Changing roles

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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Meet Pim

Sorry for the late introduction, but I wanted to get to know the game a bit better before introducing myself to you, but since the news is out in the forum here comes a proper intro.

My name is Pim Holfve and I’m the new CEO for Expansive Worlds. As I’m sure you can all understand, this is something I’m very excited about, since I feel that It’s a true privilege to be part of the fantastic team that has created such a great experience that TheHunter is today.

What I really like about Expansive Worlds is the development process. The team listening closely to you, the community. You guys guiding us in the right direction. It is quite obvious that this is a great way to work. And I want to make it clear that I have no intentions to change this in any way.

So who am I? I’m a 38 year old married father of two kids who live in the forest outside of Stockholm. I’ve been working withing the games industry for the past 7 years and I’m truly passionate about game development. Prior to joining Expansive Worlds I worked at Easy Studios as Producer for Battlefield Heroes and before that I built up the Game Studio at King.com as Game Studio Director. I learned a lot from both those studios and hopefully I can bring that knowledge to TheHunter to give you a better experience and also grow TheHunter.

So what can I say more about myself? Long time ago my plan was to become a professional hockey player, but when that didn’t happen, due to lack of skills and broken knees, I set out to be an graphic artist instead. While studying art I started programming to be able to create multimedia pieces and this lead me to start creating games, since games always have been a passion of mine. But it wasn’t until much later, after many years within advertising and marketing, I actually ended up in the games industry.
I love outdoor activities such as skiing and cycling, but according to my kids I spend way to much time talking about my bikes instead of riding them. Not sure if that is true, but I try to keep the talk to a minimum at home.
Even though I come from a family of hunters I don’t hunt myself (yet), but I greatly appreciate shooting and I’m pretty good at killing clay pigeons with a shootgun, so I try to spend as much time as possible at the shooting range.

So what is my plan now? Firstly I need to get to know the team, the product and the community better. The first two are easy, but the third will mean that I’ll be lurking in the forums to see what you have to say. I don’t plan to do any big changes, the team has, under Roberts excellent leadership, set up a great road map for TheHunter, and I see no need to change that. Initially I will be quite invisible to you, since I have a lot to learn, but as I get warmed up you’ll see and hear more from me.

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Say hello to my little friend!

YES! Finally, yesterday was payday after my recent fishing antics, catching pretty much nothing but plants and algae. Last weekend I lost a really nice hook in a silly attempt at fishing in completly worthless conditions, and the week before that I sprained an ankle as me and Andres made a little trip in the woods. I was out by myself, getting hungry and at the final stop of the day. At the bottom of a big cliff I had climbed down, feeling sort of like a failure. Then this one took a bite on my hook!

Elegant. Swedish fish equivalent to JAS 39 Gripen! The width of the hoop is about 60 cm.

It´s pretty much my first catch ever, and before I had no idea how it actually feel to have one firmly on the hook. Now I do! On my fifth or sixth throw I felt the rod twitching, so I held off a little on the reel, and a second later it was literally screaming. I quickly tightened the let-off a little (or reel-brake of whatever it´s called) and realised it was something p r e t t y big on the other end. I had read up on the lake I was fishing in and suspected it was a pike. And she put put up one hell of a fight, it was probably a female as I’ve read that male pikes don´t get this big. I was more or less sweating after a few minutes when I started seeing huge marks coming up on the surface. I also had my polarizing shades so I could see down into the water a bit. She pulled really hard at times and every time the reel started screaming I only recall thinking something like “nonononononoooo, please, you´re not that big!”. I quickly caught up with what technique to use though, carefully catching up the line after each “round” and simply holding still or letting go a little as she pulled. After a while though there was no question about what it was as I got it up to the surface. I was standing there for a moment, somewhat confused and stressed out, just holding the rod and staring at it before getting the hoop. I was really surprised about how much the fish weighted as I lifted it out of the water. I can´t say how much, but it was heavy. Getting the hook out was a little tricky as two of the three hooks was firmly lodged in the outer edge of the lower jaw, and when I  finally got it out it was all bent. Before getting the hook out I also had to mess around a with getting the jaw-opener firmly in place as I didn’t exactly feel like sticking my hand into the mouth as there was a huge amount of teeth in there. I was also really surprised about how hard it bite down at times.

The hook I used, not a big one but apparently interesting enough.

For a moment I thought about killing and cooking it, but in the end I concluded that it was larger than what I was allowed to bring with me. I really felt I had gotten enough satisfaction out of catching it though, and she proved to be such a respectable opponent (this day) so I let her back into the water. Afterwards I was almost shaking as I just had the biggest adrenaline rush in a long time. I walked back home, wearing a silly smile on my face the rest of the day.
And last but not least, I now have the office fishing record, BAM!
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Dj P, Little Peter a.k.a Peter Johansson (Part 2 of 2)

Part one of this presentation can be found HERE.

As I write this two and a half years has already passed since I got hired and started working at Expansive Worlds in February  2010. Time passes rapidly in this business as you often combine a certain amount of stress with having lots of fun at the same time. The stressed out part though is something you learn to pay attention to to avoid hitting the infamous wall. While speaking in very general terms here the work of a game developer is quite often about maintaining a balance between your own and other peoples ideas and motivations. Beside being incredibly fun and rewarding It´s also a high risk and demanding buisness where anything can happen in the blink of an eye and the sooner you fully accept and adapt to that the longer you will survive. Life at EW and theHunter can be seen as somewhat different though, at least for me and compared to my past experience. While we still set deadlines and constantly push ourselves the absence of a publisher watching over their multi million dollar investment like hawks makes a pretty big difference. Also the fact that we take one step at a time, developing and releasing new items, features, fixing bugs etc helps to bring focus to the work and reduce the overall sense of risk. While it´s hardly possible to make everybody happy with everything I don´t think we have yet to fail completely with a release causing us to seriously reevaluate our direction. But of course we´re not entirely off the hook just because there is no publisher directly involved with our production. We still have to make the business work and look after the investment that was made by Avalanche Studios to begin with, acquiring the rights to theHunter and setting up the studio where I work, and it´s really only thanks to their previous hard work that we have the privilege of existing today. The fact that we´re also providing a very niched type of entertainment also makes it harder to market and sell.

Starting out at EW was a similar experience to my old company where key staff was more or less still in the process of begin hired, and it makes me very happy to be part of creating a company and a culture as well as just a piece of software. When I started there was only one person actually working for EW, our Lead Programmer Andres that had previously worked at Avalanche and moved on to theHunter. The company CEO (Stefan) was also hired but wouldn’t start working at the office until a few months later. I met and had lunch with Stefan before getting the final go on my employment and all I remember was our discussion about the project and everything else just became a blur of excitement. I’ve learned to really appreciate the times when you find yourself working with someone you just naturally and totally professionally argue and solve problems with. Stefan was actually the third person during my career with whom I felt I had that kind of connection with, and at the moment I´d say the feeling is now moving on to include the the entire team which is also something new. As I have previously worked in larger teams between thirty and sixty people it was great getting back to a small company and team where creativity runs more free and bureaucracy is at a minimum. It´s a bigger responsibility, but also more fun in the long run!

Beside getting into how everything worked around the game engine etc my first proper contribution to theHunter included the art for the Pheasant and the Side by side shotgun. Loggers point and the Feral hog was already made by people at Avalanche before I started, but they had not been released to the public yet. I also started getting in contact and communicating with the community of players, and I admit I was pretty jumpy about it at first as that was nothing I had ever done before (as a developer in a larger studio you rarely communicate with anyone outside the studio about your work). I soon found it interesting and very rewarding though as I was learning many new things, widening my own ideas about product development, teamwork and last but not least developing my argumentation and diplomacy skills. While I´m sure this is the modern way of product development , letting the customers have a proper say and the privilege of being listened to, it´s also a hard balance to keep as working creatively require a lot of peace and quiet at the same time. I have no idea of how many actually appreciate the complexity of what I´m speaking of here. I´m pretty sure a common thought, especially in a community such as ours, may be “how hard can if be to get things right when having access to all this expertise?” The problem has nothing to do with access to expertise or lack of information but the challenges of interpretation and implementation. One good example of this is the topic of fishing and whether that would be an interesting addition to theHunter. The problems mostly concern how to translate the more basic things into the game/simulation; like the sense of relaxation you get while fishing, the suspense and the thrill of something partially unknown catching that bait as well as the struggle of landing it? These things which form the basic incentives behind the whole thing are more abstract and have little to do with flashy fishing rods, matching clothes, impressive numbers or even a lifetime of knowledge about what bait to use in different situations.

I want to point out though how much respect I have for people that know things like hunting, similar to farming, construction and real world engineering (you know, real work). and my ambition to provide a great simulation experience to all of you. While I have little against commodities of modern life I´m also very interested in good old survival skills.

I will not delve much further into details here as I could easily and up writing a whole book about it. But I should say the biggest highlights during my time with theHunter mostly concern things indirectly connected to it; such as how my responsibilities makes me grow as a person, and the stuff we do at the side of the production. Visiting the US and the Eastern Sports and Outdoor show in early February 2011 was one thing I will never forget. Meeting some great and friendly people, and being really surprised to see all that archery stuff rather than just guns. Later that year me and Stefan went to ELMIA, the biggest hunting expo in Sweden, which was also a great experience. Among other things I met and almost fell in love with a young and super cute girl in camo clothes, making a living as a wildlife painter when she was not out blasting clays and grouse with her Beretta (there´s definitely something about women who can handle guns). In the end I have nothing but admiration to the people within this world that I have met and which is so far from the common gamers (cough, nerds, cough) that i´m more used to. I´m definitely a huge nerd myself though, but not really the dungeons and dragons type!

I often find my work, hobbies and personal life to blend together, which is how I like it. Every time I´m out and see wildlife nowadays I stop and look more carefully, appreciating it so much more than before, and working on theHunter gives me a lot of ideas for things I want to do on my spare time. It kind of weird because despite the fact that I’ve grown up on a farm I’ve never  had any direct contact with hunting specifically. If you don´t include chasing runaway dairy cows around, which can also be pretty fun.

theHunter really ends up being a great combination of things I personally value and appreciate in life right now, the moral/ethical statement combined with an educational/simulation aspect and hi-end game technology. I appreciate learning, replicating and simulating real things rather than coming up with “star-trek” stuff, even though I´m pretty good at that too. Working within a small and extremely creative team and being in a position to really influence the work being done, feeling I have a lot of freedom but also responsibility and working on something that I truly believe in. I have no idea where we all will end up, but for now I defenitely sense it´s somewhere nice!

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theDevs go fishing!

Booyaka! Time for a new developer entry, featuring theDevs. Last Friday we went on a weekend fishing trip! Andrés, Peter, Robert and Daniel were the braves ones accepting the challenge, which turned into a pretty nice little adventure.

We’ll start from the beginning. Last Friday morning we wanted to celebrate the release of the Muzzleloader with a little fishing trip. We went in the CEO’s car (Robets crappy Volvo. No seriously, it’s quite nice) to Mölnbo, outside of Stockholm, to Andrés parents summerhouse to stay over the weekend. The plan was just having some fun together, make dinner, drink some beer, and first and foremost to see if we could catch some fish with our brand new fishing rods. We’re not what you call experienced fishermen, except for Andrés perhaps, who knows a little bit about it and has some past experience. But the rest of us are pretty green.

We went to a nearby lake and started throwing hooks where we thought the reeds would not have all of them. After a couple of minutes Andrés (probably using some trick he didn’t want to share with the rest of us) pulled a small pike out of the water. While celebrating the first catch of the day though, the fish, somehow, dropped the hook and jumped right back into the water on the slippery sloping rock and escaped. In the end the fish got lucky and at least we got ourselves a great laugh!

After a while, without catching any fish, we hiked on toward another spot where we had lunch. Hot dogs, coffee and a beer (but just one beer each. We´re responsible people you know).

Half decent Swedish view.

Peter, Andrés and Danny.

Food always taste so much better in the wild. And it hardly even have to be thoroughly cooked! We ended up wasting most of our drinking water on putting the grill out once finished as nobody felt like carrying it back home while it was still glowing hot.

Soon after lunch, at a new fishing spot, Robert got lucky and caught a nice perch that we decided to keep. Andres broke it’s neck and Peter got struggling with some of his fishing line being tangled up pretty bad, we concluded that a little more weight on the hooks would make it easier to keep the line stretched while throwing.

First proper catch of the day (can you see it?). Don’t know what that tall guy is smiling about though because he didn’t catch anything!

A short while later Andrés caught a little one which he gave a second chance at life and let back into the water.

Andrés and his little friend at mercy.

The real action was yet to come though. Danny thought he was snagged, but soon realized whatever his hook was stuck in was moving. And it was definitely bigger than anything we had gotten before. After a short struggle an awesome pike appeared on the surface. Everyone was quite chocked to see this and while trying to pull it out of the water the line snapped and it ended up getting away, with the hook and everything. Note to self: get a hoop-net to pick the fish up with next time!

We didn’t quite see the whole thing, but at the time it seemed to be quite similar in size to a great white shark.

After that whole adventure with the pike was settling we thought it would be a good idea to turn back home. Andrés was of course sure of the way and we embarked. Problem was only they had made new logging roads all over the place since Andres was there the last time and we ended up at a dead end. It had started to rain a little and as we all (still) had trust in Andrés leading us we went on, straight into the woods which turned out to be a less good idea.

One of several deer feeders we came across during the day, and there was hunting stands all over the place. Something is definitely going on here, and it probably ain’t organized flower picking!

After getting somewhat lost while trying to navigate using our cellphones GPS, negotiating a few bogs, slippery rock, clear cuts, ditches, mud holes, getting our feet soaked, spirits weakened and just plain tired we got back to the house. Not tired of fishing though, so we threw a few more hooks from a small pier while the rain got worse.

Peter wasn’t giving up despite his lousy odds. The rain is hard to see but it is there!

When we were more or less freezing we finally got back indoors, had more beer, made a great dinner and played some cards for the rest of the evening and early night.

We also cleaned, fried and ate the perch that Robert caught earlier. It was delicious! “Best fish I’ve ever had in my life.” – Danny.

AK 47 gets the job done! Awesome Cold Steel folding knife bought by Peter at his trip to the Eastern Sports show last year.

In the end it was a great and fun weekend, and we’ll definitely do it again some time and report back here about our success!

Until next time, gangnam style!

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Dj P, Little Peter a.k.a Peter Johansson (Part 1 of 2)

Onwards and upwards we go with the developer presentations! This time it´s Dj P himself laying down a few antics from the day he was born. This post will be split into two, the first one featuring the past and the other the present. Hopefully you will get a sense of who he is and what he is about.

Dj P, nickname of Peter Johansson, is currently the Lead Artist/Art Director/Designer at Expansive Worlds. The nickname Dj P was invented by EW staff after a recent and miserably failed attempt at organising a music playlist at a party. The other nickname “Little Peter” comes from the fact that he is almost seven feet tall (and don´t go on to ask! He knows what you’re thinking right now and the answer is “no I don´t”).

Dj_p

Dj P In theHunter style, with his favourite Swedteam cap!

But first things first, to make a long story short and highlighting some of the essential stuff. I grew up on a small farm outside a city called Örebro in the middle of Sweden. I know how to hand milk cows, drive tractors, wheel loaders and the meaning of “hard work”. I started drawing when I was about six years old (being the only one in my entire family doing that). I was doodling myself all the way through school paying more attention to practical and creative subjects rather than mathematics and grammar. Nowadays I can’t help but partially despise the education system for failing to inspire and teach how all those theoretical subjects apply to real life rather than the classroom itself as they are quite essential after all. After school I worked at the local radio station for about one year designing, building and maintaining web pages. Like every other westerner around the turn of the millenium (It seemed at the time at least) my dream was to become a web designer as HTML and the embossed graphics had become my religion. I also helped out doing radio but quickly concluded it was not my thing, and being really scared at the time about public speaking didn’t really help me either.

Early work

Early work. Could have made a pretty good movie?

By pure chance someone at a newly founded game company found my online portfolio. I recieved a mail from the company asking if i’d like to  work for them, and I ended up moving a few hours away from home to Stockholm. At the time I begun working for that company (Called GRIN) I knew close to nothing about making games and my job was only to paint textures for the 3D models that was created by others. Nine years later I had picked up enough things though to have progressed from being a “Texture Artist” to a “3D artist”, going on to work as ”Lead Artist”, “Concept Artist”, “Art Director” including other “Senior Artist” duties as well. By 2008 GRIN had grown into one of the biggest game developers in Sweden, with a staff amount to almost 300 people in three studios in Stockholm, Gothenburg and Barcelona, and people (myself included) made trips to the US and Los Angeles flirting with the Movie industry. In 2009 and the later part of the global financial crisis the games industry was suddenly hit harder than anyone had anticipated causing the company to suffer from several large title productions being terminated by publishers (naturally crapping their pants on their expenses). The company was decimated to about a hundred employees working in the Stockholm office, but only a few months later the one project still being worked on was also revoked by the publisher causing the entire company to go bankrupt. In hindsight it was of course a very sad but also interesting experience, and probably also a hard life lesson to see so much hard work and serious effort just going straight into a black hole. Two weeks after the initial announcement the company was bankrupt there was nothing left but a deserted office full of dusty hardware. I bought my office chair at the foreclosure auction for 50 swedish crowns (less than $10).

My chair

My chair. Best one I ever had!

When a company goes bankrupt in Sweden the government step in and pay people equivalent to the salary they would get through their resignation period (paying the high taxes in Sweden is not always a bad thing). I ended up getting several months worth of salary giving me the opportunity to try something I had been thinking about for a long time, setting up a company of my own and go freelance. I did a few jobs for a movie company and another game studio but soon found myself missing the creative atmosphere within a studio, and not to mention the social aspects of going to the work every day and hang out with other like minded people. I started looking for full time employment in and around Stockholm again but failed to get any as the studios were still holding onto their money like crazy until the financial climate turned back toward the better again. Around christmas I knocked on the door to the Avalanche office and asked to talk to someone (I’m not one who belive that sending an email is enough to make an impression when looking for work). I was rejected at the time but encouraged to come back in a few months. So I did, and I got an appointment with the studio Art Director. Which was too busy too see me when I got there so I got to talk to two other guys, and here´s where things got really interesting!

I came across theHunter already back in early 2009, pretty soon after the game became available to the public. I remember trying it out at work just to have a look at the pretty graphics and was instantly hooked. I’m a simulation/technical person by heart and was struck by the immersion when walking around in the woods, while asking myself; how the ¤#%& should you be able to find any animals in this… mess (of vegetation)! But I was soon successful, and a paying member.. I knew Avalanche Studios was involved with creating content for the game and during the interview I asked (half joking) if they would be interested in hiring someone to work on that project. Naturally I didn´t really think I would get to work on such an obscure project, and I had absolutely no idea that Avalanche had (apparently) acquired and signed the rights to the game just a few days earlier and was planning on setting up an entirely new company to continue developing it. I was totally blown away by the coincidence as it turned out that was the reason I was brought in to the interview in the first place. Of course I got super excited and they told me they would get back with a small work test for me before they could make the final call.

I went home and improvised as I wanted that job more than anything else! While I’m always careful to follow direction and guidelines I´m not the one sitting on my ass if I don’t get any, or if you’re too slow delivering them. I modeled and textured the head of a moose (the very same but slightly tweaked head being used on the Moose in theHunter today). My spontaneous effort was apparently very appreciated and I was hired!

Work test

My improvised work test.

Continued in part 2.

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It’s a bird… It’s a plane… It’s Superman… No, it’s El Capitán Danny!

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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Q&A

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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Priorities

Hello and welcome to this weeks installment of the Dev Blog! For those of you that have not yet picked up my role in the team let me introduce myself: I am Björn the resident Game Designer. Lets touch off with some general thoughts about design and priorities…

I find that there is a common misconception about Game Design being all about coming up with cool ideas. In fact this misconception may be attributed to most creative activities. In my experience there has never been a shortage of ideas and even if you come up with something that you think is unique it only takes a quick Google search to find out that it was already discussed centuries ago by someone’s grandparents. Part of it I think is the old myth of the genius. The guy that spends all his time coming up with great ideas that NO ONE has thought of before! Without any real references to base this on I am still pretty sure that even people like Da Vinci got most of his ideas from those that came before him. The reason for his success probably had more to do with timing and implementation than unique ideas (there’s another great example involving a certain fruit company but I fear I would get into legal trouble if we went there).

No, creativity and thus Game Design is more about finding ways to combine all the millions of ideas floating around into something new and awesome. The success of a good design does not lay in the underlying ideas but in how they are implemented.

Finding ways to implement ideas into the game is what I spend a lot of my working day doing. Ideas come from both within the team and from the community forum. The trick is working out how to integrate them into the general game design and even more importantly decide in which order to implement them.

Very few of the ideas we come across are bad ones, but even with the budget of the fruit company it would probably be impossible to do them all at once. Therefore one of our most important tasks are to prioritize in which order to implement them. Factors that play into these decisions can be summarized into a couple of categories:

  • Gameplay
  • Development
  • Business

These are tightly entangled with each other and all of them need to be considered with every decision we make.

Gameplay
Gameplay is of course seriously important since it is what keeps players playing the game and thus this company alive. It is also one of the main reasons why most of us are in this business to begin with.

Development
For every feature we have to ask the question “How long will this take to implement and is it worth spending time on compared to the other things that we could have achieve in the same period of time?”

The answer to this question is relative to the resources available at the time it is asked. The resources we are dealing with are things like the technical state of the game (game engine, tools, code base etc.) and the different types of professionals available.

Everyone in the team has their own specialty and even though we sometimes help out with small tasks it is generally best to let the expert do the tasks that require their expertise (anyone familiar with the concept of “programmers art” should know what I’m talking about…).

Programmers Art?

Programmers Art?

For instance, this means that we cannot create more animations faster by adding more people to the problem since we only have one dedicated animator.

Business
Finally we always have to consider what makes sense business wise. For instance if a publisher want an exclusive weapon in order to let us go retail we may need to put other things on hold since retail is one of the places where we have the potential to attract a largest number of new players to the game.

Thats all for this week. I hope it was enlightening and at least mildly entertaining. In the coming weeks you will hear more from the other members of the team… Maybe some more programmers art, animation jokes or incomprehensible server talk? Only time will tell. Until next time, happy hunting!

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Hello World!

This is the first post in our new blog which aim is to provide everyone with a modern, comprehensible and common source of information about the development and progress of theHunter. The good old “status updates” that a lot of you have been following will be a regular part of this, but our ambition is also to add a greater mix of news and articles shedding more light on the individual people working with theHunter and what they are doing in more detail.
The plan is to have our team members write things here on a regular basis, about anything they like being related to theHunter. Hopefully you will get a better idea of who we actually are as well as more details on what problems we might be struggling with at times. I imagine our Game Designer Björn writing about the complexity of certain game design elements. I could explain more in detail what an african environment would involve, and our programmers could give you a better idea of the complexity of their work.
Everything that is not official Company news, Status updates and details on patches and updates to the actual game should be of a more personal nature to bring a little nuance to our “moneymaking corporation venture” as it might sometimes appear to be to some, perhaps. To begin with the regular status updates will be posted here along with any other news, and we´ll also start adding the occasional “developer entry” and see what happens.

Comments and discussions here on the Blog will be disabled. Instead we invite you to our forums where discussions and our own developer input will go on as usual, and any new post here will be highlighted in the Latest News and Announcements section where you may comment our ramblings.
Hopefully this blog will turn out to be what we and you may hope for it to be, but like everything in any of our lives it will be a work in progress. We´re all looking forward to an interesting autumn at the office where quite a few things will be happening.

Happy hunting until next time!

doc

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