Xenobiome Command started as coloured outlines on a black screen. It's a colony game about holding ground on a feral infested fungal world, and none of that was visible in the first build. Here's what the last nineteen months actually looked like.
Evolution of the main menu:
You could survey an area, claim it, build on it, and lose the colony. That was the whole game.
The map was outlines with numbers in them, and the numbers were the game basically: every area had a survey cost, and Vigor was the only thing standing between you and the fog.
Same systems, first real surface. Spore plains, lots of ash, some water, and the first version of the fog sitting over all of it.
Once the map had texture, a problem showed up immediately. A pretty map that hides its content is worse than an ugly map that shows it, and this one hid almost everything.
Campaign with chapters, a landing zone, a commander, a colonist trait, a difficulty. The seasons went in around the same time, so the drift now had a countdown instead of arriving randomly whenever.
I also tried portrait mode for the game, but that was a horrible idea.
Panels, spacing, and colour got rebuilt on one set of rules instead of sixteen different ones.
The menu split into campaign and scenario, because I started thinking about replayability.
The declutter pass.
Up to this point I added things, and then added more things - now was the time to start cleaning up: badges thin out as you zoom, the resource row became glyph chips you can read at a glance, and the outpost panel became tabs instead of a huge *** wall.
Most of this update was deleting things. It's the change I'd point at first if you asked what the game needed most.
Two campaigns, narrated chapter cutscenes, quests with deadlines that drain Command when you stall, secrets buried in the maps, an uplink tree, and a trait system you spend Vigor on.
The map in that shot is the same Fungal Grid you saw in the first screenshot, nineteen months later. Well... I guess not the same.
The demo runs in your browser, no download: play.xenobiome.net. It's the first six campaign regions plus the tutorial.
The game is NOT meant to play in a browser, so treat that demo with this in mind.
Xenobiome Command releases on 4 November 2026. Wishlisting genuinely helps it get shown to people.
Thanks for reading.
Wishlist on Steam