Weekend is fast approaching, and what better way to wrap up your week than with a read through our Status Update? We have the name of our new reserve to share, some behind the scenes chat with our art team, and new seasonal goodies have been dug out from the back of Doc’s Shed.
What Sounds Better than Tropical Forest?
Piccabeen Bay! As Alena announced on-stream yesterday, we now have a name for our new Australia-inspired reserve! We took a lot of inspiration from the suggestions that were made on the forum but didn’t quite find “the one”, as such we thought why not ask our resident in-team Aussie, Bethany? The name itself comes from the Piccabeen palm, a.k.a Archontophoenix cunninghamiana, which you’ll find growing abundantly throughout the reserve. Here’s an example:
Seeing IS Believing
Yesterday marked our first look at Piccabeen Bay as we played some of the new reserve live on stream. Mat, myself (Graham), Alena, and special community guest, HooCairs took us through some of the sights and got face to face with the reserve’s inhabitants. We even had a brief visit from an albino Buffalo, which we promptly lost in the foliage…lets hope one of you can find it for us when the reserve is live!
If you weren’t able to make the stream then please do take a look at the VOD (that’s what the cool kids call “video on demand” dontcha know?).
We should mention that we’ll be streaming most days on the run-up to the holidays taking you through the Holiday Event Missions, but our next Piccabeen Bay stream will be on Tuesday 12th December. Catch us at 16:00 CET at twitch.tv/expansiveworlds
Meet Some More of the Team
Of course the whole team is very busy putting in the final polish to the reserve, but I managed to grab one of our 3D artists, Mattias, and pitched him the same questions Moe and Carolina answered last week.
First-up are some examples of what it is that Mattias looks at, and creates, all day. We have a view of Piccabeen Bay followed by some of the textures that went into the reserve itself.
And some quick Q&A with Mattias himself:
What has been your favorite part of working on the new tropical forest reserve?
Mattias: I really enjoyed the opportunity to add new features, as well as cooperating with the programmers to improve things across the reserve.
What has been the trickiest part to get “just right”?
Mattias:Getting the feeling of a dense tropical forest but still thinking about performance was a real challenge!
What part of community interaction helps you most with your job?
Mattias: Getting feedback on plants, density, crossings are all very useful. (Graham: We had a great live example of the latter in our stream yesterday)
Tune in next week for some more art team behind the scenes with our 2D/3D artist, Johan.
What’s Up Doc?
Doc is feeling festive and taken time to bring out some seasonal goodies from the back of his shed. Feel free to drop by the store and pick out a nice holiday sweater or some accessories to make those hunts a little more “jolly”. 😉 On the subject of jolly…here’s some of the Marketing and theHunter Classic team today:
We have a particularly packed update for you today, with news of holiday activities, upcoming content, store discounts and new faces on the team. Grab yourself a comfy chair and dig in!
Our Team Size Just Leveled Up!
Please welcome the latest addition to the theHunterClassic team, Carolina!
Please give Carolina a big welcome! You can already see some of her work in the new Holiday Event trophies. Which leads us to…
Winter (Holiday Event) Has Come.
What would Winter be without traditions? We all have our own to look forward to, but one thing I think we all share is our annual Holiday Event!
The event went live today and consists of a whole host of competitions, missions and store sales to keep you busy during the dark depths of winter (or well, not so dark for our fans in California perhaps, but you get the mood I’m conveying!). Prizes range from in-game consumables, deployable towers, or even something really special, an as-yet unreleased 9.3x74R O/U Break Action Rifle!
First place gets an extra cherry on top in the form of the also unreleased 1.1-8×30 Rifle Scope to go with their new weapon. Oh, and there’ll be trophies, lots of trophies!
We kick things off with the “I’m Dreaming of a Whitetail Christmas” mission, so grab your weapon of choice and go bag some!
For our traditional holiday present this year our artist Johan made a special profile image, but you will have to work for it a bit. As soon as you get 80 000 jollyPoints, it’ll be unlocked in your Profile settings. Enjoy!
Remember, new activities and item sales kick off daily, so be sure to check-in! Best advent calendar ever?
Downtime Compensation
In the theme of “giving” we are crediting all players with 2 days of premium license time to compensate for recent server issues. We hope things will go a lot smoother for you all in the run up to holidays, apologies for any inconvenience caused.
A Behind the Scenes Look at Our Next Big Release
The work on our next reserve is coming along nicely (no, we can’t give you a release date just yet, but soon!), so we thought to give you a sneak peek at what’s to come, along with Q&A from some of the folks that are working to make it one of our most beautiful yet. You’ll get a mix of some alpha in-game footage along with some animations and images straight from our artist’s tools!
First up some contributions from our Animator, Moe. Here you can see three different animations of the soon-to-be huntable water buffalo; a slow trot, stopping from a run, then an idling water buffalo in…umm, water. 😉
Next we have another new species, in an entirely new setting! Feast your eyes on the graceful sambar deer, set in our new tropical forest environment.
Now, a short Q&A with Moe himself:
What research do you do to look for realistic poses or color tones for animals?
Moe:Before I start animating I take a couple of days to gather pictures & video references on how the animal moves and behaves, I also look into the animal skeletal shape and try to get it as accurate looking as possible.
What has been your favorite part of working on the new tropical forest reserve?
Moe: Water buffaloes!
What has been the trickiest part to get “just right”?
Moe: SWIMMING COWS! It took a lot of time to figure out how Water Buffalo behave in the water, it wasn’t easy to find good & clear video references.
And finally, what part of community interaction helps you most with your job?
Moe: Reading through our forums is very helpful, many of our community members are real life hunters and they always push us in the right direction.
Big thanks to Moe, spectacular work as I’m sure you’ll all agree!
Now we have some contributions from Cecilia, a Character Artist on theHunter Classic team. In order of appearance, the Sambar Deer, Rusa Deer, Banteng, and then finally the water buffalo. Again, these are taken direct from the tools Cecilia works with daily.
Sambar Deer
Rusa Deer
Banteng
Water Buffalo
And the same questions we put to Moe, but from Cecilia’s perspective:
What research do you do to look for realistic poses or color tones for animals?
Cecilia:I try to find find good references, about 15+ images per gender, with at least one image per color variation. Then I project the textures onto the animal to get the correct colors and clean them up. Once the animal is in-game, I tweak the colors if they appear too dark or too bright.
What has been your favorite part of working on the new tropical forest reserve?
Cecilia:Sculpting the animals in Z-brush (work tool)
What has been the trickiest part to get “just right”?
Cecilia:The fur direction of the animal and finding good reference where the animal looks beautiful.
What part of community interaction helps you most with your job?
Cecilia: I’m inclined to agree with Moe! The comments made by real hunters on our forums really helps us replicate animals in the setting of our game.
Want to See All of This In Action!
Join myself and Mat in next Thursday’s stream as we take you all on a tour of the reserve for the first time! The stream begins at 16:00, Thursday December 7th, twitch.tv/expansiveworlds and we have a LOT to show you, so perhaps we can be convinced to stretch this one out some. Come armed with lots of questions, and praise, we really like praise! 😉
On the topic of streaming, we’ll be kicking up the frequency a little in the run-up to the holidays as Mat gives you some advice on completing our daily missions. Hit that “Follow” button on twitch so you can get notified when we go live!
And You Want to Name the Reserve Too?!
We are still accepting community suggestions for the name of our new reserve. Now is your chance to make your mark on the game permanently! Tips: think of something in “theme” with the reserve, it should be something easily remembered/pronounced
Welcome to the status update! It comes slightly belated this week since a lot of things have been happening at and around theHunter, but let’s hope that the old saying about all good things coming to those who wait, is true in this case. We’ve got a bunch of stuff to share with you, so sit back and enjoy.
Server downtime compensation
This Thursday we suffered server downtime. The servers were unstable for about 10 hours and the game was to a large extent, unplayable. We did a thorough investigation of what happened and discovered that the culprit was an old piece of code causing certain queries to run for far too long. Luna has now rewritten that code snippet and made sure that this would not happen again. We sincerely apologise for inconvenience and the game disruptions that it caused you! To compensate you for lost membership time, we’ve added 1 extra day to all current memberships. Thank you for your continuous support, in this matter and always!
Tropical forest animals and more
Are you ready for more news about our new reserve? We hope you are, ‘cause we’ve got some and then a little bit more. For one, there seems to have been confusion regarding the actual location, so here’s a reminder. It is inspired by the Australian tropical forest. However, as always with reserves in theHunter Classic, we allow ourselves creative freedom when it comes to flora, terrain, fauna selection and other reserve details, to make sure that the location provides fun and enjoyable gameplay and fits well in the existing theHunter-verse.
In this reserve you can expect to see some swamps with the mighty grumpy Water Buffalo splashing in the shallow waters, dense forest areas with Rusa Deer and Banteng, open beach for an occasional skittish Sambar Deer and, to mix up this antler and horn feast, we’ve also added some Feral Hogs for you. All in all, our intention is to create a location with rather challenging gameplay, due to the thick forest, and an array of unique species to make that challenge gratifying (and worthy of your trophy lodges). You will be our judges on whether we succeeded.
In the next status update we will be telling you more about the upcoming animals and the unique features we will be bringing with them. In the meantime, here are a couple of the WIP screenshots of the upcoming reserve. Enjoy!
Also, it’s a time for us to start thinking about a name for the new location! And as always, we are turning to you, our community, who not only always know better but are brilliant at these things (remember Rougarou Bayou and Timbergold Trails? <3)
So, there you go, come up with a great name that will go with the existing EHR reserves and represent the uniqueness of the location we showed you in the screenshots. We are looking forward to your suggestions. Please share them in this thread!
Doc’s Shed opening
You might remember that some time ago Doc started clearing up the store of all the items he deemed as “chuff”, and putting them into his Shed. This week he took a stab at the store again and marked a couple of weapons to go there as well. On Monday all weapons and other items with the “Limited” tag will become unavailable and moved away, so grab them beforehand before it’s too late. On a brighter note, following many a community request, we managed to sneak our moustaches and the “Trapper hat – Skunk” out of the Doc’s Shed for a little while. It’s Thanksgiving time and Doc has been in an ok mood these days.
Events, events, events
It’s holiday season again, and time for all the special fun that comes with it. This week we are running a Thanksgiving event with tiered Turkey competitions and missions, together with savoury trophies and yummy sales to go with them. Please note that competitions run until the end of this week and missions will be available until the end of the next one, December 3rd, to give you more time.
One of the greatest Thanksgiving attributes – Black Friday sale – is already alive and kicking. We’ve discounted by 20% all items in the store (except for the recently released ones) for one day, until November 25th 11:00 CET, and all memberships and membership bundles (including membership bundles on our Steam store page) until November 27th, 12:00 CET. So, if you’ve been drooling over for that shiny 10GA Shotgun, it’s now or never!
And finally, next week it’s happening. Our traditional Holiday Event with festive missions and competitions, trophies and other exciting stuff. Something you can not and should not miss. Truly the highlight of the year in theHunter Classic. Check back on December 1st to learn more about it and kick off your December with some glorious winter hunting!
Today we are thrilled to present something which many of you have been suggesting and waiting for since the game first came out. Luna has done an incredible job on this feature and she even threw in some sweet extra inventory management stuff, including a smooth search function for your lodge inventory, stacking of duplicates, and the option to pre-select a saved Loadout directly from the launcher before starting a game. The latter will come in very handy when spawning at a non-heated tent in Whiterime Ridge 😉
Saved Loadouts are released as a premium feature, since they are not required to play or enjoy the game. You may continue to set up your equipment the gold old-fashioned way, like everyone has been doing for years. But if you are looking to shave some valuable time off your hunt setup and avoid having to check the wiki for camo and permitted ammo lists, then head to the store and purchase yourself some Loadouts. They are available separately or in bundles. For bundles we have introduced a small one, containing 5 Loadouts, and a large one which will be enough to get you covered for all the existing reserves. As promised, today we are also giving 1 free Loadout to all our current members, as a little thank you for your loyalty and support.
And more on that topic, we are also giving large bundles of Loadouts to the three winners of the “Share your favourite loadout competition”. Congratulations Askrobert1234, Seifer and J_Birdman! Not only are you the winners, but your winning entries will be added to the store as bundles for the rest of our community to make use of. Thank you!
Meet you in the tropics!
Since we announced last week that a new reserve is in the works, you kept us busy with your speculations, guesses and ruminations. There have been a few of you that have been absolutely spot on. Very impressive! This post was probably my favourite, since indeed, the 12th reserve in theHunter Classic is inspired by the Australian tropical forest. In the next weeks we will be telling you more about the gameplay details of the new map, as well as, of course, the fauna. In the meantime, who would you like to see which animals will be residing there?
Anti-virus false positives
We know that a number of players have been experiencing alerts from their anti-virus software following a recent game patch. We are still trying to establish which piece of code is responsible for triggering the alert, and we are also working closely with the relevant anti-virus software developers to ensure this does not happen in the future. In the meantime, please be assured that there is nothing suspicious about any of the executables included in theHunter. This is a false-positive alert that can be safely ignored.
Personal bests anyone?
With the Personal Bests function on our site undergoing re-evaluation, in case you would like to know what was your best scoring Moose ever, UHC Apps is a fantastic website developed by our community members caledonianblues and Tod1d, dedicated to all things theHunter, with a primary focus on hosting quality community competitions. In addition, the website includes some great tools for displaying theHunter stats, and the most recent addition is a very cool Personal Bests function that allows you to view your best trophies from any season, completely with CSV download for anyone who wants to manipulate the data in Excel or other applications.
We encourage you to check it out – please note that you will need to create an account. It’s simple, it’s fast, and it’s free.
Welcome to another status update from your favourite game.
What’s in the works?
We haven’t updated you for quite some time about what we’ve been working on lately. The reason is that the whole team have been occupied with different parts of what’s going to become a new reserve! Any ideas about the location? 😉
Share with us your favourite loadout!
Another upcoming feature that we revealed last week – Loadouts – is having a nice ride through the testing phase and we are hoping to be able to present it to you very soon. To hype you up a bit, we’ve just launched a community competition, in which you have a chance to win a bundle with 11 upcoming Loadouts, one per each of the existing reserves in the EHR. Pretty sweet deal if you ask me. All you need to do is to share with us your go-to loadout, the first one you will save with the help of the upcoming feature, in this thread.
Mid-November madness & Power of Panther
Early next week it’s time for our annual event – Mid-November Madness. Check back on Monday for more details and prepare for some mad hunting to commence!
A lot of team news recently, today we have even more of that! Our Marketing Coordinator Johanna is leaving us for pastures new – good luck Johanna, you shall be missed in our weekly streams! – and we have a new User Acquisition manager Daniel who joined us to help bring more new players to theHunter. You can say goodbye to Johanna in this thread and hello to Daniel in the thread to this status update.
Hey there,
I’m Daniel Reed and I am the new User Acquisition Manager here at Expansive Worlds. Originally from the UK, I’ve been living in Sweden for about 4 years and loving it. Been playing games since I was a kid with games like Cossacks and a random game called Rollcage. Now I play Overwatch about 4 times a week and spend my time looking for new, exciting indie games like Brothers. Looking forward to getting to know you Hunters more!
It’s been a crazy Halloween week, with your hunting skills and tenacity being put to the test in the special mission in the spooky Timbergold Trails. Only 479 hunters completed the whole pack and received the Werewolf trophy and T-shirt, if you are one of them – congratulations, it’s one of the most unique special event awards in theHunter Classic history.
Image by ronMctube
As always, we were closely monitoring and discussing your sentiments regarding the event and promise to take it all into account for next year. As I mentioned last time, we will work hard to get a special alloy for silver bullets done and ready for your next werewolf encounters, and – who knows! – maybe you will even be able to put then into your trophy lodges. We will also take into account your feedback about the second mission being too difficult and off-putting. But all in all, the event seems to have been a hit and the team enjoyed reading your comments as much as they enjoyed working on it. Thank you very much!
Trophy lodge customization – what do you think?
In all of the Halloween hoopla we felt like the new trophy lodge styles and gun racks didn’t receive as much attention as we hoped for, so we are curious whether you tried them out, what you think, what is your favourite one and, of course, whether you have any suggestions for future styles? Those you can share in this thread and even win some em$ if your suggestion catches our attention.
Pre-saved loadouts, anyone?
More on a production note, the team have been busy with something big that we hopefully will be ready to reveal to you soon. But what we are ready to tell you already today is that we’ve got a new cool feature lined up for you – and believe it or not, it’s one the most requested things in theHunter Classic history, pre-saved inventory loadouts! It hasn’t been the fastest feature for us to develop, that’s why we were keeping it under the radar, but now, as we are moving into testing phase and Martin is busy trying to break it (and Luna is busy fixing what he managed to break) we are finally at the stage when we feel it’s safe to announce it’s coming. On the screenshot below you can see the work in progress – together with the loadouts we are also bringing some delicious freebies, such as searching inventory and stacking duplicate items. Pre-saved inventory loadouts will be available to purchase in the store, and all members will receive one for free at the release date as a thank you for their loyalty and support.
Team update
And finally, some team news. As I am going on maternity leave at the end of December, we will have a new producer Bethany taking over the development of the game. Also, this week we welcomed a new assistant community manager – Mat a.k.a. TreeKiwi. We are super hyped to have Bethany and Mat onboard, please read their intros below and give them both a warm welcome!
Bethany
Hello everyone! My name’s Bethany Ward and I have recently joined the team as Producer for theHunter Classic.
I grew up in Australia where I spent most of my time close to the bushland, rainforests, beaches and lakes. I have crossed paths with native animals such as red and grey kangaroos, as well as introduced game such as foxes, rabbits, and deer. Protected species such as koalas and wombats are a rare sight but I have been lucky enough to spot these as well. If you are ever out hiking in the Australian rainforest don’t let the most cheeky of Australian birds, the Lyrebird, fool you!
Recently I started a new adventure and crossed the globe to Stockholm to brave the dark winters, surströmming (maybe!?), and snow jackets. My hobbies include travelling, hiking, and meeting new people. I enjoy videogames of all kinds from realistic open world adventures to indie pixel art gems.
I’m very excited to be joining the community and look forward to contributing to the best hunting game out there, theHunter Classic!
Mat
Kia ora hunters!
Well, a lot of you will already know me, but my name’s TreeKiwi or Mat as my parents call me. All my ducks have lined up in a row and I am super excited to be part of the Expansive Worlds team. I will be working alongside Graham and the rest of the team as Associate Community Manager.
I am originally from Wellington, New Zealand but I have lived all over NZ and spent a few years in ‘Straya (Australian for Australia). I have been in the Arboriculture industry for the last 16 years and it’s sort of where my name Tree-Kiwi comes from 🙂
I grew up in a little rural community on a small farm, so I also hunt in real life. Most of my target species have been Goats, Pigs, Possums and Rabbits. Hunting in New Zealand is different to lots of the world, apart from waterfowl we don’t have any sessions. This is because all the land mammals in NZ are introduced and they have spread like the plague. So we are encouraged to shoot, trap and hunt as many as possible to try give our native forest, birds and reptiles a chance to rehabilitate.
I am so excited that I got this job and I hope that I can do the player base proud. I look forward to working with everyone here to keep bringing you the best hunting experience possible.
