As mentioned in the status update earlier this week, we have had some new people joined us lately, one of which is still to be announced officially – this person is Pim Holfve, who as of yesterday joined the team as new CEO, taking over after me. But don’t worry – I’m not leaving – I merely change my role to CTO of Expansive Worlds, to focus solely on, what I do best, the technical development of theHunter. In turn this means that going forward there will be more time and resources available for development of new game features, improvements, web, infrastructure, and other technical goals we want to achieve.

As for the CEO role, I leave it in Pim’s much capable hands. Read more about Pim in his introduction post here.

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Now this is the story all about how
My life got flipped, turned upside down
And I’d like to take a minute just sit right there
I’ll tell you how I became the intern (and later employee) of a company called Expansive Worlds

First of all, I should probably introduce myself to those of you who don’t know who I am (for the record, shame on you if that’s the case). My name is Daniel Gutierrez Gustafsson, but people call me Danny, and I’ve been a game programmer here at Expansive Worlds for over a year now, first as an intern and now as an employee.
I think it’s time for me to post a picture of myself:

Gosh, I love that one.

I’m an avid gamer. I’ve played computer games since I was a kid. That’s probably why one beautiful day for four years ago I decided I would become a game programmer. Why not an graphic artist you ask? Well, good question. And the answer is that my graphical skills are as good as a programmers, coder art with other words.

I started studying game programming after the summer of 2009, and after two years I got an internship here at Expansive Worlds. I must say that those two years were in hardcore mode, studying six to seven days a week and at least 10 hours a day. But anyway…

Since I started working with theHunter I’ve been doing a lot of different things, but one of those things that I would like to go into detail is the auto/manual reload feature.

One day, after finishing a task,  I decided to implement a feature a lot of people in our community asked about; the possibility to manually reload a weapon instead of being forced to reload after shooting.
I assumed it couldn’t be that hard to implement. Big mistake.
Since I didn’t think it would be that hard, I just started working on it right away on the main branch. Usually, we use different branches of the code base (or graphic resources for the artists) depending on how much time the feature will take. For example, something like a new environment is made in a different branch than let’s say, the next weapon to be released, because the weapon probably goes live earlier than the environment. The main branch is the one that is used for the features that will go live in the next game update.

I personally thought that implementing this feature wouldn’t take longer than a couple of days. So wrong I was.
Long story short, the way things worked at the time made it pretty hard to implement the manual reload without breaking other things (often the auto reload).
After a week or so I realized that we had to change some animations for some weapons. We had to remove all the cycling, pumping and cocking/decocking animations from the reload animations (since they were in the same animation), and have them by themselves.
At this point I couldn’t just roll back all the work I had done (since it worked for almost all the weapons and because I had been working on it for over a week), so I had to ask José, our animator, to drop whatever he was doing at the time and help me fix the animations. This wasn’t problem free either, and after a week of going back and forth with them we decided that they were good enough.

Before releasing something live we always let our beta team test everything we do, so we released it to them. They found a lot of bugs, so I just sat and fixed them one by one. I think this took probably another week.

Finally, we released the game update with the auto/manual reload feature. It wasn’t perfect (I remember some bugs that found its way to live), but it was good enough.

This feature took me almost three weeks to implement, instead of two days. So what did I learn from this? Well, never assume anything. Things will never go smooth, they will always take at least π-times what you thought beforehand.
But now I know.

tl;dr: I <3 U!

Until next time
Gangnam Style,
Danny.

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Hello all this is Robert speaking, newly appointed CEO of Expansive Worlds taking over after Stefan.
In case you didn’t know, I have been on the team for some time already, since december 2011 to be exact, as responsible for our web, server and game engine development. During this time I have been working very close with Stefan, and as sad as it is that he has left us I am at the same time very excited about taking his seat. Plenty has happened already since I first got here, still it feels like we have just begun. I for one have tons of ideas – and so does the rest of the team – and we have lots of great new things in the pipeline for you. I strongly believe that now and going forward will be the most interesting time yet for theHunter.

Now this is a Dev Blog entry so lets get a bit more personal. I have been pretty much flying under the radar until now, in terms of being active publicly in the forum, and I think most of you haven’t really had the chance to get to know me. Daniel started a thread in the forum a couple of days ago asking what you would like us to write about, and what you would like to know about us and what we do. I like that idea and figured some Q&A’s would be a good way for you to get to know me a bit better. Below are some of the questions from the thread and answers from my point of view.

Q: Where do you see the future of The Hunter going?
A: I see theHunter growing its user base, as well as growing in terms of content and features, to truly become the best and biggest online hunting game there is.

Q: Do you play the game?
A: It depends on how you see it. I don’t play much on live, but I do enjoy it a lot the times I do. However, developing a game obviously involves a lot of testing, which means most of us do play a lot, just not on live and perhaps not always the way you normally play the game. Sometimes we all play at the same time in the office to test and play around with new features. Also when we change to a new season most of us play, because that’s the only time its even slightly possible to make it in the leader board, even if its just for a brief moment ;-).

Q: Are you active on the Forum?
A: Yes, we all are. I don’t post that much, and some post even less than I do, but we all read the forum and follow what’s being discussed. It’s a good and instant way to get feedback, and as an example we do catch a lot of bugs and problems through the forum.

Q: What’s the motivation to work as a developer for a hunting game
A: I did not join the team because its a hunting game, I joined because it was (and is) in many ways a very interesting and different project compared to other games. We utilize the web a lot, and much of the technology we use is very modern, even cutting-edge (in some areas), so for me coming from an IT/web-background rather than Gaming it was a perfect match.

Q: Post a picture of yourself
A: I suppose it’s fair to see who you are dealing with, check out my linkedin profile https://www.linkedin.com/in/robertarnesson

Q: How do you prioritize, and how do you deal with constantly changing priorities?
A: Prioritizing can sometimes be difficult as I always have more on my table than I can handle. Overall I try to follow a “lowest hanging fruit” type of strategy, which simply means to prioritize the things that will have the most impact in relation to the time needed. But sometimes you have to make time investments and break this strategy, and sometimes you might even prioritize something simply because its fun (and thus may be worth doing right away).

Q: What did you have for breakfast in the morning?
A: Every friday there is catered breakfast at the office. Other days there is always fruit, nuts, bread, müsli, and whatnot free for all (and great coffee too btw) so I usually don’t eat much breakfast at home, perhaps just a “knäckebröd” on the fly in the car.

Q: How long does it take to walk to work, and do you prefer walking or the bus?
A: I think I’m the one living closest to the office (approximately 4 km), yet I’m the only one driving to work. I love anything on 2 or 4 wheels

That’s all for now folks, happy hunting!

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