and avoid enemies, but once they have been ordered to evacuate they will simply sprint as quickly as possible towards their evacuation zone. Make sure you have cleared a path for them if you want them to live!

Game Editor
The final major system we've been working on this month is our internal game editor. Our Unity 2022 update means we've now got access to much more powerful plugins, which means we can replace our creaky old game editor with something that has better performance and more functionality.

Why are we mentioning this? Not only will this allow us to work faster, but the game editor is also going to serve as the foundation for our future mod tools. Once the work on our internal tools is complete we'll hopefully have taken a significant step towards having a working community mod editor.

That's everything for this dev diary. Thanks for reading, and we'll see you next month!