January Update & Firaxis X-Com Remake

Mid-January is upon us and the festive season has been left well and truly behind. It’s time for another update on what’s been happening on Xenonauts, plus a few words on a game being made by a little-known studio called Firaxis.

I’ll start with the elephant in the room, the Firaxis X-Com remake. I’ll admit that their announcement was not the ideal way to usher in the New Year, but the more information that is revealed about the game the less I worry for Xenonauts. I have a lot of respect for Firaxis and I imagine that their remake will at worst be a good game, but there are a lot of differences between what we are aiming to do and what they are. I therefore don’t think they’ll erode our target audience a great deal. In fact, they may even increase it.

The game they are making strikes me as a heavy streamlining of the X-Com formula. This isn’t necessarily a bad thing – there’s been a raft of excellent and streamlined squad combat games in recent times, the most obvious example being Frozen Synapse. However, there are LOT of changes being made. Off the top of my head: hexes instead of squares, units limited to two actions per turn, squads of four men, unlimited ammo and no inventory system, a skill-based soldier progression rather than stat-based progression, only a single base (no base defence missions?), reimagined aliens and setting, cartoony art style and the addition of scripted missions.

Are any of these changes a bad thing in themselves? No, of course not. But will the game they come up feel much like X-Com of old? I don’t know. I don’t think anyone really knows yet. What I do know is that Xenonauts will be a much more mechanically faithful successor to the original game. Even if the new Firaxis X-Com game is fantastic, it’s not going to deprive us of our core audience. As such, I wish them the best for their project – I’m sure I’ll be playing it in the future!

Now, back to Xenonauts. The hubbub over the Firaxis remake had a couple of major effects on the project. Firstly, we’ve sped up development on the project. Previously we didn’t have a specific release target, although we were certainly making progress on the game. Now launching the game just before or at a similar time as the Firaxis remake seems sensible, as we’ll benefit from the buzz around the franchise – particularly if Xenonauts turns out to be as good a game as we want it to be. Their game is due to be released in Fall (read: ‘Autumn’) and we’re hoping to do the same thing.

Secondly, we canned the proposed press build (V8) in favour of waiting for V9, which will now contain a major graphical update. You might remember that in the last update I mentioned a new ground tile generation system. To cut a long story short, this is working very well and the game is looking much better for it. We’ve done all the ground tiles for the new Farmyard tileset and we are about to start redoing all the ground tiles from the Industrial tileset too. Once that is done, we’ll move onto the remaining tilesets. Whilst the buildings still need to be done for several tilesets, we expect to have the ground tiles done for all of them (allowing creation of basic maps) for the end of February. A quick preview of how the ground looks now can be seen here.

So the next build will contain the Farmyard tileset and hopefully the updated Industrial tileset too. The other contents of the upcoming build are going to be an additional alien race, the Sebillians, plus unit shadows and the standard bugfixes we release every build.

Two more things. First, I’d like to welcome Matthew to our team. Matthew is an industry QA professional and we’ve brought him onto the team with the intent of making Xenonauts more stable. He’s been at work for about a week now, compiling a list of all the bugs reported on the forum and verifying them himself so they can go on our bugtracker. This frees up more of my time to get missing features implemented and ensures that bugs (and feature testing) get the treatment they deserve. Expect the next build to be much more stable as a result of this.

Finally, a quick note on Desura. Not everyone enjoys downloading through the Desura client, and some are not able to do so. While it is still the best way to do it, there is now an alternative available – the folks at Desura have very kindly coded a standalone download for Xenonauts, the details of which can be found here.

That’s going to be it from me until we hit V9, which I expect in about two weeks. Until then!