Xenonauts Enters “Polishing Phase”

It looks like Xenonauts is getting closer to release, at least according to this forum post from project lead Chris England, which announces the game’s entered its “polishing phase”. I can say I’m looking forward to the official release:

Today Giovanni put in the updated victory / loss screens, and the artist is working on the final artwork for these (they currently use draft versions of it). Aaron and I also finished designing the unique tiles and the layout work on the final mission; this is just awaiting final balance and the 2D paintovers of the existing art / floor. Xenonauts is now nearly complete, and theoretically at that point we could kick it out of the door whenever we wanted.

However, “complete” is not the same as “finished”. I’m aware there is still work to be done on usability, balance, optimisation and stability. That will all take place during the polishing phase, which will last until we’re happy with the final quality of the game.

V21 Stable will mark us entering the polishing phase, and we’ll be changing our development methodology a little:

• We will completely reset our bug trackers, and ask people to report any issue they experience with the game no matter how small or how many times it may have been reported in the past.
• We will be setting up a public issue tracker, which will list and prioritise all bugs / issues that are on our radar (only we will be able to add issues to this).
• The Beta Discussion, Community Involvement and Suggestions forums will be merged into a Balance Discussion forum, as they’ll overlap quite heavily.
• We will remove the Experimental bug reporting forums.
• We’ll also be starting to get the Kickstarter rewards printed up!

We’re hoping that these changes will make everything a bit more efficient, removing some of the repetition from bug reporting and stopping important / annoying issues from falling between the cracks. We’re almost certainly not going to be able to fix all of the issues on our public tracker, but the added visibility should help the feedback process greatly.

Thanks, RPGWatch.