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!
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.
Time for our weekly status update! Have we got good news for you? Sure we have. So grab a cold one, sit back and indulge.
For one, after some additional tweaking and polishing we finally felt that our willow ptarmigans were ready to be released onto Hemmeldal, so we did so yesterday and a little bird told me they are tons of fun. For some willow ptarmigan action, make sure to pop by our official Twitch channel today at 16:00 CEST to catch the latest Lock&Learn 😉
Secondly, and it fills my heart with pure joy to tell you this, our brilliant character artist Ami and equally brilliant animator Morris have started working on upgrading our brown and black bears. Those poor guys have been admittedly our worst offenders among theHunter beasts when it comes to model and animations and the team are super thrilled to finally be able to give them some well-deserved love. I for one can’t wait to see the final result, having said that there is no ETA on when the upgraded bears will be released, so please bear with the existing ones for a bit longer 😉
A bit more on the things in progress. We are aware that the tracking is a bit broken right now and are working on it. Next week we are planning to present a delicious patch with fixes and of course some new stuff, so make sure to be there when we spill the beans.
The last animal for the Summer Fiesta competition is here and it’s a Blacktail Deer. Yes, we are that sneaky. So, if you’ve been mindful with your attempts, like we urged you to be, you can still turn things around in the remaining 4 days of the competition. Good luck to you all and may the best hunters win!
Tomorrow we are launching a little sweet GIF competition on our Twitter channelfor you to unleash your theHunter creativity. Keep your eyes peeled for an announcement tomorrow for a chance to get some action and win some prizes.
And finally, what many of you have been patiently waiting for in the last week since the announcement of the Rockies – work-in-progress screenshots! Our artist Mattias has kindly responded to your pleas and snapped a couple of good ones for you. I’ll just leave them here and let you savour all the luminescent beauty.
In the last status update we planted some seeds about the new reserve in the works and many of you have been spot on with your guesses. It’s a Rocky Mountains inspired reserve with fall environment, whoop whoop! The Rockies have consistently ended up high in our player surveys, as you can see from the snapshots of the results of our 2015 and 2016 surveys below (click to enlarge; some reserve options are of course hidden, but your collective opinion regarding those is duly noted).
Survey results 2015
Survey results 2016
Game design competition – winners announced
We’ve finally had a chance to read through the latest mission and competition submissions and the results are in! In the mission category our game designer Daniel praised the missions by Tanngnjostr for their fun and personality. In the competition category it has been a tight race between three contenders and the winner has been picked only a couple of hours ago. Congratulations to mdfortney! The two runners-up are were waiora and MonacoSteve, whose sets Daniel also liked a lot but some components of them are unfortunately not really implementable with our current competition system. The winners will receive 5000 em$, the Almost Dev Jacket alongside the honourable Contributor rank, and the runners-up will each receive 2000 em$. You can find the winning designs here.
The winning missions and competitions will be implemented in theHunter as soon as they are set up and tested. If your design was not picked this time, please don’t despair, we have lots of new animals coming up!
On the cable-backed bow
Following the release of the cable-backed bow we’ve been collecting your feedback and sentiments and felt that a short explanation from our game designer might be appropriate. The bow got a lot of critique due to it being too weak. These bows are not so powerful in real life and this is why it was kept at the lower end of the power spectrum. We have now increased it a bit, making it resemble a bow made of modern materials more than traditional materials. However, the cable-backed bow is still primarily to be used at distances of up to 30, perhaps 40 meters. Beyond that range it will lose power quite dramatically. That is, until gravity increases the force of the arrow again. On the way down, the speed of an arrow may increase slightly due to the gravitational pull. Pulling off shots like that is quite difficult but the expert archers out there keep on impressing us with their near impossible long range harvests.
Welcome new recruits!
Since the introduction of the new Recruit a Friend programme, oodles of new people have joined us by invitation of their friends, welcome guys! Many a Moose have been killed and many, many camping supplies, membership days and special items have been added to the recruiters. If you want to see the coveted .308 Engraved Bolt-Action Rifle in action, check out this video by HooCairs. We’re happy to see that you’ve been making use of this programme and hope to see more of your friends joining the troops of the EHR.
Say Ciao to Roberto!
A while ago we told you that our brave soldier Danny left his honourable post as the lead client programmer at theHunter to pursue his dreams overseas, and today we are happy to present his replacement, straight from Italy! Roberto will lead our client programming team, represented by Carl-Oscar, Patrick and Robin. Get to know him via his intro below and say hello!
Hi everyone! My name is Roberto Mangiafico and I’ve just joined the incredible theHunter team as Lead Programmer.
I moved to Stockholm from Italy facing the great Swedish winter to follow my passion for develop and play great games. I’ve started my career in the game industry in 2007 as programmer in Ubisoft, then in 2011 I left to create my own company Bad Seed and now I made a big step forward joining Avalanche and theHunter team!
I’m an avid player, game lover and technology addict and when I don’t play videogames I follow my other passions and do snowboarding, play volleyball and read manga!
See you in the forum and in the woods for a great hunt!
Apropos team changes, sadly, our game designer Daniel is also leaving us in a month to move on to new adventures. We are looking for his replacement (if you know anyone who could fit, please get in touch). Be sure to catch Daniel in the Lock&Learn this Thursday for a chance to soak up his theHunter wisdom and exceptional sense of humour.
Come hunt with us!
We are resuming our Friday play sessions, so if you want to hunt with devs, look for some open multiplayer games, between 16:30 – 17:30 CEST every Friday. I won’t be there this week, but the rest of the devs will, so make sure to kick their butts play nicely.
Happy hunting!
P.S. Here’s a small update for those of you who use our Facebook sign-up functionality. It has been temporarily removed as we are working on some website stuff. You can still connect your account to Facebook once signed up / logged in via the Settings, to share your trophy shots etc. We would also like to gather your feedback on how much you use of this feature, so we can prioritize it accordingly.
Time for another status update from us. If you missed the game update from yesterday, alongside some fixes and changes we’ve also added leaderboards and achievements for Polar Bear, following your unambiguous feedback. Hope you’ll enjoy hunting in the northern regions of Whiterime Ridge even more now.
As for the big news I promised you last week, yes, it IS a new reserve we are working on! We released Whiterime Ridge in autumn last year and it’s time to bring new hunting experiences to your game. What needs to be said here is that our Whiterime Ridge release was very turbulent, it was a harsh lesson for us and will do everything possible not to repeat our mistakes. For now we can only tell you that this one is going to be the biggest reserve in theHunter and our artists have been focusing on creating lots of amazing vista opportunities. If you’ve been with us long enough, you will know that creating a new location is a substantial undertaking with tons of things needing to fall into place before it’s a product ready to be shown. So, from now on we’ll be slowly revealing some bits and pieces of the upcoming location, but let the speculation commence!
And now onto another big piece of news for today, which is…
Introducing the new Recruit a Friend
We’ve always seen theHunter as the ultimate game for creating and nurturing strong bonds between people. Nothing makes us happier than seeing players from different parts of the world becoming friends for life, and real life friends and couples having fun in the EHR together. Because let’s face it, what else could make a friendship stronger than stalking a monster Brown Bear together for half an hour through the chilly hills of Hemmeldal, finally getting that big boy and posing for a memory trophy shot? Not much, in my book.
To motivate you to invite your friends to theHunter, we’ve had a Recruit a Friend programme. It has existed for a couple of years and although many of you have taken advantage of it, we felt that the programme has been lacking something.
So, we took a closer look at our Recruit a Friend system and decided to ramp it up a notch. Not only have we added more rewards to recruiters if the invited party buys a membership (including some exclusive items that are not possible to acquire otherwise), but we also put together a nice welcome package to people who joined by invitation, so they can get started hunting right away!
Rewards for Recruiters
If the friend you’ve invited to theHunter buys a 3 month membership or Wayfarer bundle, you will get 10 days added to your membership, Camping Supplies (15 Pack) and a spiffing new Deer “Grunt” Call – Carved Wood (one time reward) for your deer hunting adventures together.
If the friend you’ve invited to theHunter buys a 6 month membership or Pathfinder bundle, you will get 20 days added to your membership, Camping Supplies (50 Pack) and a Two Person Tree stand – Forest Camo mesh (one time reward) for super concealment of you and your bud.
If you missed our game update earlier today, we’ve just released a flock of Rock Ptarmigans onto the mountainous regions of Val-des-Bois where the birds will join the previously solitary Alpine Ibex. The ptarmigans will surely remind you of Pheasants, since they are distant relatives, but they also have some distinctive features as well. For one, they are more social and thus prefer to hang out in larger families. In addition, they have an excellent camo and blend with the environment exclusively, so spotting them won’t be easy. I shall let you find out the rest by yourselves 😉
To help make the search for Ptarmigans easier, we’ll add 40 free units of climbing gear to every player’s inventory who starts a hunting session between today and the end of Monday, August 1st (CEST). Go crazy on those ridges and don’t forget your medkits.
“What about the Willow Ptarmigans?” I hear you ask. We are still working on those little ones. There are some small issues to be ironed out before we are 100% satisfied with their quality and performance. You may come across some traces of their presence on the website, such as achievements, but we’ll make a proper announcement once they are officially released.
Summer Fiesta firing up
On Monday we kicked off our traditional Summer Fiesta. Lots of challenging missions, a competition with a new format and, of course, sales, trophies and prizes. Tons of hunting fun to add some thrill and excitement to your month of August 😉
A few people have already completed all the missions, woop woop! So we’ll see whether Doc will need to step in again and stir the things up a bit. Today the new animal entered the competition, and I hope you’ve been using your attempts sparingly, since there will be lots of jokers later on 😉
You can find the description and discussion of this event in this forum thread.
Community design competition #2
It’s time for the second part of our hugely successful game design competition. There are still three species missing their specific challenges and we are calling for your imagination and game knowledge! It will be a bit different this time, as your task will be to create a set of missions or competitions for all fours duck species. Mallard, American Black Duck, Northern Pintail and Gadwall. The rules can be found in this forum thread and you will have ten days to submit your design for a chance to win 5,000 em$ / 90 membership days, a very special Contributor membership (that will remain with you for the rest of your life in theHunter) and an exclusive “Almost DEV” jacket!
As we revealed during last week’s Lock&Learn, the new species coming to theHunter are Ptarmigans. Rock Ptarmigan will inhabit Val-des-Bois and Willow Ptarmigan will inhabit Hemmeldal. The two viewers who first guessed the species and subspecies during the livestream have been awarded their em$. Work on the birds is already in the final phase as we iron out some rough edges and polish a few minor things. We hope to be able to release these wonderful sounding critters on their respective habitats very soon. Until then, enjoy this sneak peek on these cool birdies.
Rock ptarmigan
Willow ptarmigan
Two-person tripod
Yesterday we released another great piece of large equipment for players who love hunting with their friends. The two-person tripod. Perfect to call in an animal, get on top and pass the time chatting with your buddy while the animal makes its way to you. There is also a super crazy bundle in the store which features this new tripod. Check it out, it’s probably the biggest discount we’ve ever offered on relatively new stuff.
Bugs
Here’s an update on the recent bugs – disappearing climbing gear, messed up sounds and calls as well as reduced weapon steadiness on towers. We are aiming to patch fixes for all those locusts in the next game update, hopefully next week (subject to change). As always, stay tuned and follow our updates!
Summer Fiesta
What’s for sure happening next week is the return of our traditional and probably most loved summer event. That’s right, it’s time for another summer fiesta! This time we’ve come up with a slightly different format, and I think that everyone will find something that appeals. Check back at the beginning of next week to learn the details!
Killing season
In case you’ve missed this thread on the forum – check out this epic competition by community member caledonianblues, which starts August 22nd. Sign up now and use this time to hone your skills, devise your strategies and plan how you’re going to walk away with some of the enormous 100,000 em$ prize pool!
On a final note, due to the summer doldrums, our weekly stream Lock&Learn is going on vacations together with Johanna and will be back in a couple of weeks.
Yesterday we released another great piece of large equipment for players who love hunting with their friends. 
