Hi there hunters,

Welcome to our status update! The depleted force of the theHunter team is making its way through July, sustained by the occasional ice cream and dreams about the beach. Our main work right now is focused around planning the autumn roadmap and features (and oh my, there is some good stuff in there) as well as polishing and testing things that will soon be released for you to enjoy.

Yesterday, a spanking new shotgun made its way into the store. The 10 GA lever-action shotgun. This beautiful firearm packs some no-nonsense power. And while at theHunter we, like no one else, appreciate sophisticated and skilful weapon work, based on correct weapon choice and precise shot placement, we won’t lie and say we haven’t been enjoying this beast of a gun. It’s super fun, and its three ammo types make it extremely versatile. According to our community member JimboCrow, it’s “sweeter than strawberry-rhubarb pie with powdered sugar and a scoop of vanilla!” Long story short, you should try it out. As always, we’re running a special competition to give your first hunts with the new shotgun an extra punch. Enjoy!

At the beginning of the next week we’re kicking off our month-long Summer Fiesta event which will make sure you don’t get bored in the last days of summer. Johanna, David and yours truly, under the eagle eye of our game designer Patrick, have prepared three missions packs for you (easy peasy, nothing to worry about!) and there will be 5 different competitions for all the competitive souls. Our artist Johan has made some brilliant trophies too, well worth your hunting skills! Anyway, make sure to check back next week for more details.

Since we dropped the new animal bomb in the last status update, there have been a bunch of speculations on the forum. Great to see that with 39 unique species in the game, you are still as excited about new additions as ever! I’m happy to report on the progress. Our character artist Cecilia has finished the model and textures and our animator Moe and client code programmers Linus and Roberto are busy crafting some lovely animations and unique (!) AI behaviours. I haven’t seen many correct guesses as to what it so far, so here are some thought-provoking details for you. The 40th resident of the EHR will live on Logger’s Point, Whitehart Island and Rougarou Bayou (preliminary reserves, still subject to change) and our vision is that it will be an extremely challenging animal to hunt. We’ll see where we end up at the end of the development and testing phase though. So, any more ideas? 😉

Finally, I wanted to share with you this sneak peek of the premium feature Luna has been working on. Filling feeders and barrels from the launcher to let you focus on real hunting. Please note that it is still very much work in progress.

Next status update will be published in two weeks, in the meantime, as always, see you and talk to you on the forum!

Happy hunting!

Discussion

Howdy hunters,

Good to see you in our woods! It’s been two weeks since our last status update, hope you haven’t missed us too much, with the new, apparently hugely popular Rustic trophy lodge out and all that. But you know, it’s July outside, and Sweden being Sweden, the action in town is slowly dying out due to the vacation season. We at theHunter are also pretty much decimated by the it, so you will see fewer and less regular updates in the next month (same goes about our support reply times), but we’ll be doing our best keeping you in the loop with the most important things going on in your favourite studio and your favourite game 😉

So, next week we are planning a small game patch with a fix for the longstanding issue of the slow loading inventory and GUI. We are also looking to collect information about other annoying bugs that are making your game experience less enjoyable. Please let us know your top three in this thread and don’t forget the link to the bug report thread on the bug report forums.

This Monday we had scheduled maintenance lasting for a couple of hours during which we moved to a new database all the crazy amount of your kills, achievements and poop found, among other less exciting things. Glad to see you survived that withdrawal. The move went smoothly, with a couple of minor errors that Luna fixed right away. For us this move is a significant infrastructure change, making our backend work more efficient, but you probably won’t notice any changes, except for how the leaderboards are being ordered. Now, if two animals have the same score, the oldest (earliest) kill will take a higher position.

There are a couple of hours left to submit your entry in our game design competition. We have already received a bunch of nice ones, but the door to the fame and glory path (not to mention Contributor title and em$) is still open and our ptarmigans in particular could use some of your love. One of the winning designs of our last challenge (Grizzly missions by drakle) have just been added to the game. We hope you enjoy them!

Finally, to give you something nice to contemplate over the weekend, here are some things we’re working on. Luna has started on the function to fill your barrels and feeders from the launcher to make your life a bit easier, and she is making a great progress so far. Roberto is baking a completely new type of collectables to add an extra level of immersion to game – a little bird told me they’ll even have their own leaderboard – whoa! Patrick is busy crafting insane and wonderful missions and competitions for our regular Summer Fiesta event that is going to start pretty, pretty soon. Linus is taking a stab at a new species. And David is working on a new frontend / backend feature that sometimes makes him cry but will probably be very welcomed by all of you. All in all, we are keeping ourselves busy, and lots of exciting stuff is coming. Thank you for playing and supporting theHunter Classic!

Happy hunting!

Discussion

Hello hunters,

Here is a short status update for you on this fantastic July weekend.

This week we have been busy at work adding some final touches to the new Trophy Lodge (inspired by your feedback) and testing it. As we are already in the final phase, I have managed to get a sneak peek screenshot from Mattias to share with you. We are very happy with the results and look forward to delivering it to you. Stay tuned for more news on the new Trophy Lodge very soon.

In the meantime, we also announced a new Game design competition for the species that are still missing regular missions and competitions. This is your chance to get that competition idea you’ve always wanted into theHunter and bag some pretty awesome prizes to boot. This time, following your suggestions, we have changed the format slightly. All three ptarmigan species will have their own competitions but share the same set of missions. We have also decided that if appropriate, we will pick and choose separate missions and competitions from complete packs, to put together the best of the best collections. Read more details on the competition in this forum thread, looking forward to your designs and ideas!

That’s it from us for now. Be sure to take advantage of our awesome large equipment sale running right now. This is a perfect opportunity to stock up on tents, tree stands, bait sites and other sweet items for your EHR adventures. Community member Mrmr123 has already bought 19 tree stands, but we don’t judge 😉

Happy hunting!

Discussion

Howdy hunters,

Welcome to our weekly status update! Thanks for the great discussion about competitions following the last status update. There are many factors to consider and we have plenty to think about. We’ll be announcing a new game design competition next week and in the meantime, we’re preparing the missions and competitions of the winning entries from last time.

Midsummer in theHunter!

This week is Midsummer week in Sweden, and as promised we’re bringing a part of it to theHunter. For one, all trophy lodges in the EHR now feature special decorations and today, we’re launching a special event in which you’ll get a taste of a traditional Swedish cuisine and compete for some lovely trophies. Details and discussions are here.

.17 HMR Lever Action Rifle

Today we released a new rifle. A beautiful lever action in .17 HMR. It’s the first rifle in game that is ethical for both small game and foxes and we hope it’s going to become your new favourite. Please note that careful shot placement is of paramount importance when taking down foxes with this weapon. It’s also important to take distance into consideration. Following the tradition, we’re kicking off the new weapon by launching a special competition. Time to test that bad boy out on some bunnies.

Team

As there have recently been some changes to theHunter Classic team, we thought it might be a good time to take a new team picture. The game has been going for a long time. Many people have come and gone, each of them leaving behind a part of their work (and heart) in theHunter Classic. You can track the evolution of the team by these pictures:

December 2012
May 2013
February 2014
October 2014
September 2016

And here is the latest version of theHunter Classic family, sans Linus (who is on his day off today), Adam (who is working from the Vietnamese coast) and David (who works from home on a consultancy basis).

(From left to right top to bottom)

Johan Pauli – 3D Artist
Sacha Karsenty – Sales & Partnership Manager
Mattias Nordin – Art Lead
Patrik Andersson – Client Programmer
Cecilia Eriksson – Character Artist
Katarina Schultz – Frontend Programmer
Roberto Mangiafico – Lead Client Programmer
Greg Iwaniec – Sound Designer
Stefan Hoischer – Community Manager
Patrick Enz – Game Designer
Moe Awira – Animator
Johanna Schramm – Marketing Coordinator
Robin Andersson – Client Programmer
Alena Rybik – Producer
Luna Duclos – Backend Programmer

Trophy Lodges Open Day

Finally, there’s a cool community incentive going on right now. Trophy lodges open day! You can express your interest and discuss the details in this thread. Come join us, this is your chance to show off your awesome trophies!

Happy hunting!

Discussion

Hello hunters,

It’s status update time, so grab yourself a cup of hot joe, sit back and enjoy the read!

Last week we released a hefty game update with lots of fixes and a new, long requested feature – functional sunglasses. With that patch we were keeping the promise we made earlier in the year about commitment to quality and trying to maintain a balance between adding new stuff and improving the existing features and gameplay, as well as adding depth to the existing game. We realize we will probably never be able to fix all the bugs that get reported, but we have been and will continue doing our best to provide you with a game that is enjoyable to play. Hence, we’ve spent a lot of time (and Roberto and Luna tore a lot of hairs out) digging into the slow inventory and map loading times which, since the release of the trophy lodge, seemed to have spread to more players. This week, we finally saw what looks like a light at the end of the tunnel. There is still some work to be done before we can deliver it to you, but we are hopeful.

Another thing that has been in the works is a new iteration of the trophy lodge, which has been assigned codename “Rustic”. We took in a lot of the feedback you provided after the release, both when it comes to the gameplay, but also look and feel (thanks INTIMID883R, Fletchette and others!) and we will try to implement as much as possible. More news to come soon!

Yesterday we launched a the new pack of competitions. The Rocky Mountain Elk set, designed by our community member Ash1302. In the meantime, we would like to ask you whether you participate in our regular competitions. If yes, what are you favourite ones? And if no, why you think this is the case. Looking forward to your replies in the status update thread!

Next week Sweden and the rest of the Nordic countries are celebrating the holiday of Midsummer which is a local name for summer solstice. The whole team is off on Friday, eating pickled herrings and drinking snaps, and this year we’re also adding some special Swedish fun to theHunter as well. Come back in the middle of next week for more news on this!

Team news
We have had some team movements over the last weeks. For one, our QA manager Dennis Borg has left us. Thank you for everything Dennis, you will be missed! We also have a new addition to theHunter family now. A front-end developer Katarina has joined us to replaced Magnus, who has been working on theHunter: Call of the Wild for the last months. Katarina has already settled in and is now working on the function to let you visit friends’ trophy lodges when in single player. Read her intro below and say hello 🙂

Hi all, I’m Katarina (Kitty or Kat works just as well) and I’m joining the awesome theHunter Classic team as a Frontend Developer.
 
I’m born and raised in Uppsala which is approximately 40 min by train north of Stockholm. I did however spend 8 years living in London where I worked and also studied music for a short period of time. Apart from playing drums (and of course video games) I also enjoy yoga, cooking and having fun with family and friends.
 
I’m very eager to get to know all of you and to learn and grow with the company and it’s amazing culture.

Survey results
Finally, it’s time to announce the results of our traditional annual survey. This year we collected responses from 5609 people – thank you everyone, the feedback and information you shared are very valuable!

Although we can’t make all the results public, every single response will be evaluated and all answers will be taken into consideration when we decide on our future roadmap. We hope you forgive us for including Trophy Room in it by the way, it was a bit sneaky, but if we hadn’t done it you would have been on to us in no time 😉

Now let’s dig into some data:

* You mostly play to enjoy the game experience and increase your Hunter Score and stats. The third most popular option was to have fun with friends.

* 95.82% of our players would recommend theHunter to a friend – thank you for your support and loyalty <3

* Another sweet number – 92.59% players who have made a purchase in the game would consider buying something again and around 90% think that their purchase offered good or ok value for money.

* 84.06% of all respondents are satisfied, very satisfied or extremely satisfied with our  communication.

* 81.94% of players experience bugs in-game occasionally, seldom or never, whereas about 18.06% often or almost every session.

* Our efficiency at dealing with bugs was evaluated with 7.02 as the weighted average, on a scale from 1 to 10. That is the best result we’ve seen since we started asking this question!

* Over 40% of respondents play mostly single player, with another 25.94% both single- and multi-player.

We’ve randomly chosen 7 players who have filled in the survey and added them 1000 em$ each:
TosaInu
Whiteonyx
Wby257
Spyre9
Zadepam
Laces3345
satancete

–  spend them well!

That’s it from us for today!

Happy hunting!

Discussion