Xenonauts Kickstarter Drive Launched

In case Firaxis’ XCOM: Enemy Unknown has made too many changes to the original X-COM formula for your tastes, or you simply would enjoy another title in the genre, the Goldhawk Interactive folks have launched a Kickstarter drive for their Xenonauts, a “spiritual successor” to the original X-COM. In just about one day they have already raised $32,675 out of their $50,000 goal, and since there are still 31 days to go, I’d say there are some very good chance the team will have to provide some stretch goals sooner rather than later.

The standard pre-order comes at $20, but higher tiers includes rewards such as an art book, so I’d expect a significant number of people to go for that. Here’s what the team hopes to accomplish with the fundraising drive:

Xenonauts has been in development for almost three years already, and has been available for pre-order for the last 18 months (please see the FAQ if you have already pre-ordered the game). We are planning to release the game this year. Why are we doing a Kickstarter?

The answer is simple – we want to make Xenonauts as good as it can be! We have raised enough money through our existing pre-order system to finish the game, but there are a lot of cool little touches that we want to implement but we simply don’t have the resources to justify spending our time on. This is a shame – it’s always the little touches that make a game memorable!

Xenonauts is also an incredibly complex game and contains vast amounts of content. We only have three full-time team members (the project lead, one artist and one coder) and they don’t even live in the same country, instead working together in a virtual office. Everyone else on the team works with us part-time, around other jobs – the ones that pay the bills. This causes a lot of delays, bottlenecks, miscommunication and stress.

Despite the difficulties, we are nearing completion of the game using this model. However, getting the key team members together full time and in the same place would allow us to respond to bugs and issues more quickly, and finish the game faster and to a higher standard (and with less damage to our collective sanity).

The key message is this: if the Kickstarter fails, Xenonauts will still be released and will be a good game. If the Kickstarter succeeds, the game will be better and finished more quickly because of it.