This page contains the most frequently asked questions regarding Xenonauts. If you have a question that is not answered on this list, then the best place to ask it is on our community forums. You’ll get a faster response than if you email us direct, and it means everyone can benefit from hearing the answer to your question!
GENERAL:
1) IS XENONAUTS JUST A SINGLE PLAYER GAME, OR ARE THERE MULTIPLAYER ELEMENTS?
Xenonauts is a single-player only game, and will not include any multiplayer elements. As we are an indie team, we have limited resources and we decided to focus on making the single-player game as good as possible rather than potentially spreading ourselves too thinly by adding multiplayer.
2) IF WE PRE-ORDER THE GAME, HOW DO WE RECIEVE THE FINAL GAME?
If you pre-order Xenonauts, you will recieve a Desura key that allows you to play the latest public release of the game. Once the game is complete, you will recieve either a Desura key or a Steam key depending on your preference.
3) WILL YOU PORT THIS GAME TO MAC OR LINUX?
Not at this point in time. We will look into doing this after the game has been released on the PC, as we are unsure if it is feasible at the moment. It will almost certainly require some form of wrapper if it does.
GAMEPLAY:
1) WHY HAVE YOU REMOVED BLASTER BOMBS AND PSYCHIC POWERS?
We felt that both the Blaster Bombs and psychic powers unbalanced X-Com and made it too easy. As such, we have not included them in Xenonauts. For psychic powers in particular, we thought this should remain the domain of the aliens throughout the game, to give them an edge over the humans that no amount of reverse-engineering their technology could take away. As such, there will be more options for defending against psychic powers than there was in the original game.
2) WHY ARE THERE NO FEMALE SOLDIERS IN THE GAME?
This isn’t sexism, it’s a question of technical limitations. The game uses spritesheets to render each animation, and we need a different spritesheet for a human soldier performing every animation in the game from all 8 isometric directions for every weapon / armour combination. There will be literally thousands of spritesheets in the final game, which take a lot of time to render and process, and fill lots of memory. If we changed the underlying model so it could be a man as well as a woman, that would double the amount of spritesheets required. This is also why there is no black / asian soldier sprites in the game – although there are black / asian soldier portaits and black / asian / female civilians in the game.
3) CAN I PLAY AS THE ALIENS?
No. This is an asymmetric game and it’s not been designed to be balanced from either side. Plus it would get rid of a lot of the mystery of the aliens if you were controlling them yourself. Familiarity breeds contempt and all that.
4) HOW MODDABLE IS XENONAUTS?
Very moddable, at a basic level. Less so at a high level. Xenonauts has been designed so that pretty much every stat of every unit, item and research project in the game (as well as most global settings) can be changed usng only a text editor. You can also reskin any window in the game using a text editor. This means it’s ideal for any armchair game designers out there, as you can change and rebalance the game to your heart’s content. There are also powerful map generation tools available to the community, so creating your own maps is easy. However, deep changes to the gameplay aren’t really possible. You won’t be able to turn Xenonauts into a totally different game as you could with, say, the Source engine.
TEAM:
1) WHO ARE THE TEAM BEHIND XENONAUTS?
Goldhawk Interactive are an independent development studio based in London, United Kingdom. The team work remotely from all over the world; we’ve not actually met each other in person. Most people involved work part-time around another job, which is the only way we can create such a high-quality game on such a small income.
2) CAN I JOIN THE TEAM?
You may be able to if you see us posting up a specific vacancy that you have the skills to fill, but we generally don’t accept unsolicited job applications. Sorry. If you want to help out, the best thing you can do is to pre-order the game and become an active member of our community forums (we bounce most of our ideas off our community before implementing them).
