Another Wednesday, another status update. As you might have noticed we’re killing bugs as fast as we can right now. We know there are more in there, so our focus is to continue to do that for as long as we need to.

We hear a lot of voices raised about the first person animations, we know some of you don’t like it as it is, but, as we’ve mentioned before, we’re working on remaking them. It will take time and we can’t release them one by one, so right now you just have to bear with us. But remember, good things comes to those who waits… 😉

Work on the fox is going well, but we still have a lot of work left before we can start testing it. We’ll let you guys know more at a later stage.

We would like to thank the fantastic people who helped us test multiplayer, the alpha and beta test teams. We would never have completed multiplayer as fast as we did without your help.
As a token of our gratitude we’ve awarded you with a special in-game item that only you guys and gals will ever receive. We know it’s not much, compared to what you have done for the game, but at least other players will be able to see that you were part of the team that made multiplayer happen when they see your avatar in theHunter.

We’d also like to thank all the members of the community who helped other players during the update. There were a bunch of you in the live chat and some have helped out on Facebook and in the forums. Having such helpful people in the community is such a great support for our small dev team.

We’ve also awarded Pioneers and Wardens with a special item as well, so others can see that you, back in the days, were early supporters of the game and are still around.

Happy Hunting!

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Howdy hunters,

Another Wednesday has arrived so it’s that special time of the week again: Status Update!

At the moment most of us are working our bu**s off so we can ship multiplayer as soon as possible.

Our client developers, Andrés and Daniel, are going through data from our alpha and beta testers and fixing bugs in an impressive pace.

Tomas and Peter, our art team, are busy working on the new third person characters  outfits, environment tweaks and lots of other art related stuff.

The animators, José and Hampus, are getting close to finish all new animations for weapons reloading and using equipment.

Björn is making sure game play is still as good in multiplayer as it is in the game today.

Robert, Herman and Emil are almost seeing the light at the end of the web site tunnel, so we’re getting relatively close now.

Unfortunately this doesn’t mean we can communicate a hard release date yet, since we still feel that we need more time to test it before we ship it. Saying that, we are aware that when we finally release the multiplayer version there might still be some bugs in there. This is, sadly, unavoidable, since some bugs will be so rare that we need tens of thousands of players for these to show up, but we’ve planned for bug crushing, and polishing, after the release. Our aim is always to have  an as bug free game as possible, even though some takes a long time for us to fix since some bugs difficult to recreate, as some of our more seasoned hunters have experienced over the years.

Here’s a sneak preview of what lifetime statistics will look like on the new profile pages:

We’ve gotten quite a few questions regarding if free members will be able to play multiplayer games. They will be able to join multiplayer sessions, if the creator allows that (it’s a setting when you create the game), but free members won’t be able to create their own sessions.

An exciting piece of news is that we’re working on a new theHunter logo. We feel that when multiplayer is released it should also be shown in our identity. Like a fresh new start. We’re close to finalizing it, so if you’re lucky you might see it in next weeks update 😉

Happy hunting!

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Status update time. A little late we know!

It would be quite wrong to say not much has happened since last week, because we´re pushing on toward the multiplayer release. Most things though are taking place “under the hood” and the biggest change is that we have now moved on from the initial alpha stage to a beta stage in development and testing. What this mean is that we now put most of our focus on fixing bugs and add the last touches to all the required features. All in all we´re making good progress.

For some weird reason we have also gotten quite into competing in the Lanebandit minigame that is available in your Huntermate. Perhaps you should all do some practice because we might just want to add a leader board on the website in the future 🙂

Also, thanks for the great and concise feedback on the Red Fox that was mentioned last week. Perhaps we should do this more often. As soon as work is commenced on the fox your pointers will be taken into account as far as possible with regard to certain technical limitations.

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Status update and feedback time!

Of course we are still very busy working on multiplayer. Right now our focus is reaching the “feature complete” stage where we stop adding new things and work primarily with getting everything already in there to work without problems, and also add the last touches to the graphics.

Red Fox work in progress

On Friday morning 08:00 CET we will perform a series of server upgrades, including physically moving all our servers to a new location within our current data centre and making infrastructure changes which will substantially improve our bandwidth and scalability capabilities. The website and forum will be unavailable during this time, for approximately one hour.

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Dear Hunters,

It’s another sunny day in Stockholm, so we’re quite happy here. Another great thing is that it’s Emil’s birthday today! So take the opportunity to congratulate him today.

This morning we got invaded by some builder that wanted to change some doors to a ventilation shaft in the office, so now we have two rather large grey steel doors in the office. It’s not very pretty.

We’d also like to remind you about the video competition. Deadline for entries is on Monday next week.

Almost everyone in the studo’s got full focus on multiplayer. So even though there was a bank holiday in Sweden yesterday, some of us were busy working, since we want it to be released just as much as you guys.

We’re getting a lot of questions about when multiplayer will be released, and to be frank, the only answer we can give right now is when we’re done testing and we have removed all known bugs. Due to the extreme focus on multiplayer we don’t have time for much else, so we hope you understand why we don’t have a lot of exciting stuff to tell you about. We will however show you a little preview of what the new map will look like:

One of the new cool features on the map is that, in a multiplayer game, you can draw, strategies for example, on the map so the other players in the session can see.

Happy Hunting!

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Hey hunters,

Another lovely Wednesday is here, it’ almost sunny here in Stockholm, so we’ll briefly update you on what’s going on.

Alpha testing is going well and we sent out some new invites to get more people in a few days ago. We know that many of you are anxious to get to test multiplayer and we’d love to let you all do it, but right now we have a great, and efficient, team reporting things for us to address and we couldn’t cope with feedback from many more players. We will however grow the number of tester more over time, so keep your eyes open for info on Facebook and Twitter to see when this happens.

As a reminder, when we select players for testing we have certain criteria, one of them is that you have to be a very active player, another important one is that you can never have  shown up in our cheat detection.

We’ve started another Video Tutorial Competition and we hope we will many entries since we know thta many of you are fantastic at creating videos. These videos are great for new players and if you are the winner there are some smashing prizes for you. Submit your videos here

As we’ve mentioned before we’re revamping the backend of the web and game, and the plan is to release this at the same time as Multiplayer. We’re also re-designing the frontend of the web and parts of the game UI. Below is a screenshot of what the inventory might look like in the future (bear in mind that this is work in progress):

We hope that you like what you see 🙂

Happy hunting!

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Howdy Hunters,

As you could see on Tuesday, the invites for the initial Alpha Test team was sent out. So testing has started and as far as we can see things are working pretty good. We know a lot of you were disappointed for not being picked but there’s still chances for you to get on the test since we will grow the number of testers over time. So right now were awaiting feedback from our testers on what we initially released in the alpha version. One big change is that all our current animations are made for first person view only, so every single animation has to be re-made to work for third person view. And we have a lot of different animations in our game. So José and Hampus have their hands full to say the least.
Some of you didn’t seem to be happy with our answer to who will get the kill if several players have shot an animal, and this is something we will try to find the best solution for together with the alpha testers.

We released a new piece of equipment today. It’s a binocular with a built in range finder. This great combination will allow you to pack more stuff when you go hunting. We hope you’re as excited as we are.

It’s time for our latest addition to the team, Hampus, to introduce himself. So here he is:

Hi there,
I’m a 24 year old, fresh out of school animator from the south of Sweden. Just before I started working here I finished a 30 week long internship at Easy studios where I animated on weapons and trailers for Battlefield Heroes. In doing so I also graduated from The Game Assembly, the same school that both Danny and Tomas went to.
I spend a lot of my free time playing all kinds of video games, Halo being the one franchise I always find my self coming back to. From the age of seven and until just a few years ago I was a team gymnast competing on a national level. Now a days I train a lot less but I enjoy running and I’ve promised my self that I’ll try climbing with Emil, any day now…
Oh, and I’m also currently the only one in the office with actual hunting experience.
I’m currently animating the items for multiplayer.

Howdy hunters,

We’d like to start off with welcoming Hampus who joined us this Monday. Hampus will work on third person animations for multiplayer together with José. Hampus will get to introduce himself in a future status update, since we think that you might be a bit anxious about finding out more about multiplayer at the moment.

We’ve gotten an overwhelming number of applications for alpha testing multiplayer. And we’ve almost gotten an equal amount of questions about how things will work when we release this most fantastic feature. This is understandable, since some of you have been waiting for this feature for almost 4 years. For the following weeks we’ll try to address as many questions as possible in the status update. So this will be our official channel for Q&A. We would also like to ask you if you could refrain from answering other player’s questions about multiplayer with your own speculations, we’ve seen this happening and it causes confusion.

About the alpha tester selection process

Since we’ve already gotten so many applications for alpha testing we have decided to use some selection parameters to help us chose the right initial candidates and these are the following:

• Paying member (to narrow the number down, we will need non-paying members for testing later)
• Application in well written English (we clearly stated that good English skills is a must on the registration page since we can’t read feedback in several languages)
• A well written application
• The stated number of hours played matches the actual data we have stored
• Must not have shown up in our cheat detection
• The player has, if ever been active, been a good sport in the forum.

The emails to the chosen testers will go out in the beginning of next week. We will announce when we have sent the emails, but if you receive an email, you are not allowed to tell anyone. If you do so you are automatically disqualified from testing. The alpha tester will have to agree to a NDA, non-disclosure agreement, to get access to their test accounts, which means that they will not be allowed to publicly write about, post pictures and videos of what they see while testing. If they do so, they will not only be disqualified from the alpha test team but also get their live accounts banned and Expansive Worlds will take legal actions against the player in question. It’s not up to the testers to update the community about the progress.

Some Questions and Answers

• When will you launch multiplayer?
  It depends on how fast we can find all bugs and remove them. After the alpha period is over we will start a beta test period where we bring more testers in. After that period is over we’re ready to release it.
• Does Expansive Worlds host the server?
  No, the user setting the session up will host the game. So you play on the hosts reserves with his/hers equipment placed in there. You will be playing in the host’s “world”.
• Will the clients be able to use the hosts tents and other world items?
  Yes, but only the host will be able to place world items in the reserve.
• How many players can play together?
  Up to 8 players will be able to play together in the same session. But you can of course be less than 8. During a session players can leave and join as long as the host stays active.
• Will you be able to shoot other players?
  No, theHunter is still a hunting game and not a war game.
• What happens if the game Host crashes or leaves the game?
  Initially the games pauses, to see if the host comes back, but if not the game ends
• Can anyone start a multiplayer game?
  No, initially it will not be possible for free members.
• Can anyone join my multiplayer game?
  It will be up to the host. When you start a multiplayer game, you can set some parameters for your game. The parameters will be the following:
  • Only friends
  • Only paying members
  • Anyone
  • Within a Hunter Score range
• Who gets the kill if several players have shot an animal?
  The person who shoots the killing shot will be the one getting the kill in the statistics, but anyone can confirm it. This might however change over time.
• What if someone ruins the game by scaring animals and behaving badly?
  The host will be able to kick and ban players misbehaving.
• How many players can be inside towers/ground blinds at the same time?
  It’s not set in stone yet, but hunting towers will have place for three hunters, and ground blinds for two. Tripod stands and tree stands will continue to be a “one man only” type of equipment.

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