Games

[Some guy]

http://www.xenonauts.com/

Inspired by UFO: Enemy Unknown. Here are two interviews with developer Chris England:

http://www.rockpapershotgun.com/2010/11 ... more-44147

http://www.taktikzone.de/index.php?Game ... interview2

[Qpo]

http://www.xenonauts.com/xenonauts-overview/

XENONAUTS OVERVIEW

1 October, 1979: Unidentified forces presumed of extraterrestrial origin arrive in Earth orbit. Panic spreads globally when attempts at communication fail and initial attempts to repel the invaders are met with heavy losses and little success. The only successful interception occurs over the Baltic sea, conducted by modified interceptors which prove at least partially resistant to extraterrestrial weaponry. A clandestine organisation known only as the ‘Xenonauts’ claims responsibility, offering nations protection in exchange for funding and full freedom to operate within their territory and airspace.

For humanity, a glimmer of hope remains – if they can withstand the attacks long enough unravel the secrets of the alien aggressors, the Xenonauts may find yet a way to defeat the alien invasion. Should they fail, millions of years of human history will be brought to a close in mere months…

Xenonauts is a strategy game in which you control a multi-national military organisation defending a Cold War-era Earth from alien invasion, using small squads of persistent soldiers to eliminate the extraterrestrials and recover their technology in turn-based ground combat. A detailed strategic layer allows you to co-ordinate the defence of the planet, using your interceptors to shoot down UFOs and researching captured artefacts to learn about your foes and unlock new combat equipment to use on your missions.

Xenonauts is a spiritual successor to the classic X-Com strategy games from the 1990s. We aim to improve the graphics, add new content and streamline the interface whilst still retaining all of the key mechanics of the original games. Devoted fans should love this game, but we’re also keen to introduce the joys of old-school grand strategy to a whole new generation of players who might not otherwise experience it!

Key Features:

- Ground Combat: 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!

- Strategic Management: 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.

- Research Tree: 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.

- Persistent Soldiers: 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…

- Detailed, Emergent Simulation: 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.

Xenonauts is currently playable but not complete (the final version is hopefully arriving in late 2013). However, the game is available on Steam or through this website for pre-order, which will give you immediate access to the current build and all future updates (including a copy of the full game on release).

Receiving the money in advance allows us to spend it on development and improve the game, but also allows the community to give us feedback on how the mechanics are working or report bugs they are experiencing. Please explore the site for further information about the game or check our Why Pre-Order page for more details on pre-ordering!

http://www.xenonauts.com/category/concept-gallery/

http://www.xenonauts.com/category/screenshot-gallery/

[Some guy]

http://www.xenonauts.com/xenonauts-finally-released/

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!

PS – I should also mention that OpenXcom has also hit V1.0. They are a free, open-source clone of the original X-Com with none of the bugs and proper support for modern PCs. If you’re hunkering to play the original X-Com again, make sure you check these guys out!