The Making of X-COM book

Thanks for all the support everyone! On to more X-COM news, David Craddock is writing a book about the making of the original game, which I figured fans would be interested in. From the author’s own words:

Monsters in the Dark: The Making of X-COM: UFO Defense tells the story of the early years of legendary strategy game designer Julian Gollop and the making of the original X-COM, and is funding now on Kickstarter.

The standard edition will be available from retailers, but the special edition is exclusive to the Kickstarter and contains some bonus content (including an interview with yours truly). So if you need to know everything about X-COM, go check it out.

Edit: Second chance to get the book on Indiegogo.

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Patreon

Hello everyone. This is SupSuper writing to you personally, not as representative of OpenXcom. No light-hearted tone, jokes, or any of the usual stuff. This is a serious post so I don’t wanna waste your time.

I’m sure you’ve noticed my contributions to OpenXcom have been pretty rare lately. Sadly my life has had to take priority, OpenXcom is a hobby I work on in my spare time, my income comes from working full-time as a programmer and it’s very difficult to keep both up without taking a toll on my mental health. I am as sorry about this as much as you, I love my community, I do my best to keep myself available whenever possible, and I hate letting you all down like this.

To make matters worse, 2020 has been a rough year on everyone and I’ve been running into financial difficulties. I talked it over with some friends and they suggested setting up a Patreon. This lets you donate to me monthly, helping support me and my hobbies like OpenXcom. It’s like a subscription, only there are no hidden penalties, you can start, change and stop donations at any time.

So if you’ve been a fan and have money to spare, consider donating to my Patreon and spread the word. You’d be surprised how every little helps. At worst, you will help alleviate my financial troubles. At best, I could work full-time on this and more remakes, without having to juggle jobs. I can’t guarantee you’ll get anything out of it but I’ll be eternally grateful and I’ll do my best to meet your expectations.

If you don’t care I fully understand, I’m not trying to guilt you or ask for charity, just trying to figure out ways to help both of us. This will be my first and last time asking for personal donations on this website. I’d rather keep this related to OpenXcom or more charitable causes. Here’s a FAQ, if you got more questions just ask:

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Extra Life 2019

Time for the yearly tradition again. I play old games live, you can’t believe what you’re watching, the kids get paid!

Extra Life is a charity that raises money for the Children’s Miracle Network hospitals via streamers all around the world. Including us! Check their website for more details.

How to join:

  • Stream starts at Nov 2rd 12pm GMT and spans 24 hours (or until I fall asleep). Usually starts with old games and ends with X-COM, so there’s something for everyone.
  • Subscribe to the Twitch channel to be notified and watch when it goes live.
  • Donate here and spread the word!
  • Join the Discord if you wanna talk, don’t be shy! Or do be shy and just hang around in chat. Feel free to ask me questions and/or make fun of me.
  • This FAQ is still handy.

Edit: Stream’s over. Thanks everyone for watching and donating, we raised $490! If you missed it, here’s the recording. You can use the Chapters dropdown to skip to X-COM if you want.

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Another year, another Extra Life stream

Extra Life is a charity that raises money for the Children’s Miracle Network hospitals. We promote it by playing games live, you donate to help sick kids, everyone wins!

Sadly I had to miss last year’s, but this year I’m gonna try and make up for it by going for a full 24h. That’s right, twenty-four hours of me playing old PC games and probably being really bad at them! You can’t miss it!

Here’s what you need to know:

  • Stream starts at Nov 3rd 12pm GMT and ends at Nov 4th 12pm GMT (hopefully).
  • Subscribe to the Twitch channel to be notified when it goes live.
  • Send your generous dollars to the donations page and spread the word!
  • Join the Discord if you wanna be a co-commentator, otherwise just hang around in chat.
  • This FAQ is still handy.
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Do use the (new) Mod Portal

Sorry about the recent silence, we’ve been working hard on restoring the status quo. Case in point, we now have a shiny new mod portal hosted by the fine folks at mod.io. Click below to check it out and spread the word to your fellow modders to upload their work there:

It’s by the same people that have been running Mod DB all these years, so hopefully it should be more reliable than the last one. 😉 I heartily recommend it to any other indie / open-source games looking for a mod platform that doesn’t tie them down to a storefront.

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