Xenonauts Kickstarter Project Update #4, $63,000 and Counting

The fourth update to the Xenonauts Kickstarter project points out that we now get to vote for the features we’d like to see added to the X-COM-inspired strategy/RPG as specific funding milestones are reached. Additionally, the team reveals that they’re looking into the costs involved with producing boxed copies of the game:

Next, stretch goals. These are the new features we’ll add to the game as the Kickstarter hits higher and higher levels improving the experience for everybody!

These will come at $75k, $100k, $125k, $150k, $175k and $200k. We’ve set up a poll so that you can choose which features you most want to see in the game, with the top voted feature coming in at $75k and the next most popular one coming in at $100k (and so on).

Also, we’re in the process of costing out boxed copies. There’s a lot of interest in them, but we need to make sure that we’re not going to be losing money if we offer them! There’s a question on the poll where you can register your interest if you do want one.

OK, without further ado, here’s the available stretch goals. Vote for your favorites on the poll here: http://www.surveymonkey.com/s/CBDTVPS

‘¢ Mac / Linux port The game will be ported onto Mac / Linux platforms for release, and hopefully for beta too.
‘¢ Female soldiers We’ll add female soldiers to the game, with 25-30 female portraits and modified Basic Armour soldier art. Battlefield sprites will remain unisex.
‘¢ Soviet Town terror tileset ($40k) the current terror tileset is an American town. To fit with the Cold War theme, we’ll put in an alternate tileset for the Soviet bloc countries using Soviet-style architecture.
‘¢ Military Base tileset ($40k) this tileset would allow us to put military terror sites in the game, where aliens have attacked a military base and you are sent in to deal with them.
‘¢ Indoor missions these would be missions where combat squads are sent into large buildings or into underground bunkers to clear out an alien strike team. We can mostly re-use the Xenonaut Base tiles for this, so this will be a $25k item.
‘¢ Reaper (Chryssalid) Hive tileset ($40k) in addition to the normal alien base missions, we will add Reaper (the Xenonaut equivalent of Chryssalids) Hive missions to the late-game. These would feature (nodes) that spawned infinite numbers of Reapers until destroyed. Yes, I have been playing Space Hulk.
‘¢ Tileset-Specific NPC Allies we do have friendly AI soldiers in the game, but only one type. This would add different variants police on the Industrial tileset, farmers with shotguns on the Farm tileset, mujahedeen with AK-47s on the Desert tileset etc.
‘¢ Vehicle Combat Experience soldiers level up with experience, vehicles do not. This would allow vehicles to increase their stats (not armour / health) by a maximum of 15% with combat experience.
‘¢ Pilot Portraits and Callsigns at the moment, the aircraft are just aircraft. This would give each aircraft a pilot portrait and a callsign, so they seem less expendable. These pilots will not level up with experience.
‘¢ Human Psionics and Blaster Bombs We’ve removed these from the game due to balance reasons, and we will not put them in Xenonauts. This stretch goal would bundle the game with a developer-made mod that allowed people to put them back in.
‘¢ Memorial Screen This would be a tab on the UI which allowed you to view a list of all your dead soldiers, including the location and time of death, their portrait and number of kills etc.
‘¢ Proxy Grenades These are fun. This would add a secondary fire function to all advanced grenades (Alenium grenades upwards) that allows them to be used as proxy grenades.
‘¢ Motion Detector This would be a one-hand soldier item that, when equipped, will display a coloured overlay on the battlefield to show any AI movement in previous turn within range of the soldier holding it.
‘¢ Hire a Level Designer – we will add a lot more map variation to the game before release, but we don’t have a devoted level designer. This will let us hire one.
‘¢ Tall Grass There’s waist-high grass in X-Com. This would put it in Xenonauts too, complete with the ridiculous (yet amusing) fire mechanics from the original.

The goals that involve the creation of a new tileset cost $40k instead, so if one proves most popular then it will arrive at $90k instead of $75k. This is because tilesets are surprisingly large and are EXTREMELY time consuming and expensive to make they’re the most expensive component of the game by some distance.

Given we’re only going to get about 50% of the money pledged after KS fees and the costs of manufacturing and shipping the rewards, there’s no way we can put an extra tileset in the game for a $25k stretch goal, I’m afraid.