Team XF developer BPzeBanshee began the Game Maker Studio 1.4 port of Xeno Fighters R on 1 January 2019. The project's Game Maker era began on 1 December 2008 in the legacy versions of Game Maker (Game Maker 7/8/8.1). Almost 4 years later, on 22 September 2022, Team XF officially migrated the game project to Game Maker Studio 2 (specifically, version 2022.8 at the date of migration).

Game Maker Studio 2 allows us to do desktop exports to Windows PCs and Linux PCs. There is also support for Mac builds, but none of Team XF has a Mac computer to help us with building Mac versions.

The decision to migrate Xeno Fighters R to Game Maker Studio 2 was reached when Team XF wanted to ensure the game can run in current and future desktop operating systems. Our previous environment, Game Maker Studio 1.4.9999, is the final official version of GM Studio 1 released in April 2018, meaning the software would no longer receive support as YoYo Games shifted their support towards Game Maker Studio 2. We decided that continuing to use an unsupported software would hurt Xeno Fighters R in the long run, as there is a possibility that future versions of desktop OS's would introduce changes that may render Game Maker Studio 1.4.9999 and the games made with it to not run properly, or not at all.

The attached YouTube video shows Xeno Fighters R on a test run in Game Maker Studio 2. While the game runs, the migration into Game Maker Studio 2 created a multitude of compatibility hacks in order to make the game run out of the box, but not without major performance hits, as well as game regressions and crashes due to the major changes between Studio 1.4.9999 and Studio 2. Development time will be spent converting these compatibility hacks into native Game Maker Studio 2 engine features, while we continue to develop content for Xeno Fighters R.