Xenonauts Kickstarter Project Updates #1-2, $50,000 and Counting

Xenonauts Kickstarter fundraising drive has reached its $50,000 goal in less than a couple of days, which prompted the team to post two updates as the numbers went up, first when they hit $40,000, and then when the project was fully funded. Here’s an excerpt from the latter, where the team talks about stretch goals:

We’re also thinking about stretch goals. The current thinking is that we’ll do a Mac / Linux port of the game if we raise $100,000, and we’ll add female soldiers at $200,000. We’re still looking into the practicalities of both of these, so this is not yet confirmed.

It appears our engine will support Mac natively with a bit of work, but for Linux we’ll have to bundle it with a wrapper. We’re letting someone have a look at our source code with a view to porting it, but we also need to work out how we’re going to handle things like development builds. Ideally we’ll put out all development builds on all three platforms, but we need to figure out the specifics before we confirm the stretch goal.

For the female soldiers, these will appear on the Soldier Equip screens with female faces and more feminine Basic Armour art (all other armour is too bulky to show off the differences between the genders). In the ground combat, they will appear the same as the male soldiers, except for female sound effects (without going into too much detail, this is due to sprite issues).

The main problem with this is actually the portraits – our character artist is extremely overworked and doesn’t have time to do the 20-30 new female portraits we’ll need. We’re doing some tests to see if other artists can match his style before we confirm this stretch goal. If one of them can do so convincingly, female soldiers will be go.

We’re setting it at $200,000 because we think that it is an achievable target, but one that would be fantastic for us to hit. Even after Kickstarter have taken their cut and we’ve paid for all the rewards, we think it’ll be enough for us to form a physical studio. Being in the same room would make life so much easier for us as we finish off the game.

Finally, we’re also looking at adding a “Force Soldier” option into the game, where you can enter a name in the game options and if a pre-set soldier with that name exists, they will appear in your starting squad of 12. Should ensure that anyone who has paid to go in the game will actually get to see themselves!