Howdy hunters,
Here is our weekly status update, including what we’ve been up to at Expansive Worlds.
Sneakathon 2016
So, yesterday we launched a new hunting event which we’re planning to run every year – Sneakathon 2016. We combined a couple of tough challenges, featuring some of our most spooky species, into a set of missions for all non-competitive souls as well as a final Roe Deer competition. The feedback for the event has been very positive so far, which makes us happy campers. To help you out in the Sneakathon, we reduced the price on all Sneaky 3D clothes by 50%, which is even cheaper than our regular bundles. In the spirit of sneakiness, there’s also a brand new fall leaf camo variation of our favourite Ghillie suit, designed by Gostwind in our 2014 outfit competition!
Player Survey
Here’s a reminder that the player survey we launched last week is running until the end of this week. The number of entries so far has been overwhelmingly high, but we’re still missing a couple of thousand opinions. Your opinion counts, so please take the opportunity to share it with us. You only have one opportunity per year, and we’re looking forward to discovering the results.
Lock&Learn – Deer Diary
As you may remember, two weeks ago we started a regular live-streaming project, Lock & Learn. Our community intern Johanna is learning the ropes of theHunter and sharing her journey with everyone in weekly Twitch streams. Without question, theHunter is a challenging game with a rather steep learning curve, which can be overwhelming for new players, so with this project we wanted to show (in an entertaining way) how one takes their first steps in the game, learns from their mistakes and evolves into a bad-ass hunter. Johanna has already completed two streams, you can catch a recap of her first episode, The Moose Karma, here, and here is the recap of her second one, Deer Diary – watch it carefully and enjoy it thoroughly 😉
Unfortunately there will be no stream today, but next week Johanna will be joined by our veteran hunter ForstHeld, and a little birdie told me they will take to the fields of Hirschfelden where Forst will give Johanna some Red Fox hunting lessons. Anyway, hope to see you on next Thursday at 16:00 CEST on Expansive Worlds’ Twitch channel.
Next week’s free species
We are continuing our experiment with free species rotation, and tomorrow Brown Bear and Moose will become premium again, while Alpine Ibex and Wild Boar will be free to hunt for the next 7 days. From next week onward the free species rotation will occur from Thursday to Thursday.
Team news
And now on to some team news. In the last few months, theHunter squad has undergone many changes. A bunch of people have left us and many more have joined. So, today we’re saying goodbye to our awesome animator Hampus, who has been with us for three years and has done some amazing work. The best of the best including the ibex fighting and labrador retriever animations. Good luck Hampus, you’ll be missed!
No goodbyes without hellos, and today we’re also welcoming a new member into the theHunter family. His name is Kristoffer and he’ll be working with us in the capacity of tools programmer, a completely new role for Expansive Worlds. Kristoffer’s work will be happening deep down behind the scenes, as he’ll be optimizing our engine tools to make the jobs of our programmers, artists and designers more efficient. Read Kristoffer’s intro below and say hello to him, although you won’t feel the direct impact of his work, what he does is extremely important and had a significant impact on the end result.
Hello there!
My name is Kristoffer Bergman and I’ve just joined Expansive Worlds as a Junior Tools Programmer.
I come from a small village near Lund in Skåne and just recently moved to Stockholm. At the age of 16 I made my first “game”: a console based “Hangman” in Java that I made during summer vacation, and seeing my brothers play around with it and having fun just felt amazing. The “I made this, they like it, they are happy because of me” feeling was absolutely addicting, so naturally I was gonna spend the rest of my life at my computer, programming.
Fortunately for me, this didn’t come with a particularly big life change. Spending unhealthy amount of time by the computer has for a very long time been a big part of my life, and I have been playing video games ever since I got my first Gameboy Colour.
Until I found a job to have as an excuse for programming 24/7, my path was unclear. During my early school years, I was the go-to-guy before any math or natural science test to explain things, and I ended up really enjoying to help people understand how stuff works. I love programming just as much as helping people, so I dreamt of becoming a teacher as well as becoming a programmer.
Then I found The Game Assembly, which had a program in Game Programming. I didn’t even realise that “Game Programmer” was an actual job. When I got in, my dream of becoming a programmer was about to be fulfilled. The only downside was that this meant I wasn’t gonna become a teacher and help people. However, one day at one of our school projects, the content creators were annoyed because their tools weren’t working. I helped them solve it and ever since then I know that til the day I die, this is what I want to do.
We are finishing this status update with a short video about our parent company, Avalanche Studios, in which some members of the Expansive Words’ team have been spotted. I thought it would be interesting for you guys to see where we work and put some faces to names of those who work on the game, and who you (hopefully!) love 🙂 Enjoy!
Happy hunting!
Share this
