Hi there hunters,

Here comes a weekly status update from us.

• After the release of Bushrangers Run last week we’ve received a lot of feedback from you, mostly in terms of what animals inhabit it, but also other aspects, such as sound and art, thanks for that! We really appreciate how engaged and passionate you are about everything happening with theHunter and you can be sure that we’ll take all the feedback seriously and discuss the possibility to implement some of your suggestions. As usual, we can’t promise anything at this point, because we don’t want to raise any expectations. Just keep in mind that while a lot of suggestions might sound like great fun and that is the only factor that might seem to matter to you, like any other game development studio out there, we have a bunch of other factors to consider, for example scientific lining behind the game design, game engine functionality, development roadmap, resources and budget and other boring stuff which still dictates our everyday work.

• The weekend following the release of Bushrangers Run a lot of people experienced downtime on our web and game servers. To make up for your lost game time, we’ll be adding 1 extra day to all active memberships. We’ve also conducted an internal investigation and taken measures to prevent this from happening again in the future.

• We are now in the process of revamping our forums, in order to bring you a more slick and user-friendly community experience. Any suggestions on what functionality you’d like to have will be very much appreciated. You can share it in this thread and expect to hear more on this later.

• And the last tidbit about the EW team. You might remember the story of our client programmer Robin, which we shared a couple of months ago. He suffered a stroke back in August 2014 and at the time when that status update was written he was still in the hospital. In the last couple of months Robin has made some tremendous progress, he is back on his feet already, has visited the office a couple of times and said Hello and Thank you to all the people who were sending him their best wishes and asking about him. Robin still has a long recovery journey in front of him, but he is already chirpy, back to his sense of humour and playing theHunter (hopefully soon back to coding it too!).

• Another staff notice – we have a new team member, his name is Hannes and he has joined us as a producer. Check his intro below and say Hi:

Hello All,

My name is Hannes Rhodin and I have just jumped onboard the Expansive Worlds ship as a Producer. It is exciting times; full steam ahead on both theHunter and theHunter: Primal, and some very interesting ideas are in the making.

I’ll try to introduce myself, I live in Stockholm with my girlfriend (since 15 years back) and two kids… yes, I’m old. My hobbies are storytelling, movies, art, pulling weights and sculpture, with focus on sculpture right now. Here is a work-in-progress picture of my latest piece:

I have been in the computer game and digital graphic business for more or less 25 years, mainly focusing on the art, animation, level design, story and cinematic parts of it. Working in lead positions have got me in to the Producer craft. In my role as a producer at EW I will be focusing on theHunter and theHunter:Primal, great products with great possibilities and with a healthy connection to the community… to you, all the hunters and the hunted ;), this communication is something I value and think I can learn a lot from.

Cheers!

That’s it for today, see you around and happy hunting!

Discussion

Howdy Hunters. Status update time! We think it´s about time we give you some more info on the new reserve we´re working on, and which is taking shape quite nicely. As some of you have already guessed this is a swamp/marsh dominated environment mainly inspired by places in the US state of Louisiana. There´s a brand new animal living here as well, but one thing at a time! The new reserve will feature two main “biotopes” based on Water Hickory and Bald Cypress trees. There will also be a lot of shallow water areas. The reserve is currently in it´s final stages where a lot of small things is tweaked and the terrain is polished to suit the intended gameplay. We´ll let the screenshots below speak for themselves. Note that some things are still subject to change though.

We would appreciate your help in naming this reserve and would like if you provided us with ideas and inspiration that make this one fit nicely next to the rest of environments! Please add your suggestions in this thread in our forum for us to have everything in one place.

On a different matter; we´ve done some “under the hood” work on the inventory in an attempt to reduce loading times. These tweaks was applied on the live server a short while back and we would appreciate your feedback on whether you think it now works better or not? We´re well aware that the inventory sometimes takes a long time to load, which depend on many things. But we perfectly understand this can be a very annoying immersion breaker when playing and intend to work continuously on it if needed.

Happy hunting until next time!

Comments

Greetings hunters,

Another week has passed and things are great at Expansive Worlds. Our interns are getting up to speed and hopefully you will soon see some of their creations in the game.

We’ve started working on a new species, we’re telling you this much since some of you seems to think that we aren’t working on the right things. We will tell you more at a later stage, but as many of you, who have been around for a while, knows, it takes a very long time to complete a new species. For those of you who are fairly new, a new animal requires a lot of work from our graphic artists, animators, game programmers and game designer and most of the time they can’t work simultaneously, since they need to wait until the previous discipline has completed his part. We can also tell you that its one of the species mentioned in the user survey posted a while ago. So feel free to speculate on what it might be 😉

We’re aiming at releasing a bunch of new missions next week. The missions are being tested at this very moment and we need a few more days to make sure everything is fine and dandy.

And the winner is…
After long and hard discussions we’ve finally selected a winner in the Profile Shot Competition. We’d like to thank all of you who participated, and if you liked this kind of competition let us know, we might have another one in the future.

1st prize goes to ohotnikna who gets 5000 em$
 Second prize goes to vladimiroquai who gets 2500 em$

And finally third prize goes to ToyBoy who gets 1000 em$

We’ll end this status update with an apology. In the last installer we managed to add a rather undesirable feature. When you install the game the installer makes your browser auto start when you boot your PC and sets theHunter as default web site. This was never our intention, but we have added a fix in the new launcher that will remove this. So if you are experiencing these problems just update the launcher (you do this by starting a new game) and the problem will be resolved.

If for some reason the automatic fix does not resolve the problem you can manually address it by following these steps:

(Windows XP, Windows 7)

1. Open the start menu and navigate to “All Programs/Startup”
2. Right click “theHunter” and select “Delete”
3. If there is a dialog about administrator permissions click “Continue”
4. Done!

(Windows 8)

1. Press Ctrl+Alt+Delete
2. Select “Task Manager”
3. Select the “Startup” tab
4. Right click “theHunter” and select “Disable”
5. Done!

Once again, we’re terribly sorry about this. Happy hunting!

Comments

We have closed down the survey since we felt we had enough answers. We’d like to thank all of you who took the time to fill it out. The findings will guide us in improving the game and to make sure we’re working on the things you, our community, wants. We had a workshop on Tuesday, where we discussed the result of the survey and made some initial planning. It seems as Daniel is very disappointed that not more of you seemed to like the idea of paintball guns in the game. I’m sure he’ll tell you about his vision when it comes to the subject of paintball later on.

We also spent a few hours trying some different rifles at the shooting range. Unfortunately we had so much fun so we totally forgot to take pictures…

We’ve launched a new feature today: Teams! Teams is an optional way to organize players in a multiplayer game into teams. This can be used for things like unofficial competitions with players on the same server or to allow private communication between a group of players in a free for all game. There might also be other uses that we haven’t thought of so be creative! You will soon be able to read more about how teams work in the wiki.

We are aware of that there may be some questionable ethics involved in the type of hunting that comes from real-time competition but we feel that this is a case where fun has to prevail over realism.
We would also like to point out that this is an experimental feature and we will, as always, monitor community feedback to guide its future development.

Sadly we have something negative to bring up. We really don’t want to bring it up, since we don’t want this to happen in our game, but unfortunately it does. If a player uses a hijacked PayPal account or stolen credit card to pay for anything in the game, he/she will immediately be banned from the game. It is against the law and it gets reported to the police, but it also costs us a lot of money in fees.

We’ve fixed a few minor bugs in the game and you can read more about in the game update.

Happy Hunting!

Comments