Trophy Lodge – Rustic. The new trophy lodge features two levels, 27 trophy slots (including a full body mount for deer), and a small new feature – radio. You can buy it separately in the store as well as in a bundle with a Classy trophy lodge. The functionality and gameplay are the exactly the same as of the Classy one.
Extended contextual help with possibility to buy items (scent eliminator, tent and face paint) from in-game – please note that to use this feature you need to turn on your contextual help via Settings
Changes
Trophy lodge editor is now available on web / launcher – you can now hide, drag and drop your trophies, rename lodges via Game management tab (available under Settings).
You can now visit your friends’ trophy lodges via Trophy Lodge selection manager, both in SP and MP, even if they are not online.
Species specific camo (eg. Boone & Crockett, Outback outfit) is now highlighted brown in the camo app when used on the reserves with respective species.
Bug fixes
Fix for the fps drop when using a shotgun vs hard surfaces and objects (eg. ground)
Fix for the Aimpoint scope on 7mm rifles
Tweak for large platforms, so large bears would not hit the roof
Here is a short status update for you on this fantastic July weekend.
This week we have been busy at work adding some final touches to the new Trophy Lodge (inspired by your feedback) and testing it. As we are already in the final phase, I have managed to get a sneak peek screenshot from Mattias to share with you. We are very happy with the results and look forward to delivering it to you. Stay tuned for more news on the new Trophy Lodge very soon.
In the meantime, we also announced a new Game design competition for the species that are still missing regular missions and competitions. This is your chance to get that competition idea you’ve always wanted into theHunter and bag some pretty awesome prizes to boot. This time, following your suggestions, we have changed the format slightly. All three ptarmigan species will have their own competitions but share the same set of missions. We have also decided that if appropriate, we will pick and choose separate missions and competitions from complete packs, to put together the best of the best collections. Read more details on the competition in this forum thread, looking forward to your designs and ideas!
That’s it from us for now. Be sure to take advantage of our awesome large equipment sale running right now. This is a perfect opportunity to stock up on tents, tree stands, bait sites and other sweet items for your EHR adventures. Community member Mrmr123 has already bought 19 tree stands, but we don’t judge 😉
Trophy animals on small round, medium round and large square platforms in the Trophy lodge can now be rotated with help of PgUp / PgDn keys (default). Like the rest of Trophy lodge editing, this can only be executed in a single player mode
All Trophy lodges in the EHR now feature special Midsummer decorations!
Fixes
Another fix for the excessive “moaning” of black bears
Fix for the bear model on the RFF shooting range (it was only possible to get a body shot on it before)
A new fix for the game freeze when in the trophy shot mode
Fix for bad fitting of some glasses and facemasks
Fix for sunglasses and shooting glasses bug when they would randomly go transparent and show eyes underneath
Ibex head in the forward pose is slightly lowered
Fix for a bug where the rename input field would sometimes disappear in the lodge editor
Fix for a bug where achievements on the expedition statistics screen displayed as 1 off from what was actually earned. (Displayed 500 when you earned the 1000 achievement, 0 when earning the 1 achievement, and so on). This fix only applies to expeditions started after 2017-06-20 10:00 and is not retroactive to previously bugged expeditions
In progress:
Continue looking into the “roaming bears bug” – it was not solved completely with the last patch
Slow loading inventory times – almost there!
Investigating the bug with some players randomly not getting a taxidermy prompt
Welcome to our weekly status update! Thanks for the great discussion about competitions following the last status update. There are many factors to consider and we have plenty to think about. We’ll be announcing a new game design competition next week and in the meantime, we’re preparing the missions and competitions of the winning entries from last time.
Midsummer in theHunter!
This week is Midsummer week in Sweden, and as promised we’re bringing a part of it to theHunter. For one, all trophy lodges in the EHR now feature special decorations and today, we’re launching a special event in which you’ll get a taste of a traditional Swedish cuisine and compete for some lovely trophies. Details and discussions are here.
.17 HMR Lever Action Rifle
Today we released a new rifle. A beautiful lever action in .17 HMR. It’s the first rifle in game that is ethical for both small game and foxes and we hope it’s going to become your new favourite. Please note that careful shot placement is of paramount importance when taking down foxes with this weapon. It’s also important to take distance into consideration. Following the tradition, we’re kicking off the new weapon by launching a special competition. Time to test that bad boy out on some bunnies.
Team
As there have recently been some changes to theHunter Classic team, we thought it might be a good time to take a new team picture. The game has been going for a long time. Many people have come and gone, each of them leaving behind a part of their work (and heart) in theHunter Classic. You can track the evolution of the team by these pictures:
And here is the latest version of theHunter Classic family, sans Linus (who is on his day off today), Adam (who is working from the Vietnamese coast) and David (who works from home on a consultancy basis).
(From left to right top to bottom)
Johan Pauli – 3D Artist Sacha Karsenty – Sales & Partnership Manager Mattias Nordin – Art Lead Patrik Andersson – Client Programmer Cecilia Eriksson – Character Artist Katarina Schultz – Frontend Programmer Roberto Mangiafico – Lead Client Programmer Greg Iwaniec – Sound Designer Stefan Hoischer – Community Manager Patrick Enz – Game Designer Moe Awira – Animator Johanna Schramm – Marketing Coordinator Robin Andersson – Client Programmer Alena Rybik – Producer Luna Duclos – Backend Programmer
Trophy Lodges Open Day
Finally, there’s a cool community incentive going on right now. Trophy lodges open day! You can express your interest and discuss the details in this thread. Come join us, this is your chance to show off your awesome trophies!
It’s status update time, so grab yourself a cup of hot joe, sit back and enjoy the read!
Last week we released a hefty game update with lots of fixes and a new, long requested feature – functional sunglasses. With that patch we were keeping the promise we made earlier in the year about commitment to quality and trying to maintain a balance between adding new stuff and improving the existing features and gameplay, as well as adding depth to the existing game. We realize we will probably never be able to fix all the bugs that get reported, but we have been and will continue doing our best to provide you with a game that is enjoyable to play. Hence, we’ve spent a lot of time (and Roberto and Luna tore a lot of hairs out) digging into the slow inventory and map loading times which, since the release of the trophy lodge, seemed to have spread to more players. This week, we finally saw what looks like a light at the end of the tunnel. There is still some work to be done before we can deliver it to you, but we are hopeful.
Another thing that has been in the works is a new iteration of the trophy lodge, which has been assigned codename “Rustic”. We took in a lot of the feedback you provided after the release, both when it comes to the gameplay, but also look and feel (thanks INTIMID883R, Fletchette and others!) and we will try to implement as much as possible. More news to come soon!
Yesterday we launched a the new pack of competitions. The Rocky Mountain Elk set, designed by our community member Ash1302. In the meantime, we would like to ask you whether you participate in our regular competitions. If yes, what are you favourite ones? And if no, why you think this is the case. Looking forward to your replies in the status update thread!
Next week Sweden and the rest of the Nordic countries are celebrating the holiday of Midsummer which is a local name for summer solstice. The whole team is off on Friday, eating pickled herrings and drinking snaps, and this year we’re also adding some special Swedish fun to theHunter as well. Come back in the middle of next week for more news on this!
Team news
We have had some team movements over the last weeks. For one, our QA manager Dennis Borg has left us. Thank you for everything Dennis, you will be missed! We also have a new addition to theHunter family now. A front-end developer Katarina has joined us to replaced Magnus, who has been working on theHunter: Call of the Wild for the last months. Katarina has already settled in and is now working on the function to let you visit friends’ trophy lodges when in single player. Read her intro below and say hello 🙂
Hi all, I’m Katarina (Kitty or Kat works just as well) and I’m joining the awesome theHunter Classic team as a Frontend Developer. I’m born and raised in Uppsala which is approximately 40 min by train north of Stockholm. I did however spend 8 years living in London where I worked and also studied music for a short period of time. Apart from playing drums (and of course video games) I also enjoy yoga, cooking and having fun with family and friends. I’m very eager to get to know all of you and to learn and grow with the company and it’s amazing culture.
Survey results
Finally, it’s time to announce the results of our traditional annual survey. This year we collected responses from 5609 people – thank you everyone, the feedback and information you shared are very valuable!
Although we can’t make all the results public, every single response will be evaluated and all answers will be taken into consideration when we decide on our future roadmap. We hope you forgive us for including Trophy Room in it by the way, it was a bit sneaky, but if we hadn’t done it you would have been on to us in no time 😉
Now let’s dig into some data:
* You mostly play to enjoy the game experience and increase your Hunter Score and stats. The third most popular option was to have fun with friends.
* 95.82% of our players would recommend theHunter to a friend – thank you for your support and loyalty <3
* Another sweet number – 92.59% players who have made a purchase in the game would consider buying something again and around 90% think that their purchase offered good or ok value for money.
* 84.06% of all respondents are satisfied, very satisfied or extremely satisfied with our communication.
* 81.94% of players experience bugs in-game occasionally, seldom or never, whereas about 18.06% often or almost every session.
* Our efficiency at dealing with bugs was evaluated with 7.02 as the weighted average, on a scale from 1 to 10. That is the best result we’ve seen since we started asking this question!
* Over 40% of respondents play mostly single player, with another 25.94% both single- and multi-player.
We’ve randomly chosen 7 players who have filled in the survey and added them 1000 em$ each: TosaInu Whiteonyx Wby257 Spyre9 Zadepam Laces3345 satancete
Functional sunglasses – Sunglasses and tinted glasses now have an actual effect. It can be turned off in the gameplay settings and / or toggled on the fly with help of Z key (default)
Eyewear and facewear now have different inventory slots, so you can have both glasses and a scarf / moustaches on at the same time
A new pose for pheasants added to the Trophy lodge
The sound should be lower when inside the Trophy lodge when it’s raining
Reindeer is now placed on large wall plaques in the Trophy lodge (please note that all your previously mounted reindeer are re-set to Trophy manager)
The top large wall plaque in the Trophy lodge now has a slightly lower position to accommodate for larger antlers
A new trophy pose added for reindeer, small adjustments made to red deer and elk poses – should eliminate / make better antler clipping
Filter and sort buttons added to the Trophy manager, as well as tooltips to the various buttons in the Trophy lodge selector and editor (now you can hide your trophies)
Fix for swapping trophies in the Trophy manager
New soundmix fix for the bear moaning sound (bears should now sound less loud)
Two more large bird platforms are added to the Trophy lodge
Help button added for when inside of the Trophy Lodge
Change to the roaming animals AI which should eliminate the situations when players are not able to catch up with roaming animals (bears, deer, goats, wild board etc.)
Bug fixes:
Fix for Happy Camper, Blazing Orange, Army and B&C scarves showing as green in the camo app
Fix for the 16GA white barrel issue
Fix for rabbits and hares always showing “roaming” tracks
Fix for the game crash / freeze during the trophy shot
Fix for distance calculation on the map
Fix for wrong distance showed for mineral feeder position
Fixed an issue where the harvester would get a trophy instead of the person who killed the animal
After a short status update break with are back with your weekly dose of news and general musings from our headquarters.
Trophy Lodge update
It’s been exactly two weeks since we released Trophy lodge and your response has been very heartwarming. We’ve received a small mountain of feedback from you and we discussed it all in depth. The hotfix patch was already released last week and more fixes and improvements are being tested right now to be included in the next one.
For one, a lot of you have been reporting troubles with reindeer trophy placement, so we’ve decided to move those from medium wall plaques to large ones instead, which we feel is a more suitable place for their abundant antlers. We also slightly lowered the position of the top wall plaque and tweaked poses for red deer and elk, worst offenders in terms of antler clipping, so after the next patch it will be easier to place your monster trophies.
Secondly, we’ll be adding two more platforms for turkey, geese and pheasants. You said (and we agreed) that one per trophy lodge is not enough.
The last and hopefully the nicest bit, we persuaded Max the Taxidermist to keep his em$ fees at 10 em$, same as during the post-release week. I guess he was pleased that you were pleased with his work and the looks of your Trophy lodges 😉
Armed with more of your feedback, we started investigating the possibility to add full deer mounts for you to be able to showcase your piebalds and albinos in all their full-bodied glory, connecting the taxidermy to shooter instead of harvester, as well as a function to visit friends’ Trophy lodges when playing single player. In general, our feeling is that this feature has been really well accepted (supported by tens of thousands taxidermied animals), so we will continue working on it and adding more bits and pieces to the whole experience.
Trophy shot bonanza competition
It’s time to announce winners for our Trophy Shot bonanza competition! The EW team picked their favourites in two categories, and here are the entries that impressed us the most:
Best Trophy Lodge shots (winners get 1050, 950 and 700 em$ respectively)
1. Riumma
2. Foxtrotter (Max_Firepower)
3. Pittie
Best Trophy shots (all winners get a Trophy lodge)
1. Dilaj
2. Gas56
3. Villkatta
We’ve also decided to give Blendy a consolatory prize of 200 em$, as their trophy shot missed the top three by just one vote.
Congratulations to the winners and thank you to everyone for creativity and participation in this community challenge, let’s do more of those!
Latest releases
Last week we put up a new pack of Rocky Mountain Elk missions designed by our community member Dillakiller – get cracking on those and earn some gm$ for your taxidermy wishes!
This week we released four new face scarves in Blazing Orange, Happy Camper, Army and Boone & Crockett styles. They look dandy and the last two also provide camo against deer species. To accompany the release of the scarves, we are running a weekend sale on all the matching clothes and dog gear. Time to get fancy. And while we are on it, is there any particular style or piece that you feel is missing from our clothing gallery and that you would like to see added?
For now that’s all from us, check next week’s status update for the results of our recent player survey and introduction of our new front-end developer Katarina.
Fixed the issue with the taxidermy prompt not being available for some animals (was related to security token behaviour)
Fixed the missing taxidermy pop-up when a player clicks Escape when in trophy shot mode
Fixed the wield / unwield issue while entering the Trophy lodge (you shouldn’t be able to wield weapons when inside of the Trophy lodge)
Disabled emote and dog commands while entering the Trophy lodge
Fix for game crashes related to graphics code
Fix for the small terrain issue on Bushranger Run (floating barrels)
Performance improvements for the trophy manager when dealing with many trophies
Fix for the mission “I’ll give you a buck each”, so it now can be completed with all .243 rifles and .30-06 rifles
In progress:
Graphics issue on WRR
Filters to hide trophies in the Trophy manager
Investigating solutions for extra large antlers clipping through the roof for some large wall plaques – in the meantime, please try switching between different poses to find a suitable one
Issue where swapping two trophies would misbehave
Further digging into slow loading times for inventory
Bug with players not being to catch up with “roaming” bears
Bug with fleeing rabbits showing roaming tracks
Players getting stuck when pressing the Escape key while in the Taxidermy prompt menu (please avoid doing it until it’s fixed, click No instead)
Big day today! And not only because spring has finally come to Stockholm. After months of blood, sweat and tears (mostly tears), we are super thrilled to announce the release of one of the biggest features we’ve ever brought into theHunter. Introducing the brand new Trophy Lodge! If you watched our pre-release livestream on Tuesday, you already have a good understanding of what to expect, if not, you can catch the replay here.
You (and us too) have been waiting for this for quite some time, so I won’t be keeping you too long with my rambling. We put together game design notes which detail how to use the Trophy Lodge. In addition we welcome you to indulge yourselves in this detailed dev blog on how we developed this feature. We hope you enjoy!
Trophy Lodge Gameplay
The Trophy Lodge that you can find in the store features a “classy” style and has 21 slots for displaying different animals (4 large wall plaques for elk, red deer, moose and bison; 7 small wall plaques for small and medium sized deer, ibex, sheep and pigs; 5 small round platforms for small game; 1 large round platform for pheasants, turkey and geese; 2 medium platforms for wolves, foxes, coyotes and goats; 2 large platforms for bears and kangaroos).
You can own an infinite number of trophy lodges and you are free to fill them up as you see fit. Some players might opt to have one of two trophy lodges with their absolute best scoring animals, some will have one trophy lodge per reserve, where only species harvested in that reserve will be featured, some will dedicate one trophy lodge to their most special harvests including rares, non-typicals, amazing memories. Go nuts and enjoy!
All your Trophy Lodges are accessible from any in-game lodge that have a Trophy Lodge sign on the outside. You can find trophy lodges on all of the 11 reserves and when you approach the door you will be able to enter by pressing “E” (default key). You can rename your lodges as you wish, and lock them if you want to hide them from the curious eyes of your guests in a multiplayer game.
You can taxidermize every single animal you harvest, from now on. You can do it by paying a small em$ or gm$ fee to Max the Taxidermist (who is in charge of all this malarkey) from the game, right after taking a trophy shot or, if having chosen not to take one, by clicking Resume Game from the harvest screen (the latter prompt can be turned off in your gameplay settings). If you choose not to taxidermize your animal from within the game for whatever reason (no cash, you were not sure that your trophy was a rare one, just not in a mood or pressed the wrong button by mistake) your animal gets sent to Max the Taxidermist’s enormous fridge where it is kept for 24 hours in case you change your mind and want to turn it into a trophy. Please note that the taxidermy option from Max’s fridge costs slightly more than the on-spot taxidermy fee.
All your taxidermied animals can be found in the Trophy Manager, accessible from inside your Trophy Lodges by pressing “I” (default key). In the Trophy manager you can place your trophies in the current Trophy Lodge and check out trophy information. When inside a lodge you can also see details about displayed trophies by right-clicking on them; you can change their poses by left-clicking while the trophy info is visible. Try it out, it is much easier than it sounds. Any editing of the inside of a Trophy Lodge (placing animals, switching between poses) can only be done in your own lodge and in single player mode. Multiplayer is dedicated to showing off your lodges and trophies. When in multiplayer, guests can visit any of the host’s Trophy Lodges, unless locked.
Frequently Asked Questions
Can you taxidermize your old animals?
This is a good question and one which has been asked many times already. At the launch of the development process we were seriously investigating this option, but unfortunately we quickly discovered it would not be possible due to technical limitations. In order to recreate a trophy from a harvested animal we are now sending and saving a whole bunch of new data, which we simply didn’t have any reason to store before. We realize that it is rather sad news for those of you with a bunch of non-typicals, rares and top-of-leaderboard animals under your belts, but we hope you will also see it as a fresh start that will rekindle your passion for hunting animals you might have grown bored of. Plus, who knows, maybe your new personal best is just around the corner 😉
Can I customize the interior of my trophy lodge?
Not right now, but we built our Trophy Lodge with this possibility in mind. If this feature is successful and popular, we are going to work on customization and additional trophy lodge features, so you will have a chance to make it into your very own hunter’s den.
Can I delete my trophies?
No, we wouldn’t like to go down that road, since all trophies are paid for. But we are working on the function that allows you to hide the ones you are not interested in displaying anymore.
Any other question you might have …
… please ask in this forum thread. We will be there to answer them as well as read about your first impressions and feedback.
Time to Kick it Off
We are celebrating the release of this huge feature with the Trophy Lodge Bonanza Competition, in which you can win a trophy lodge and some sweet em$ prizes. And also we bribed Max the Taxidermist with some pulled pork and whisky and got him to lower his em$ taxidermy fees by 50%. That means for the next 10 days, you can taxidermize for 10em$, until the end of Sunday, May 28th (around the time we expect Max to sober up). Today we are also starting a new season, whohoo! So, get out there and get stuffing.
Trophy Lodges have been on our agenda for ages. When I say for ages, I really mean for ages. The very first mention of it on the forum goes back almost to the beginning of theHunter, year of 2008. Since then suggestions of some sort of trophy room have been popping up regularly, both in the forum and in our surveys where they always ended up in top tier of the most desired features. Despite this, the idea of the trophy room kept being moved down on priority list in favour of less daunting features. It felt like too huge an endeavour for a small and lean team as ours has always been, so the risks of commencing on such an adventure have been outweighing the expected rewards, and the trophy room post-it kept being put aside, time after time. Until December 2016.
Brainstorming
Trophy Lodge – first draft
Back then we gathered together for one of our brainstorm session to nail down what we would be working on in the upcoming year. Those sessions usually happen twice per year and are fun (and sometimes slightly crazy) discussions where everyone throws in ideas and we all talk tech, feasibility, community reactions and many other factors that need to fall together for a new feature to make its way to the roadmap. That time our 3D artist Mattias drew a fireplace with an antler rack above on a post-it and showed it to us as a first concept of a trophy room. Although usual concerns being brought up (Can we even do it on our engine? How long will it take? Where can we cut corners? Shall we take a “lighter” approach?), all of us got super inspired by the image of a cozy “room”, filled with gorgeous animal trophies and memories that are unique for each and every player. We looked at each other and said “what the heck, let’s do this, and do it right”. And so it began.
Design
Patrick Enz, Game designer
The work, as usual, started with putting the vision into design, compelling and comprehensible both for the team to work on and the players to follow. Our game designer Patrick took a first stab at it in January 2017 and it took at least a month of team brainstorms, multiple amount of changes and adjustments before we all felt that we have something we could work with. During those early meeting sparks would fly, not once but often our lead programmer Roberto would have to flush his infamous black book with the huge NO sign on it (when the rest of us went a bit too wild in our imaginations), but in the end we all managed to achieve something we could unite behind and what is, more or less, what you see released today, although we ended up changing, adding and cutting quite a few things as the development progressed.
From a game design perspective the biggest challenge was coming up with a gameplay loop that felt right and true to theHunter, which would encourage players to get their trophies taxidermized. With Patrick at the steering wheel we broke the whole design into small pieces and discussed how to tackle the amount of rooms, how it will all work in multiplayer, how to solve the placement of trophies, what to do with the indoor lighting, something we have never had in theHunter before, and other stuff. In general, in the game design we tried to find the balance between offering our players as much freedom as possible in using this feature while maintaining a strict gameplay framework which would make it possible for us to implement it technically. One example of such balance has been the decision to go for pre-set plaques and platforms and divide all our existing animals between them.
Trophy Manager – Design
“My favorite part with working on this amazing new feature”, Patrick says, “was when we finally were able to add taxidermied animals to the Trophy Lodge itself. It sort of felt like playing The Sims again but with a hunting mindset. Being able to place melanistic variations of animals all around my lodge gave me a satisfying feeling since melanistics are just awesome. Otherwise having the honor to create the initial representation of the lodge was an amazing opportunity since I saw it as my first step into the deep and complex field of game design itself.”
Art
Mattias, 3D artist
Johan, 3D artist
In the meantime our 3d artists Mattias and Johan started to work on the concept art for the Trophy Lodge itself. There were simple drawings picturing the layout and general look and feel. The initial plan was to create two different styles at the release, but due to time limitations we had to focus on one, the Classy style.
Mattias created a mock-up model of the entire lodge in the game to get a sense of scale and try out how animal trophies would fit. This was our first challenge, and in the end he had to increase the initial room space several times, because trying different animal sizes really made the room look small. Some of the antlers are huge!
Once the mock-up was nailed, Mattias and Johan made a long list of art assets that would be present in the room and assigned each of those priorities. So, walls and floorings would be on top of it, whereas the whisky and cigar corner, something all of us really wanted to see in the game, was cut due to time constraints.
Trophy Lodge – First sketches
After all the assets were finished the artists ran into another curveball. They had to re-furnish the room, trying to make it large enough for all the big animals (they were taking the largest animal per species as a benchmark) and look cozy at the same time. The most challenging task was definitely to scale the lodge correctly. Mattias and Johan had to go through several different mockups of room layout and size before it finally felt good. And even after they started asset creation they had to go back and scale the room further. Always larger.
The final step, if one doesn’t count bug fixing, was to create a “bake” for the static light, which is making a black and white texture with lighting information. After that it needs to be applied to the scene; the furniture, the walls and floor. This really helps everything go together better.
Trophy Lodge – Icons WIP
When asked about his favourite thing about working on the Trophy Lodge, Mattias says, “The best part was a certain point in the development when I felt we really had something going on; and that was when we made a small video for an internal presentation! Every visual bug was sorted out and it really felt like we had a chance to get it right. Work-wise I also appreciated working with rendering the lights for the room.”
Animation
Moe, Animator
From the animation side, Moe’s task was to pose all our existing animals on their respective plaques and platforms. Sometimes it was challenging to fit some animals with large antlers on their large wall plaques while still maintaining a good looking pose for smaller antler and animal variations, as those plaques are very versatile and can fit smaller deer to larger ones. That’s why when placing your trophies with huge antlers on the wall plaques, you would need to be smart where to mount them.
In the beginning we decided to go for just one pose per animal to save some time and work, but about a month ago Moe suggested we try to add support for multiple poses to make things more versatile. Our programmer Patrik tried it out and managed to get it done in a couple of hours, that’s why now you are able to switch between 3 poses per animal, and some of them have 5.
Client code
Roberto, Client programmer
Patrik, Client programmer
Robin, Client programmer
When we started to work on the Trophy Lodge we knew that it would bring a lot of technical challenges, and it did.
The first problem we needed to solve was the Trophy Animal system. Specifically, how to reuse the most from the animals we already have in the game, being able to recreate the very same beautiful antlers, at the same time saving as little data as possible on the server side.
As this entity is something new for our code (we have items, animals, critters, all with their own specifics, but nothing that would combine characteristics of both animals and items), we had to create a new one. In the end we managed to create a new kind of item – TrophyAnimalItem – that bring all of this with it, saving only a few magic numbers for the antlers and avoiding to change anything in the current animal and population system. Patrik did an amazing job creating a dedicated loading system for the TrophyAnimalItems, making it easy to expand and maintain.
Along with the new type of item came the way of managing the Trophy Lodge itself with all the trophies and the dynamic plaques. Roberto and his team created a file where the designer and artist would bind the plaques and platforms in the settings with the real object in the game, managing to enable only those that are actually used. All of this is then synced with the back-end and the new Trophy Manager interface that Luna created.
At this point we had to establish communication with the server to be able to update the status of the lodge with all the animals at their right places with their right textures and poses if one leaves the Trophy Lodge. To do this, Roberto and Luna decided to create a .json file with all the information about the animals in the lodge. When the game client loads the lodge it sends the request to the server about the updated lodge data and then recreates the trophy animals with all their poses on the fly.
Trophy Lodge – Early stage of development
To place your animal in the Trophy Lodge you need to be able to taxidermize it, so Robin created a smart system that manages communication with the server, the interface and the way the client stores the data for the animals we harvest. We had to make some changes to the harvest flow, specifically in the trophy shot system, but in the end it was absolutely worth it.
When everything for a real Trophy Lodge experience was in place code-wise, the client programmer team focused on the multiplayer functionality, like the synchronization of the position of the players, so that different players can be in different lodges at the same time without clashing together or seeing each other. We ran into a whole bouquet of issues here, both related to fast-travelling and collision hiccups, but in the end, with a lot of effort and passion we managed to nail them, hopefully all 😉
As always, there is stuff that could be improved and things that we could add but we laid out a very solid foundation and are really happy that we managed to solve all the tech challenges which, historically, is something that has been holding us back the most.
Backend code
Luna, Backend programmer
Luna’s part in the project has been quite significant too. On her plate there were:
Server (both engine configuration, tracking taxidermy data and tracking lodge data)
Game UI (lodge selection and trophy manager, as well as linking things with the client)
Launcher (fridging functionality)
The main issue was time, and the amount of things that needed to be done. Thankfully, Luna managed to maintain a good pace and get everything finished and polished up a few days before our planned release date.
For the Game UI, we decided that starting fresh with a new codebase for those particular UI panes would be a good idea, it was a lot of fun making those from scratch with more modern code and a new way of working.
Beyond that, the server bits were rather interesting, it might not look like it, but the server has to do a lot of work and tracking behind the scenes to make sure everything stays consistent and everyone gets their trophies.
Result
As you can tell from the above, what we are hyped to present to you today is the result of many months of hard work by the whole team. Sometimes we didn’t know whether we would pull it off at all, sometimes we ran into a brick wall and had to engage all the creativity we had to get out of horrible situations. Some things got waived and scraped along the way, some things were added, some things were left out for future iterations, and we really hope we will have them one day soon! All in all, we are extremely proud of what we have achieved as a team and we hope you will use the Trophy Lodges, fill them up with your proud trophies and feel the love and care we poured into it.
Future
We hope that the story of the Trophy Lodge in theHunter doesn’t stop here. We already have some plans for some future iterations and additions. What are they? You tell us! We are looking forward to continue developing this awesome feature together with you.
