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!

Comments

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.

Comments

Howdy Hunters,

This week’s status update is a bit late due to us being extremely busy working on some secret stuff. But we hope that you have been kept busy, hunting for eggs.

According to our stats, you seem to be enjoying Hemmeldal and we had a record-breaking number of hunters exploring and playing our game this weekend.

Easter is coming up in Sweden so we’ve got a few days off to spend with our loved ones (we love you guys too, but this time we’re referring to family and friends). So we’ll be eating a lot of traditional Swedish Easter food like, salmon, eggs and pickled herring. And maybe drink some nubbe.

We’d like to know what kind of weapons you are missing in the game so please post that in the comments. Bear in mind that we won’t put any fully automated weapons in theHunter.

As we’ve mentioned before, our latest addition to the team is Emil and we feel it’s about time that he introduces himself. So please give him a hearty welcome!

Hello everybody,

I’m 25 years old. I live close to Globen in Stockholm. I’ve been interested in programming and game development since I was 12 years old, THe same year I made my first ping pong game in visual basic with some help from some older programmers. When I was 10 I started training Ju-jutsu and quickly became really good at it. I competed against adults when I was 16 years old and got a few medals 🙂

I stopped training martial arts when I was around 20 years old when I started working as a System developer.

My first mission for the Hunter was the Easter event page. But now I’m focusing more on the server side for theHunter.

Here are some photos of me doing what I like doing.

I like going out for some food and drinks.

Now I’m into rock climbing which I have been doing for about a year.

I also like visiting new countries. This is me in a forest in Estonia from my vacation last summer, but the only animals I spotted was a few dogs.

Happy Hunting!

Comments

Another weeks has passed and it is status update time. We were hoping for spring here in Stockholm, but instead the cold came back. Whoever is keeping the sun away from us, please don’t! We need spring now.

We’ve been kept busy fixing the last bugs on Hemmeldal and fine tuning the Brown Bear. It’s all coming along just fine and it’s looking legendary. If nothing unforeseen pops up we’re looking at a release next Wednesday, but bear in mind that in the wonderful world of game making anything might happen. So keep your fingers crossed. We’ve seen a lot of questions about species on Hemmeldal, and the initial species are the following: Brown Bear, Moose and Roe Deer.

It might seem a bit empty, but our plan is to add more species over time. It won’t happen next week, but eventually these three will be accompanied by more species.

We’d like to remind you of our Facebook page, make sure you like us there since we have special Facebook deals and competitions every now and then.

Expansive Worlds expanded this week. A new backend developer, Emil, started this Monday. It’s fantastic to have him on board. He’ll be working closely with Herman and Robert, mainly focusing on, improving your web experience. Emil will introduce himself properly later on.
We mentioned that Mathias joined us a couple of weeks ago, we feel that it’s time for him to introduce himself.

Greetings, hunter community!

My name is Mathias and I am the latest addition to the theHunter developer family here at HQ in Stockholm. I am currently on my way of becoming a full-fledged M.Sc. in media technology and computer science. As a part of my final examination at the University Of Linköping here in Sweden, I am doing my thesis work in collaboration with Expansive Worlds.

I won’t give away too much information on my mighty mission, but it just might (or might not) have something to do with investigating how to expand game concept’s by alternative platform usage (oops!). Well, that’s all you will get for now.

Please also note that as this is a part of my education, I am not a full-time working employee of Expansive Worlds. Basically, I work for em$’s, coffee and to get an excellent experience before I will graduate (also, the coffee is pretty damn good). I hope that you will one day will get to enjoy the result of my thesis work, though.

I will be here for approximately 15 more weeks, so we have got plenty of time to get to know each other. Want to fire some questions at me? Please refer to the comment section of this status update. Who knows, I might even answer a few of them…

I would like to thank the guys at Expansive Worlds for giving me this opportunity and for the hearty welcome.

Comments

So another Wednesday has arrived and and it’s finally time for a status update. It’s getting warmer in Stockholm so it seems as the long winter is soon to be over. We’ve had snow since November here so we think we deserve some warmth.

We’re planning to kick off a new event tomorrow and we hope that you’ll all enjoy it. It’ll be a full week of competitions and happenings, so make sure you check in every day, so you don’t miss out on all the fun.

We got a lot of great name suggestions from you, our beloved community. We’ve spent a lot of time going through your suggestions. A great deal of them were good, others kind of odd and some made us laugh. We finally, after tough discussions, decided on the name Hemmeldal. We’d like to give a warm thank you to BioTek who suggested Hemmeldalen. We think that the name Hemmeldal reflects the spirit of the reserve and has the right Scandinavian tone to it.

We’ve gotten a lot of questions about the new Species both in the forum and on Facebook. Initially we wanted to keep it a secret until we release Hemmeldal, but since some of you are way to anxious, here it come: * drum-roll* Say hello to our new “little” friend, the Brown Bear!

Besides the brown color preference the main difference between this new addition and it’s Redfeather Falls cousin, the Black Bear, is that it is a lot bigger. This size difference does not only make this beast a lot harder to put down but it also makes them more confident which translates into a somewhat less spooky species that is more likely to resort to violence when cornered*.

This coupled with the already notorious viciousness of the female Moose makes the First Aid Kit a highly recommended accessory when exploring this hostile reserve…

*Most Brown Bears are usually not very active predators, in fact only about 10% of the European Brown Bears diet consists of meat. This however does not mean that they won’t tear you apart if you surprise or corner them.

Comments

It´s Wednesday and status update time!

This weekend we’ll be running a special Tripod multispecies competition on Loggers Point – all preys must be shot from a Tripod. At the same time, starting at Friday 00:00 CET, we are giving away a free Tripod with every purchase of 5000 em$ in the Hunter Store!

Also new for the Tripod competition is a new type of condition – limited number of attempts – designed to fight the problem with spawn mashing. It’s quite simple, the number of attempts (game sessions) you have to get your entry into a competition is limited. Every time you start a new game session at a reserve where there is a competition active one attempt will be deducted. Once all attempts are used up no more entries will be registered for that competition. It’s possible to inactivate (pause) a competition, if you decide to do something else for a while, while inactivated no attempts are deducted.
The intention is to implement this condition (and possibly others too) throughout some of the standard competitions as well in a near future, in order to enforce fair play amongst all hunters. You´re all in favor of fair play aren´t you?

What about the new reserve then? Everything is going well and we´re in the final stages of tweaking a lot of small stuff and will get into more extensive testing shortly. An exact release date is not yet decided but we´re still aiming for the second half of March, which we should make if we don´t run into any totally unforeseen problems. We´re pretty sure you´re curious about the new animal and what that one is but we still want to keep that as a little surprise!

We´ll also start looking through all your suggestions for the name of the new reserve and try to conjure up something we think fits nicely. Thank you for all your suggestions, a lot of them really help as we get a lot of food for thought.

Last but not least, there has been a few of our dedicated long time players being slightly upset about the recent changes we have made to the old warden membership. We hope your playing experience doesn´t get too much of a blow by this and before we say; that´s that, we want to give all of you a big thanks for supporting theHunter while it was still very much in its infant stage (and it still counts just as much).

Happy hunting!

Comments

Hej alla jägare,

Thought it would be good to start off with some Swedish today since we’re getting so inspired by the coming Scandinavian looking reserve. 🙂

So another week has passed and a lot of our focus has been on the Valentine’s event. Many of you participated and some of you got the unique trophies. The number of trophies we handed out this Sunday was the following:
203 bronze trophies
301 silver trophies
144 gold trophies

So for those lucky, or rather skilled, hunters bagging a trophy can consider yourself owners of rarities.

We haven’t come up with a great name for the new reserve yet, so we thought we’d let you, our community, take a stab at it. Post your suggestions here, but please refrain from commenting on other players suggestions. We’d like the name to reflect the reserve and its environment and go well with our other reserves. Here are some more pics to get inspired by:

The new rifle, released last week, seems to be a big hit. We’ve gotten a lot of positive feedback on it, and as you know by now, we love positive feedback, so please keep it coming.

We’ve noticed that some of you have discovered the crossbow tracer arrows. We sure have some nosy hunters out there. We’ve decided to hold on to them until further notice. But they will be released eventually.

We have a new addition to the team. His name is Mathias and he’s studying to become an engineer and he’s going to work on his degree project while here. Mathias will introduce himself later on and tell you about what he’s working on. He’ll be with us for about 20 weeks, so feel free to give him a hearty welcome.

We’d also like to know what the interest is for another Video Tutorial competition. So if you’d like to participate in another one, let us know.

Comments

Dear Hunters,

Another weeks has passed and it’s that special time again, status update!

Many of you seems to be enjoying both the new rifle and the countdown to Valentine’s Day. That’s great news for us Devs. We appreciate all kinds of positive and constructive feedback.

If you haven’t gotten your loved something for Valentine’s Day tomorrow, remember that a theHunter membership is a great way to say “I love you” 😉

Today we will also tell you a bit about what Peter and Tomas has been up to lately, but first something completely different. We need to get some more help with moderating the forums. So if you think you’re up to that task, have a look here to see what our requirements are. If you think you match the requirements, please send a PM to NAOutdoors.

Now, some more details on the upcoming reserve. We are indeed attempting to make something that contain snow and convey a different climate than most us are used to in theHunter. While the previous reserve (Hirschfelden) was one step toward a different season there was no changes done to lighting or weather. The new reserve is a Scandinavian inspired landscape set during late fall and early winter and contain a slightly tweaked lighting and falling snow instead of rain which is a first in theHunter. There are several reasons for not going with even more snow than we have chosen to do here, some of them are technical but to larger extent aesthetically related which mainly affect production time and possible unknown pitfalls which we simply choose not to risk making better friends with at this time. The preliminary release date is late March, and so far things seem to go our way and we´re making pretty good progress. The fauna for this reserve is not yet carved in stone, but it will contain one new animal that belong to the same family as one of our older ones.

The images below show the current state of affairs. Some smaller details are still missing and some things might come to look a little different in the end but it should still give you a good idea of the final product.

The environment consist of mixed aspen and pine forests.

View from a hunting stand, and one from the top of a hill.

Comments go here!