Xenonauts

Xenonauts delivers tense turn-based combat across realistic, varied and fully-destructible battlefields, against almost fifty different variants of enemy. Missions range from capturing crashed UFOs or alien bases to defending cities (or even Xenonaut facilities) against alien attack. You’ll experience the chill of encountering a new alien for the first time and the joys of test-firing a new weapon for the first time. Deeply asymmetric combat keeps the battles interesting – after all, you’re fighting intergalactic invaders with 1970′s ballistic technology!

You will also be managing the defence of the planet, dealing with the invading alien UFOs with your customisable interceptors. You need to balance the needs of your funding nations with your own. Your funds are limited – are you going to spend them on battlefield equipment, more scientists, or expanding your coverage of the planet? Your priorities must be balanced carefully if you are to win the war.

Xenonauts has an extensive research tree with almost a hundred projects to unlock, each with its own unique description and painted artwork. It slowly reveals the intentions and origins of the invaders, while also unlocking new battlefield equipment, aircraft and vehicles for you to use as you harness alien technology and turn it against them.

Soldiers in Xenonauts are persistent from mission to mission, improving their stats and gaining ranks with combat experience – but their deaths are always only a single bad move away. You will grow to care about the brave men and women under your command as they slowly grow from green rookies into hardened veterans, but that only makes it more painful when their heroic tale is cruelly cut short by a burst of plasma fire…

Xenonauts contains no scripted missions, just broad rules setting the pace of the invasion. As such, no game plays out the same twice. If you shoot a Scout UFO down over a polar area, you get a Crash Site mission where you can capture a crashed Scout UFO in an Arctic tileset. Commence a battle at night and you’ll be fighting the mission in the darkness with reduced sight range. If your base is attacked, you fight the defence in a perfect replica of your base. A lot of time has gone into weaving the two very different halves of the game together into something that feels both natural and enjoyable.

Release day has finally arrived: Xenonauts has left Steam Early Access and made its way into big wide world! Development has taken five eventful years. I still remember taking our first pre-orders and the days of being banned from Paypal. Our successful $150,000 Kickstarter was two full years ago now, and *that* day when Firaxis announced XCOM: Enemy Unknown was even longer back.

This process has taken a lot longer than anyone expected it to, myself included. I originally estimated that it would take 6 months and $25,000 to make Xenonauts. It took ten times that long and…well, I’ve not sat down and totted up all the production costs yet, but I already know they are an order of magnitude higher than my original estimates. If you were one of the really early backers: I’m sorry that you had to wait so long.

At the same time, this game would never have happened if it were not for those early backers. It also would not have happened were it not for the people who backed us during our Kickstarter, or those who bought the game when it came out on Steam Early Access. That money has all been spent on development; all of it has been spent on making Xenonauts the game you’re playing now. If you bought the game at any point before it formally released, know that your money *did* help us.

I should also mention the team that worked on the game. Our successful Kickstarter let us get an office and form a core of full-time individuals that make up the heart of the company, but literally hundreds of people have worked on Xenonauts in some capacity. Many of these people accepted lower rates than they would normally charge for their work because they wanted to be involved – they were doing this for the love, not the money. They have my thanks for doing so.

Going forwards, we will not be making further gameplay changes for a while (although I won’t rule out a patch V1.1 at some point in the future). However, we will continue to patch any crashes or game-breaking bugs found in the game. If you find any, please let us know on our forums and we’ll do our best to sort them out.

Our more immediate plans are to add Steam Workshop support to the game – we have a busy modding / mapping community on our forums and I’m keen to help them reach a wider audience and make the mod-install process as easy as possible. We’re also working on getting Mac / Linux builds set up on Steam and finally processing the physical Kickstarter rewards. Still work to do, then – but it’s tidying up stuff around the game, rather than work on the game itself.

To end, a few mind-boggling community figures: Steam has logged well over 1 million hours of gameplay on Xenonauts in the last year alone. That’s over a century spent in-game. Prior to release, the *average* player had put 45 hours into the game each (taken from everyone who ever fired up the game on Steam). Not bad, eh? I hope you enjoy finally getting your hands on the game!

We have now released Xenonauts V1.0 on the Steam Stable branch, which marks the end of formal development for Xenonauts. This is effectively the final version of the game, minus any stability patches that may be required. We will shortly be rolling it out to the Humble Store and Desura etc too.

Official release and leaving Early Access for the game is in about two weeks (tentatively pencilled in as 16th June), but the remaining time is mostly going to be spent on sending out review copies, the PR around the launch, porting to Mac / Linux and getting the Kickstarter rewards sorted out etc.

We will continue to work on fixing any crashes / hangs encountered in the game, and any non-crash bugs that render the game unplayable in other ways.

We’ve fixed all the worst issues that appeared over the past few days of community testing, but as the game is 10-15+ hours for a playthrough we’ve obviously not been able to fully test the game internally after the last bunch of fixes. So there may still be some issues in the game – but if so, they’ll be addressed in the next two weeks before the official release.

There have been a lot of changes made since the previous Stable version. The game has a much smoother difficulty curve, more information for new players, new line of sight mechanics, much improved AI and all sorts of finer polish.

The choice is therefore up to you whether you want to play the “final” version of the game now or whether you’d prefer to wait a couple of weeks to make sure any stability kinks have been ironed out. We’ll make more of a song and dance about the release when it comes to the 16th, but I thought it was best to explain this update and make it available to anyone who did not want to wait that long!

Thanks for your patience and support over the past five years of development, it’s been a long and difficult journey and I doubt we could have got so far without the all help from our community!