Dear hunters,

The sun is shining in Stockholm so life as a developer is good since we can see other people enjoy it outside.

New feature – Profile shot
Members can now take profile pictures of their character in the game. To take a picture you first activate the mirror cam by pressing F2 (default key) and to enable camera mode you press the space key. You can move the camera around and take the photo by pressing left mouse button. Here are some pretty examples:

Competition
We’ve kicked off a profile shot competition where you can win up to 5000 ems$! Check out the rules and submit your entry here.

New items – sunglasses
If you want to look extra cool in the forest you should of course equip the latest addition to the store: sunglasses. These awesome looking sunglasses will affect game play in no way what so ever, but they will make you look pretty bad-ass.

New functionality – Facebook connect
If you are a Facebook user you can connect your theHunter account to Facebook to make it easier to login. To do so, go to your account settings (the cogwheel in the main menu) and select Facebook settings. Once you’ve connected your account you can use Facebook to login.

We need your help
Since we’re always trying to gain more players we would greatly appreciate if you can help us with voting for us on steam greenlight and also give a great rating and review on Chrome Web Store.
We’d also like to push for the recruit a friend feature. Not only do you get more friends to play with, but you will also get rewarded in the form of free membership if your friend becomes a member (if you’re already a member the extra days will be added to your membership).

Happy hunting!

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It’s status update time!

We’ve just on-boarded three new interns and today’s status update will focus on them and their introductions. They all come from The Game Assembly, the same school as Tomas, Hampus and Danny went to.

Hi, everyone!

My name is Oskar and I’ve just now started my internship at Expansive Worlds, where I will be doing graphical content for theHunter.

I’m originally from Varberg, a small town on the west coast of Sweden, and I’ve lived there for the most part of my life. I like spending time with my girlfriend, family and friends, travelling and practicing my art. I also like watching movies and television shows, which I use as a source of inspiration.

My first brush with video games was Super Mario Bros on the NES in the late ’80s. Ever since, I’ve been hooked. When I was a kid I dreamt of one day being able to work with games but as I grew older I somehow got the idea that wouldn’t be possible while living in Sweden.

So I got into web development but after a couple of years it didn’t feel right. I thought to myself “if I’m gonna spend a third of my life or more working, it should be with something that I really enjoy!” and so, I was drawn back to video games.

In the short time that I’ve been here, I’ve noticed how dedicated many of you are about hunting and theHunter, and also how dedicated the team is to bringing you this experience.
I’m really excited about the opportunity to be a part of that and I promise you all I will do my best!

Hello there!
I am one of the new interns here at Expansive Worlds and I’ve joined the Client Programming team. My name is Robin Andersson and I am 22 years of age and have recently moved to the beautiful capital, Stockholm (totally worth visiting, by the way).

I am originally hailing from Gothenburg but I have also studied and lived in Malmö for two years.
Apart from the obvious, being a game enthusiast, I also love sailing and sports in general. I have trained judo since I was 9 years old until I injured myself badly in a competition at the age of 17. I have participated in the Swedish National Cup but since the injury training has been very off and on. My brother (big fan of theHunter) has also been an important part of my life: So this is a little shout out, I guess. Best guy ever!
For the last two years I have deeply immersed myself in trying to become a good programmer, which now has given me the favorable opportunity to be part of this great team. I will try my best for them, myself and for you out there!

Hi there. My name is Daniel Jansson and I have just started my internship as a Level Designer here at Expansive Worlds. I have always enjoyed the creative process and have worked on pen and paper RPG’s as well as done a fair deal of writing. But a few years back I set my sights on computer game development and managed to get accepted into The Game Assembly in Malmö as a Level Design student.

Two years of intense studies later, I am now sitting in Stockholm working on The Hunter and having a great time. Apart from games I enjoy reading and have a weak spot for really, really bad B and C movies. Also I am a beer nerd, in particular when it comes to the various traditional Belgian style beers. Especially sour beer. Yeah, sour beer is good for you.

So please give the guys a warm welcome!

We’re aiming to release the next gen of the “mirror cam” some time next week and we’re also working on something that might please our guest players.

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User survey
We’ve been busy planning the near and far future, but we realized that we need more of your input so we’ve decided to put up another survey so you can guide us in our future development of the game. The answers in the survey are based on things we feel would benefit the game and is based on our opinions and what we’ve seen been discussed in the forums. Some of the features, listed in the survey, will take a very long time, up to 6 months or more, for us to complete, so don’t expect anything listed there to come anytime soon. We will treat the answers, provided in the survey, as the opinion of the community, so please take the time to fill this out and tell us what you really want by doing it.

Note about filling out the survey: The questions that we want you to rank are a bit tricky. You either select a number (the “alternative” will then change place) or drag and drop the “alternative” to place it where you want it.

Click here to get to the survey

First person animations
As we’ve mentioned in several previous updates, we’re working on improving the first person animations. Since José came back from his paternity leave, he’s been tag-teaming with Hampus, so this process is going a bit faster now. They still have a lot left to do, so don’t expect it to be done too soon, since we have a lot of items in theHunter that needs special animations. The muzzle loader, for example, is one of the trickiest ones to get to look good. To give you a hint of what it’ll look like here are some screenshots:

New feature – “mirror-cam”
You can now look at yourself with the new “mirror-cam”. By pressing the F2 key on your keyboard (you can change this key in settings in the game client) you’ll get a third person view of your character. This feature only works when you’re at the lodge, or by the tent, since we want to avoid it to being used to give unfair advantages while hunting. We might use this feature for avatar pictures at a later stage if this is something you’d like. Here’s what it looks like:

New feature – player ban
We’ve added a ban option for the host of a multiplayer game. So if you want to make sure a misbehaving player won’t ruin your game again just click the brand new ban button that can be found under the admin tab, next to the kick button, in the client. It will both kick the player from the current session and stop him/her from joining your future games. You can un-ban players by going to the settings page on the website.

New feature – Sort server list
We’ve added a feature that lets you sort the server list for multiplayer games. You can now sort the multiplayer servers in order of: Country, reserve, host and distance. And you can also search for server and host names in a text search.

New Fox variations
We’ve added two new color variation of the Red Fox. You can now hunt grey and crossed Red Foxes on Hirschfelden and Hemmeldal.

Bug fixes
We’ve been fixing some bugs as well. Thanks to you, our fantastic community, an AI bug, that we completely missed, has now been fixed. We’ve made leaving the inventory in game faster, by removing a bug and you can now purchase things in the store on the web while playing without the game crashing. We’ve also crushed several bugs on the web site. See the change log for more details.

Happy hunting!

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The office is slowly starting to get populated again since summer vacations are coming to an end. Next week we should be back up to full force again. As soon as we’re all gathered again we’ll start planning the bigger features we’ll be working on up until Christmas and forward.

As we wrote in last weeks update there’s been a lot of bug fixing and a bug fixing patch was released yesterday.

 This doesn’t mean we’re done fixing bugs, since we know there are still more bugs to kill.

José is back from paternity leave, so he and Hampus are working together on the first person animations. There’s still a lot of work to be completed, but they’re slowly getting there. So bear with us, they will come.

Andrés is working on a “third person camera”, so you’ll be able to see/look at yourself out in the woods. It’s moving along nicely so we’re hoping that we can release that feature soon.

Happy Hunting!

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So it’s that time of the week again, status update time!

David, NAOutdoors, got some extra help yesterday from his new sidekick Harley. Harley is be the best looking dev we’ve seen in a long time. We do not know if he’ll be able to help out with bugfixing yet though.

As mentioned in last weeks update it’s vacation time in Sweden so it’ll be quite empty in the office for a few weeks. We are still working as hard as we can, but with a smaller number of people.

We’ve noticed that only comawalker have managed to beat Daniel, delaWHO, in Lane Bandit so far, Daniel is getting a bit cocky here at the office so please beat him. (comawalker, Daniel sends word that he’s coming after you now)

We know you are eager to hunt those foxes and it is coming. Real soon! We’re just doing the final tweaks and as soon as that is done you’ll be able to hunt them on Hemmeldal and Hirschfelden. The fox will be accompanied by a brand new weapon suitable for fox hunting. A lot of you have asked for this specific rifle so we hope you’ll enjoy it.

Happy hunting!

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Status update time. A little late but you didn´t think we forget about it did you?

To begin with we´ll upload a new patch today containing a broadcast type hog feeder. We´ve thought for some time about expanding the range of feeders in the game and the intention is that this one could be used with different types of food to attract different species. First one out will food for feral hogs and wild boars, then we´ll see what we come up with as there may be both technical and design related things that need to be covered.

Another little feature included in the patch is a leader board for the Lane Bandit game that you can play on your Huntermate. This one is just for fun, and it´s a small feature that is long overdue. There was actually supposed to be a leader board from the very beginning of this game in theHunter, but for various reasons it fell out and never happened. However the scores has always been saved to the server, only it has never been properly presented. Until now. Have you ever player Lane Bandit your score could be in there so make sure to check it out!

We´ve also released the “Friend invite” feature on the web. By recruiting your friends you can earn free theHunter membership days so be sure to check it out!

Finally, as vacations are kicking in a some people here at the studio will disappear for a few weeks to come. But don´t worry, the show will go on as usual and we have both new items and activities on the schedule through the entire summer.

Happy hunting until next time!

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Happy 4th of July!

So we’re a bit late with this weeks status update, and we’re sorry about that. Today’s update will be short and sweet due to us being terribly busy.

It’s the fourth of July so we thought that, especially our players from the US, would appreciate a free USA t-shirt. It’ll only be free to the players who log in today. We will however sell it in the store at a later date. (The shirts will be delivered over time today. We can’t do all nationalities but we’ll release some every now and then)

We’re getting a lot of questions about when we’ll release the fox. We’re happy that you are eager, but unfortunately we feel that we need more time to tweak and polish it. So please bear with us.

Happy hunting!

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Time flies, and its´already Wednesday again which means another status update!

Apart from further bug fixing on both the game client and the servers work is being done on a few other things. Last week we mentioned the Red Fox, which is now pretty much finalized by the art department. Here´s a picture showing what the most common color variation will look like. What “rare” variations will be included will be reserved for those lucky hunters who spot them in the game as they are released!

Red Fox Work in Progress

As you may also know that we´re working on adding proper first person animations to all the weapons. A feature that we choose to leave out for the multiplayer release, and which has spawned a lot of both positive and negative opinions. But of course, now that we have the “holstering” function there´s no reason for not having the weapons clearly visible on the screen for those who like that, and if not only for the simple reason that you should definitely be able to see all the swag you buy at the store. As we replaced the old character “rig” (the floating arms and torso) with our full body character there´s some new things that we also have to take into account as we make the new animations. As unfortunate as it is we can´t simply convert the old animations to the new system as the animations are inherently liked to the old skeleton/rig that was used. Below is an image showing the angle of rifles that we´ve found to work quite well. It´s only a little different compared to the old animations, but we´trying to find a slightly better balance as the weapon should not take up neither too much or too little space on the screen. It should also feel lite you´re holding the weapon in as an natural pose as possible while still being able to see it.

.300 Rifle view

That´s all for this week. Happy hunting!

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Status update time! A little light today as we´re getting closer to that time of the year when people go on vacation and people will begin to drop off and come back within the coming weeks. Currently Pim is out of the office for two weeks getting some well deserved rest and family time. But that does not mean things will stop happening at the studio. As the multiplayer release is getting more and more stable we will start looking at what to do next, and we still make small tweaks here and there to make sure everything is running smoothly.

We have a bunch of new items in the pipeline, some of which will be announced before being released, and others being a surprise. The Red fox is being worked on and the art is getting near completion. We have implemented a number of points from the feedback we got from you guys and it should be quite hard to confuse the fox with any other animal at this point.

Also, we should mention that it´s Mattias (our master thesis student) last week at the office, and this is probably his last day, if the public transportation strike going on here in Sweden right now is still on tomorrow! For 20 weeks he has been working with mobile support for thehunter and it´s been a great experience having him on board. Time will tell how we might choose to use his work.

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