Gameblog : First, can you tell us how Xenonauts improved these last months ? And what is the next big milestone for you ?

Goldenhawk Int. : Xenonauts is coming along very nicely, thanks. We've just released our beta candidate to our pre-orderers today, and we're going to be making fixes and lots of usability improvements to it in the near future. The game isn't finished yet, but we've moved the emphasis of development from adding fundamental systems and content to concentrating on the user experience, appearance of the game and overall gameplay fun. This has only just happened so there's still a lot of work to do, but it's a really nice milestone for the project.

I suppose you played 2K's XCOM, what's your take on it ? What did you like/did not like ?

I played a lot of the new XCOM when it came out, and I enjoyed it very much. I actually wrote a short essay on what I thought was good and bad about it (here, if you can read English) but to summarise it, I thought it was very well produced and captured the spirit of the old X-Com while removing quite a lot of the complexity that made the first game inaccessible. It did very well financially and I'm happy to see that; I think it has sparked a lot of interest in the turn-based strategy genre too.

There were a few design decisions I didn't like, though. For example, the way that the aliens seem to pop into existence when revealed and then get a free move I thought encouraged the player to turtle defensively rather than explore a map and risk "activating" additional aliens, which limited the tactics. I also think the strategic layer was too heavily simplified for my liking, as it was basically just a glorified mission selector.

I can see why they did that, though - Firaxis' XCOM is about making everything a choice. That's why you can only ever do one mission of three, and why the character skill trees always have two possible options when you level up. It does that very well, but then it loses the flexibility of a more open-ended game like the original X-Com. But the advantage of the simplified system is that you can have better balance and the game is easier to understand, whereas an open-ended game is very hard to balance the game and stop luck having a major effect on the player's game. Given what they wanted to achieve with the game (i.e. appeal to more than just strategy purists), I think they made the right decision. But personally as a strategy purist I do miss the complexity of the original game.

Did XCOM change Xenonauts's development in any way ?

I don't think it changed our development that much, as Xenonauts was fairly well formed before XCOM was announced and it quickly became apparent that Xenonauts and XCOM were going to be very different games - they made a more innovative remake of the game, and we've made a more faithful one. I suppose it might have encouraged us to be a bit more faithful to the original game than we would have otherwise (to make sure there was differentiation between the games) but I don't think it had too much of an effect.

Do you think XCOM success will have an impact on Xenonauts own success ?

Ironically, our best month of (non-Kickstarter) sales was the month that XCOM released. I think the fact that they increased interest in the X-Com franchise and the turn-based genre helped us a lot, and the fact that they changed a lot of the original game meant that a lot of hardcore fans saw us as the "true" remake instead. To be honest, though, I think that these days people have enough money to buy two games if they think they'd like to play both of them, and I don't really see them as our direct competitors. My only concern would be that if major magazines aren't interested in writing about us or reviewing the game because there's a "real" X-Com game out there already, I really hope that doesn't happen!

You've been on Desura since 2010 now. Have considered Steam's Early Access feature ?

Yes. We've been chatting to Steam about this and we're provisionally planning to launch on Early Access in the next six weeks. We'll have an updated demo for people to try when we do so too!