The wait is over, the 11th of the Evergreen Hunting Reserves, Timbergold Trails, inspired by the stunning Rocky Mountains, is here and should be downloading onto your PC as we speak.
A couple of quick points before you delve into this glorious fall environment.
There are five species currently residing in Timbergold Trails – Mule Deer, Grizzly Bear, White-tailed Ptarmigan, Bighorn Sheep and Rocky Mountain Elk. All five species will be on free species rotation until next Thursday, October 27th.
There are a currently some known issues with the reserve (you can find the detailed list in “In Progress” part of the Game Update). We will continue working on those as well as polishing and tweaking the reserve, we are planning to release a patch as soon as possible. So, if you encounter any rough edges, please don’t sweat it, just report them in the forum and we will jump on them!
We are running a promotion campaign until Monday, October 24th, during which time you will get Deployable Hunting Towers when buying 2000, 3000 and 5000 em$ – 1, 2 and 3 towers respectively. Hopefully they will come in handy in the vast wilderness of Timbergold Trails!
Just a short update from us this week since it’s all hands on deck here in the studio as we near completion of the eleventh reserve of the EHR!
Rocky Mountain Elk
Meet the next new inhabitant of Timbergold Trails, the upcoming Rocky Mountain inspired reserve. The majestic Rocky Mountain Elk. All screenshots are work in progress and actual models may be subject to change prior to release.
Compound Showdown 2016
The results are in and it’s official, team Pulsar took the win. Well done and thank you to everyone who participated, regardless of which team you joined. The prizes and trophies have now all been awarded. We hope you enjoyed the event!
Pre-release livestreams
You’ll soon get an opportunity to see Timbergold Trails with your own eyes. As tradition dictates, we’ve planned a series of pre-release livestreams. Once again, with the help of hunters from our wonderful international community, we’re able to offer the livestreams in three languages – English, German, Spanish and Italian! Here’s the video announcement of the English livestream, and below, you can find the dates, times and details of the streams in other languages.
There will be no Lock&Learn session this week, since Johanna is tied up with preparations for the upcoming Timbergold Trails pre-release livestreams. Normal Lock&Learn schedule will resume next week.
Holidays
I’m heading off on holiday from the middle of next week, so for the next 3 weeks it will be Philipp and Johanna that will keep you updated. I apologise in advance, but will not be able to respond to private messages or forum posts during this time
That’s it from us this week. We hope to see you all on the livestreams. Happy hunting!
As our new reserve with all its residents slowly but surely reaches completion, we’ve been having long discussions about a name that would do proper justice to its shimmering beauty. I’ve gone through all of your suggestions, numerous times, and presented a dozen of the best ones to the rest of the team. In the end, we settled on Timbergold Trails. We thought that it nicely represented the colours and the “wooden” look and feel of the new reserve, had a nice melody to it and fit well with the rest of our location names. Congratulations to Raphael202, who suggested “timbergold pass” which we also liked, but later decided that Trails has a nice alliteration with Timbergold plus we do have oodles of trails in the new reserve. As a thank you for this suggestion, Raphael202 will receive the honourary Contributor membership status, together with the coveted Almost DEV jacket, as well as a store item of their choice (please contact me via forum PM to claim your reward).
The art team is now working on the reserve emblem, which will be revealed later, but here is a question for you. What do you think it will show?
The lady is ready!
Today we are finally, finally thrilled and psyched to show you the gem of Timbergold Trails (well, at least in my humble opinion). The beautiful bighorn sheep. Mattias has at last battled their horns and made these sneak peek screenshots for you to enjoy. Oh boy, I can’t wait!
Ask Us Anything
Thank you everyone who submitted their questions on the Ask Us Anything thread. We’ll go through them and reply to whatever we can in the upcoming weeks. The engagement on this one was great, as always, thanks for staying so interested in the nitty-gritty of your (and our) favourite game and keeping us on our toes!
Compound Showdown competitions
The second stage of our Compound Showdown event – competitions – started yesterday, so it’s time to grab that compound bow of choice once again and defend your team’s honour. The competitions are pretty hard-core, as no callers, scents or platforms are allowed, so a lot of hunting skills and patience will be put to test. The last gift from our game designer Daniel to all of you who appreciate true hunting challenges 😉
My Hunting Shop update
The My Hunting Shop competition ended last week and the beautiful Beretta backpack is already on its way to the winner – dools24, who must be one happy Aussie right now. You can find the final leaderboard here.
Our partners My Hunting Shop have also kindly offered a 10% discount for all our players. You can claim it with the code TheHunter2016 on their site. Please note that the code applies to purchases between 100 and 600 Euro and is only valid until December 20th within Europe.
The Stallion in the Store
Finally, if you missed it yesterday, The Stallion, the premium version of our powerful .45 Long Colt Revolver is finally available in the store. Go check it out.
First of all, be sure that you pick your bow team in our Compound Showdown event that started yesterday. You have until October 5th to complete one of the qualifying missions, get a lovely trophy and a ticket that will guarantee you entry to the competition phase which starts next week. When it’s over, we’ll finally be able to put an end to the constant fighting about which compound bow is better; Snakebite, Parker Python or Pulsar. All the compound bows, except the two new variations of Pulsar, are on sale throughout the whole event.
Rockies
The testing phase of our Rockies-inspired reserve is in full bloom, and today we’re ready to show you yet another upcoming resident. The Grizzly Bear, rwah! Please note that these screens are work in progress, and the fur textures will look different in the game.
Here’s the last call if want to make a suggestion for a name for the reserve. Submit your entry in this thread before the end of the day today CEST, then the thread will be closed and we will set out on the fun quest of picking the best of the names.
The Team
Finally, you’ve probably noticed that our team has changed quite significantly over the last year. You can find almost all of our current devs (except for our Customer Service Manager David Lucas) in the best of their looks on this picture (click to enlarge):
(top row, from left to right)
Patrik Andersson – Client Programmer
Morris Belfrage – Animator
Johanna Schramm – Marketing Coordinator
Magnus Eckers – Frontend Developer
Kristoffer Begman – Tools Developer
Emil Bjurström – Backend Programmer
Robin Andersson – Client Programmer
Calle Gustafsson (behind the skull) – Backend Programmer
Gregoire Iwaniec – Sound Designer
Alena Rybik – Community manager
Dennis Borg – QA manager
Sacha Karsenty – User Acquisition Manager
Ami Jansson – 3D Artist
(bottom row, from left to right)
Moe Awira – Animator
Roberto Mangiafico – Lead Client Programmer
Philipp Strecker – Producer
Carl-Oscar Löhn – Client programmer
Mattias Nordin – 3D Artist
Marcus Tuomi – 3D artist
Ask Us Anything
And for you to get to know the team a bit better, we’ve decided to do another Ask Us Anything! I’m sure some of you have had quite a few questions sitting in your heads that you would like to ask different members of theHunter devs team, so here’s your chance. You can direct your questions to the whole team or specify which developer you’d like to reply and I’ll do my best to coordinate the team’s response efforts by relaying the questions to right people.
The AUA thread will be open from now on until Monday, October 3rd 2016 12:00 CEST. All questions will be moderated and supervised by myself and the moderation team. I’ll do my best to get you the answers to your questions by within a week of the AUA session closing.
No tech support and bugs related questions, as these usually require a thorough personal investigation and we have specific channels for those type of queries (customer support and Bug Reports forum)
Try to avoid opinionated questions, eg. ”Why does the new gun suck?”
Do not repost your question multiple times
All questions may be asked, but not all questions may be answered, although we’ll do my best to reply to everything we can. If I the answer is unknown or can’t be revealed, I’ll let you know. Questions will be answered not necessarily in the order in which they’re posted.
The magnificent environment of our 11th reserve is almost complete. It’s the polishing that’s left, and for our art, animation and programming crafts it’s all hands on deck working on the species. My hope was to share with you a couple of screenshots of the Bighorn Sheep today, however it looks like we’re running into some problems with the horns of those ladies, so I’ll have to keep you hungry with these lovely Whitetailed Ptarmigans and will hopefully show you more wonderful beasts next week!
We’re still collecting suggestions for the reserve name here. Please’ share your best ideas!
Heavy Recurve Bow by InstinctiveArcher
On Wednesday we released a new bow, inspired by the real life creation built by our community member InstinctiveArcher. We are super proud and honoured to have it featured in the game and we really hope to have more community content of this calibre in the future. Apropos the bow, and especially for you competition junkies: if you’ve tried it out already. you probably noticed that it’s slightly more powerful than other two Recurve Bows. Based on this, we were contemplating not allowing it for the same competitions, but instead creating a separate category for it. We are interested to hear whether you think this is a reasonable and fair decision, and we look forward to your feedback on that 🙂
Game Patch
With our game patch yesterday we also released changes to the Ptarmigan behaviour and pop-ups for missing licenses that we thought could benefit from more in-depth explanation, so I asked our producer Philipp to share some insights and details on those changes:
Ptarmigans’ behaviour change:
The new behaviour of our beloved little ptarmigans is somewhat of a small game development dream come true to me, so I want to share a bit of backstory for it.
Some weeks ago, our client programmer Patrik was working on the fleeing behaviour of the Ptarmigan as they started hiding on the ground too early or had a couple of problems when flying away. Being the thorough programmer that he is, he dove deeper into the code.
Together with Carl-Oscar he discussed his findings and it created an urge in them to get more out of the untapped potential of the flying bird with the hilarious call. They teamed up to become an unstoppable force of pitching their ideas first to Daniel (he will never be forgotten) and then to the rest of the team. Everybody agreed that what they wanted to do were great additions, so estimations were made and the work began.
Naturally, it took longer than anticipated but yesterday the new behaviour was finally released. What rubbed Patrik and Carl-Oscar the wrong way was that spooking a group of lifelong Ptarmigan friends shatters the relationship among them so profoundly that they never want to meet up ever again. So, they changed it.
Ptarmigans will now reunite with their flock after being spooked, giving their behaviour a more realistic touch and hopefully create some heart-warming reunions. The other thing that bothered them about the well-being of a Ptarmigan is their ability to find food. The poor birds stroll around the same area where they spawn which makes survival quite tough. So, they changed that too.
As a flock, Ptarmigans will now migrate to different areas in different time intervals. This is especially impressive if you are caught off guard and see the flock taking off and flying. We thoroughly enjoyed testing it and getting in a new element of immersion. Personally, I like this story so much because it’s a great example of the passion and dedication of the team. We are not a big team but what we don’t have in numbers we make up for with heart and seeing two programmers researching real life Ptarmigan behaviours and pitching their ideas to the team makes working on this game even more enjoyable.
Missing License Pop Ups:
Another addition from yesterday’s update is a new notification pop-up for missing licenses. We received feedback regarding the previous system on the forums and it resonated with us as a lot of new players don’t receive the help they need to understand the license system.
Thus, Robin worked on a new system that informs you if you are missing the licenses for an animal that you picked up a clue for, spotted or want to shoot. There is a trade off in control, as you have to confirm the pop up but we hope that the current rules don’t make it too intrusive. There is a cool down system so you should only receive one pop-up per species every 5 minutes.
We hope this offers better balance between informing players and maintaining immersion. On a side note, it is possible to alt-tab out of the game, buy a license and continue the ongoing session. The bought license will kick in immediately.
Let us know what you think!
Finally, a new team member is here! Since our animation wizard Dick (you should know him by the brilliant scent hound animations) is currently on parental leave, we needed some more animation force to keep Morris company, and so Moe came on board. Read his info below and say hello in the forums.
Meet Moe
Hello everyone!
My name is Moe Awira and I just moved to Sweden & joined theHunter team as an Animator!
A little about myself, I’m originally from Aleppo city in Syria. I became fascinated with animation when I was 5 years old after I watched Disney’s A Bug’s Life! It was magical to see cartoon characters move and behave like they’re alive and make you sympathize with them!
In 2005 I got my first computer and started playing PC games and teaching myself animation after school using Flash! In 2010 I got my first full-time job as Animator at an animation studio in Amman city in Jordan. Afterwards I worked at several games and animation films in Jordan and Turkey.
Outside of work I enjoy playing games, watching movies, cycling, hiking and camping!
I’m glad to join this awesome team & looking forward to animating my first animal in theHunter!
Yesterday we released the new landing page and sign up process which will hopefully make it easier for new players to join theHunter family and get started with hunting. It didn’t go as smoothly as we had planned (as many of you know) and we are still experiencing some issues with launcher and browser access. You can read more about these issues and how to solve them in the interim, on your end, in our producer Philipp’s post here. We are continuing to work on fixing the remaining issues and will keep you updated in the respective forum thread. Thank you for bearing with us!
The mystery of the .243 Carbon Rifle
Many of you noticed (some within nanoseconds) the non-buyable but sleek-looking .243 Bolt Action Rifle – Carbon in the store, and started speculating as to what was going down. Well, I’ve got two pieces of news for you. One good and one bad. In keeping with tradition, let’s start with the bad. It won’t be buyable. The good news however, is that you can get it for free by verifying your email via Settings. If you do that, in addition to the rifle you will also receive 3 membership days (which will be added to existing memberships) as well as some other items, including a ground blind. Please note that you can only receive those rewards once, even if you change your email address afterwards.
Win the Beretta backpack from My Hunting Shop
Today we’re launching a new competition in collaboration with one of our partners, My Hunting Shop. An online marketplace for all things hunting and outdoors. The competition will take place on Hirschfelden and will last for 15 days, and the winner will receive the super awesome Beretta Modular Backpack 35 l, kindly supplied by My Hunting Shop, sent directly to wherever you live. You can see the bigger brother of our prize backpack “in action” in the video below, and I bet it’ll make you want that bad boy! Top three players on the leaderboard will also get unique trophies. So, go activate the competition and make sure to check My Hunting Shop, they’ve got a bunch of cool stuff there.
Rockies update
As the work on the new reserve continues, we thought it would be a good time to name our baby. So as tradition dictates, we delegate this task to you, our creative community who not only always know better but are brilliant at these things. Think of such masterpieces of names like Whiterime Ridge and Rougarou Bayou.
The rules are the same – come up with a great name that would fit with the existing EHR reserves nicely and represent the uniqueness of the location we showed you in the screenshots and video before. We are looking forward to your creative outbursts – share them in this thread!
Warning! The following announcement may be too graphic for some computers 🙂
On a final note, throughout the development of the new reserve, a lot of time has been spent debating the question of low graphic settings. Each reserve we have made to date has supported low scene complexity. This means every tree, shrub, rock and so on, requires a low-poly model to be created. As everyone knows, graphics technology has advanced leaps and bounds since the release of theHunter, and this is an area that continues to develop rapidly. Unfortunately we cannot afford to be held back by older hardware or system configurations any longer, and we have taken the hard decision to release this reserve with medium, through to very high graphics settings only. It is hoped that this decision will assure a more aesthetically pleasing and polished gameplay experience for the majority and, from an internal development perspective, optimise and streamline the process of creating new reserves and associated assets.
For some time now we’ve been planning to update our landing page, and in particular, streamline the sign up process for theHunter. Our backend developers and artists have been working hard on designing and creating this new functionality and we are soon ready to release the changes.
New players who sign up to create a theHunter account will hopefully experience a much more user-friendly welcome to the game, and will enjoy a new wizard-based, step-by-step process that will guide the player through the first steps of creating their new game account. This will include everything from choosing their avatar and their name, to embarking on their first hunt in the game as they walk through the tutorials to learn the basic controls and game mechanics of theHunter.
Our hope is that this change will help make the sign up process more enjoyable and simple, and that it will encourage new players to follow the tutorials and learn the basics of the game before they begin their hunting careers. After all, we want new players to stick around and enjoy the game as much as our long-term players.
Here are some screenshots of how the new pages will look when they go live next week. Stay tuned for more information.
theHunter Moments – GIF Competition
First off, we want to thank everyone who took the time and put in the effort to create a GIF for the recent community competition. We thoroughly enjoyed watching the GIFs and had a hard time choosing the winners. However, the votes have been counted and the results are in.
Congratulations to the winners and thanks again to everyone who took part! Look out for more community competitions coming soon.
Snap Happy Chappy
We’ve recently created an official theHunter Instagram page. If you have an Instagram account, please follow us for regular snippets of our day-to-day life here at Expansive Worlds. We will share regular highlights and things of interest here at the office, and give you sneak peeks into how we work and who we are. If you don’t have an Instagram account, go create one then follow us – you can find us under @thehunter.game 🙂
Behind the scenes with Marcus & Mattias
As we continue to work hard on making the new Rocky Mountain reserve beautiful and perfect, we thought it might be fun to do a quick Q&A with our talented artists Marcus and Mattias.
Q: What was the most fun part for you to work on this reserve?
Mattias: Working on the firewatch tower, I learned a few new things.
Marcus: To see the reserve starting out as an ugly duckling, with temporary models, textures and materials etc. to then finally, slowly but surely transform into the best looking reserve we’ve managed to create so far.
Q: And the most challenging one?
Mattias: Making the locations look believable, as though someone had worked and lived there once upon a time.
Marcus: If you stand anywhere in the reserve and look in any direction, I still want it to be aesthetically pleasing. But it’s challenging to make it look like a beautiful fall setting and still use these saturated red, yellow and greens, without making it look “clowny”.
Q: What is going to be unique in this reserve in terms of the environment?
This reserve features the most variety when it comes to vegetation, compared to the previous reserves, ranging from big dense conifer forests to open fields, then transitioning into beautiful aspen forests, sparkling with different colors.
Q: What types of vegetation will we see and what made you choose those particular types?
Some examples are ponderosa pine, Douglas fir, red osier bush, quaking aspen, larch and more. Quaking aspen and Douglas fir were obvious choices as they are associated with the Rocky Mountains.
Q: What kind of points of interest will we see in this reserve, and why did you choose those particular ones?
We’ve focused on the lives of the miners during the gold rush era, early 1900, and built the buildings and locations accordingly. We’ve also spent a lot of time with all the props, buildings, vegetation and locations to add to the exploration and keep the players interested.
Q: What inspired you? Did you use references from specific areas?
When we decided on the Rocky mountains we gathered a lot of reference photos of the area in general. Looking at references and slowly seeing everything coming together, as well as receiving all the positive feedback from the community.
Q: What excites you most about the upcoming reserve? What are you looking forward to the most?
Pretty much everything about the new reserve, and releasing it to the public to see the reactions of the players.
No Climbing!
We have read and taken onboard the feedback from the community regarding the climbing mini-game from Val-des-Bois and we want to take this opportunity to assure players that the climbing mini-game will not be making an appearance in the new Rocky Mountain reserve.
There are however no plans to remove the climbing mini-game from Val-des-Bois. Players have invested in ropes and spent time setting them up, and their removal would require us to completely rework the terrain and topography of the reserve.
Hunting Buddies Where Art Thou?
For some time now, as many of you will probably be aware, Johanna has been hosting weekly Lock&Learn livestream sessions. These livestream sessions are a way for her to learn the game, hunt new animals and share her learning experiences with the community, but also to involve players from the community. She has been joined by community members Fletchette, caledonianblues, JackRbbt and other talented hunters, and today we would like to invite anyone from the community who is interested in hunting with Johanna to register their interest using this form. We realise that differing time zones may make it difficult for some players to join, but if anyone can be available at the scheduled livestream time of 16:00 CEST on a Thurdsay, please come forward and put your name down. Johanna doesn’t bite, and we need new hunting buddies for her!
That’s it for today, there will be no patch this week but we are planning one next week, fingers crossed 😉
Welcome to our status update. The work on the new reserve (and the new animals) continues. Our epic Summer Fiesta event is over and you can find the final leaderboards here. Thank you all, let’s do it again next year, until then we’ll make sure that you have plenty other things to do.
Yesterday we released a patch in which we increased the limit of world items. Now you can place 8 tents, 7 deployable hunting towers and 15 tripods, blinds or tree stands, per reserve. We are currently also running a sale on the large equipment in the store, so be sure to take advantage and stock up.
Another big (and sad) piece of news is that this is the last week at Expansive Worlds for our game designer Daniel, so I have asked him to reply to some questions about the design of the new reserve, enjoy!
Behind-the-scenes – Game design
Q: Why a reserve based on the Rockies in the first place?
A: It was very much requested by our players and the entire team got excited by the dramatic landscapes that a Rockies based map could offer.
Q: Is there going to be something unique about this reserve? What would make it special, in comparison to the others?
A: It is our first fall map based on a North American environment. It also features quite lot of exploration opportunities, more than any other map we’ve done before. Added to this is a handful of new species to hunt!
Q: What species are going to live there and can you shed some light on why you chose those specific ones?
A: Well, we always try to add animals that make sense in that particular environment but also glance at what the community wants. When we started with ptarmigans we were already working on the new reserve, so we decided to add the White-tailed Ptarmigan to the lineup. There will also be Bighorn Sheep to keep the White-tailed Ptarmigans company up in the mountains. We know there are a lot of people who want to more goats and sheep in theHunter so that decision was an easy one. The Rocky Mountain Elk was also an easy decision since we know people like to hunt Elk. Then we needed something iconic for the reserve and the vote fell on perhaps the most iconic North American big game animal around. The Grizzly Bear. It also felt like it was time to give the good old Mule Deer somewhere new to hang out so they will roam the map as well.
Q: What excites you most about the upcoming reserve? What are you looking forward to the most?
A: The environments are simply stunning! But I also look forward to something unannounced that will be added to reserve a little bit later after the initial release…
Q: Can you rank theHunter reserves from your most favourite and least favourite? Where do you think the Rockies will fall?
A: I think it has the potential to become my favorite reserve. It’s like a combo of Hirschfelden and Redfeather Falls with some Settler Creeks and Val-des-Bois sprinkled on top!
Q: Since it’s your last week at Expansive Worlds, is there something you’d like to share with the community? Some yet unrevealed secrets or your personal highlights? Start pouring out of your bottomless well of wisdom!
A: 1: Eat your greens. 2: Never accept subpar beer. 3: Listen to the community. Oh and 4: The Mallard Missions are based on fact based factual facts.
Large Equipment Limit Increase – it’s now possible to have up to 15 pieces of large equipment (blinds, tripods, tree stands), 8 tents and 7 deployable towers per reserve.
Bug fixes
Feral hog charge sound fix
Removed figures standing on the ice along the rivers in Whiterime Ridge
