UFO: The Two Sides 2 Windows game

About UFO The Two Sides 2.X.

A fan's attempt at reimagining how certain old-school types of strategy/tactical games could play were they made with multiplayer in mind. Humans against Aliens. There have been quite a few of those, all of them dating back to one particularly famous and excellent UFO game.

A short history and why the term "2.X".

UFO: TTS had started as a private solo project around 2009. The goal was to create a game for a small circle of friends to play with. Releasing it publicly had not been a consideration at that time. However, as development continued, I'd come into contact with other fans of the game. As such, the enthusiasm for a game in this genre was fairly high, which led to the decision - try and release it. Of course, this meant a new problem had arisen - as a solo developer interested only in coding – rather than the graphical aspect – I did not worry about creating the sprites and textures - those would come from other sources. And, as long as the project was private, it did not seem like it would present an issue. This changed with the decision to release it publicly. Thankfully, I had met a few great people who helped me; in particular Rom and Nirven. With their assistance, we started a small team and continued with the development by proceeding to create the graphics from scratch.
Around 2010 or 2011, rumors and subsequently official statements began appearing, which claimed a true remake of a certain famous UFO game was in development. At the same time, my personal plans had changed. I won't go into too many details, but both of those events combined resulted in fear of legal consequences for our project. Even with graphics assets being created from scratch, they quite closely resembled the assets from that aforementioned famous game (which was, of course, intended - to have a certain old-school feeling similar to that game). This led to another decision. And that was to close the entire project and go back to the roots; private solo ventures. Development had been put on hold, then resumed a few times. Now it's 2024 and, in the end, the game is finally finished. As such, I have nothing left to do with it. So, it came down to one of two choices: either forget about it and perhaps play an odd game from time to time, or release it once again and hopefully offer someone a bit of fun. I chose the latter.
To touch upon the version number, the "2" simply indicates it's quite a different game now.

The differences with the previous version are as follows:

- gameplay, while similar to the old version, has seen a lot of changes.
- a lot of bug fixes related to synchronization issues, crashes, features not working etc.
- quite a lot of new additions that I won't spoil for now, but they make the experience fairly different compared to the previous iteration of TTS.
- a big rebalancing pass changed a lot of ingame dynamics

Version 2 also has shortcomings, which are important to understand before downloading:
1) There was no attempt to make the game feel modern or intuitive to play. There is severe lack of basic functionalities such as ingame options to change settings - everything needs to be done manually in a configuration file.
2) There are no graphics at all. This makes the game – in its current state - technically unplayable. My hope here is that enthusiastic fans will create the graphics and/or sound packs which will allow this project to be playable while remaining free of legal repercussions. Alternatively, you can try importing assets from the old project, although the many changes may make this difficult to achieve. All graphics and sound files are in open formats which are easy to replace.

The second bulletpoint is very important. As a solo developer, the decision was made not to publish any content not created in its entirety by myself. This way I'm 100% certain of the legality of the project.
While the development is complete, I am not ruling out updating the game if any new bugs or issues arise. However, please understand that no ports to other systems are planned. Game won't be open source either.

Lastly, I'd like to thank Rom and Nirven for their support, MetalCanyon for reigniting the spark that led to finishing the game and Misterjopper and BratGronflo for having the patience to further test the game.

Disocrd: Discord.gg