Howdy hunters,

Time for a status update! As we at Expansive Worlds are enjoying the last days of the very short and, as always in Sweden, erratic summer, we are hard at work tinkering with all the wonderful stuff that will soon to be added to the game. So, Luna is adding her loving final touches to the web barrel and feeder management and in the near future you can expect to be able to hire a little horde of invisible helpers to run around the EHR filling your bait sites while you are at work looking forward to a successful hunt on Hemmeldal or Bushrangers Run.

Bobcat sneak peek

Our biggest darling right now, Bobcat, is being worked on and polished and getting ready to jump into the testing phase (when the real work begins, some might argue). There were a lot of questions about how you will be able to hunt them and whether there will be some special equipment for them in the store. We are still nailing the last nuances of the hunting gameplay, so you will have to wait a bit for a definite answer. All I can say right now is that there will be some sort of lure for them but they, as I’ve mentioned before, will be very challenging to hunt.

I know that many of you have been dying to see the upcoming Bobcats, and here you go. A sneak peek of some renders from our talented character artist Cecilia, and animator Moe. Why yes, there will be albinos, the coveted gem of any trophy lodge!

A necessary reminder that these images are work in progress and what you see is not final.

Crunching Fiesta Numbers

Our Summer Fiesta has been rocking and rolling for two weeks now and we have crunched some data for you on the missions: 133 hunters have competed Johanna’s Epic Hunter missions pack, 31 have completed my Legendary Journey pack and 22 have completed caledonianblues’s Nightmare Mode pack. Only 13 hunters have completed all three packs! If you compare it to 160 who have completed the infamous Doc steps in mission back in 2014, this is a very special achievement! To honour all hunters who will have completed all three of the mission packs by the end of Summer Fiesta, Doc established a special trophy. Doc’s Hunting Champion! A true hallmark of hunting finesse. You still have over two weeks to get it into your trophy gallery, so you can cherish it for years to come 🙂 Game on!

Special Lock&Learn

Here’s a heads-up that next Thursday, August 18th, our Twitch channel will host a special livestream to celebrate the milestone of 3000 followers. You will be able to see the EW developers clashing with community members in an epic battle. The names of developers and participants from the community, chosen from those who applied last week, will be announced next week.

Premium tripod shooting rest

Finally, a new deluxe tripod shooting rest arrived in the store this week. Some of you might have seen it from before as it was featured in the rustic lodge. As the rest of premium items in theHunter Classic, it features a higher price point but offers no additional gameplay advantage that would make competitions unfair or make the game unbalanced in any other way. The main purpose of those items is to add an extra spice to the game experience while not interfering into the gameplay and give their owners a sense of having something special.

That’s it from us for today!

Happy hunting!

Discussion

Hey you hunters,

Thanks for stopping by on this beautiful August Friday to read up on what we’ve been up to.

Summer Fiesta

Have you already gotten your teeth into our Summer Fiesta? If not, then you should, you absolutely should. This year we’ve prepared a delicious spread for you: a) a grand month-long Scoresaver competition with new animals being added every Tuesday and Friday (Black Bear and Grizzly are already in, and seven more will join them when their turn comes); b) three packs of challenging missions (at least two players, Sycoshowbob and Ravenous_Fox, have already completed all of them, impressive!);  c) four skill based competitions for each of the week of August. The first one, Stealth Challenge is already live and kicking and awaiting all belated hunters to fight for the fame and glory, as well as a unique trophy. You can read all the details and discuss the Fiesta in this dedicated thread.

Are you ready to meow?

Now, onto something that has been the talk of the past week – the new species in the works. As sneaky as I was trying to be in my hints, you’ve sussed me out pretty fast, even my strategic attempt to throw you off with my avatar didn’t work. It is the Bobcat indeed! We are as hyped and as excited as you are, it being the first feline ever to reach theHunter Classic, and we are all committed to doing a great job on this fluffy and mesmerizing fella. The work with the model and animations is in its final stages and the client programmers are hard at work coding their unique behaviours. As work progresses, we will be keeping you updated with some behind the scenes details, screenshots and other assets, so make sure to come to this blog  regularly.

Lock&Learn – 3000 followers celebration!

Our Lock&Learn stream on Twitch started a bit more than one year ago when Johanna joined the EW team and it has grown into a cosy weekly opportunity for the community to hang out in the chat following Johanna and Stefan’s adventures in theHunter Classic and theHunter: Call of the Wild. Yesterday they tried their luck at one of the Summer Fiesta missions, pretty successfully, if you don’t count one very unfortunate Roosevelt Elk (you can catch the replay of it here, starting at ca. 4:23). In the meantime our Twitch channel has grown to 3000 followers – thanks for your support everyone! To celebrate this milestone, we are doing a celebration Lock&Learn stream on August 17th, and anyone from the community can apply to join! If you are interested in taking part, please fill in this form by August 8th.

Say hello to Martin

Finally, today we are happy to introduce you to the latest addition to our team – Martin, our new QA engineer, who will be making sure that the new releases go as slick as a snake in a barrel of butter, and giving the devs a helping hand in our continuous agony and ecstasy of fixing bugs.

Greetings everyone, my name is Martin Sundberg and I’ll be the next addition to the Expansive Worlds team, nice to meet all of you!

When I play games, I want to be completely immersed, remove everything around me and just be there and then. That’s why I believe there’s nothing worse than to be drawn from or out of an experience due to bugs or other abnormalities. If you haven’t guessed it already I’ll be joining the team as a Quality Assurance Engineer.

I grew up close to Stockholm in a little town called Vaxholm. I’ve always loved games, for as long as I can remember and more often than not I played a little too much… So, at a young age I decided I wanted to become a game developer.

My first milestone was to get through university so I applied for a school in southern Sweden called Blekinge Institute of Technology. While studying there I met five other people with the same ambition as myself. We founded Gatling Goat Studios and to date we’ve released two games, they are called Traverser and Chicku (you can find trailers on YouTube ;)!

After a total of five years in Karlshamn I wanted to move on and widen my horizons with new experiences and that’s when I found this opportunity. Now I’m here and I’ll do my best to help the game become even better!

See you around the forums!

That’s it from us for today, have an awesome weekend and get cracking on those Fiesta missions. I am off to find some sneaky Willow Ptarmigans and pray to the gods of EHR that one of them is over 600 in score 😀

Happy hunting!

Discussion

Hi there hunters,

Welcome to our status update! The depleted force of the theHunter team is making its way through July, sustained by the occasional ice cream and dreams about the beach. Our main work right now is focused around planning the autumn roadmap and features (and oh my, there is some good stuff in there) as well as polishing and testing things that will soon be released for you to enjoy.

Yesterday, a spanking new shotgun made its way into the store. The 10 GA lever-action shotgun. This beautiful firearm packs some no-nonsense power. And while at theHunter we, like no one else, appreciate sophisticated and skilful weapon work, based on correct weapon choice and precise shot placement, we won’t lie and say we haven’t been enjoying this beast of a gun. It’s super fun, and its three ammo types make it extremely versatile. According to our community member JimboCrow, it’s “sweeter than strawberry-rhubarb pie with powdered sugar and a scoop of vanilla!” Long story short, you should try it out. As always, we’re running a special competition to give your first hunts with the new shotgun an extra punch. Enjoy!

At the beginning of the next week we’re kicking off our month-long Summer Fiesta event which will make sure you don’t get bored in the last days of summer. Johanna, David and yours truly, under the eagle eye of our game designer Patrick, have prepared three missions packs for you (easy peasy, nothing to worry about!) and there will be 5 different competitions for all the competitive souls. Our artist Johan has made some brilliant trophies too, well worth your hunting skills! Anyway, make sure to check back next week for more details.

Since we dropped the new animal bomb in the last status update, there have been a bunch of speculations on the forum. Great to see that with 39 unique species in the game, you are still as excited about new additions as ever! I’m happy to report on the progress. Our character artist Cecilia has finished the model and textures and our animator Moe and client code programmers Linus and Roberto are busy crafting some lovely animations and unique (!) AI behaviours. I haven’t seen many correct guesses as to what it so far, so here are some thought-provoking details for you. The 40th resident of the EHR will live on Logger’s Point, Whitehart Island and Rougarou Bayou (preliminary reserves, still subject to change) and our vision is that it will be an extremely challenging animal to hunt. We’ll see where we end up at the end of the development and testing phase though. So, any more ideas? 😉

Finally, I wanted to share with you this sneak peek of the premium feature Luna has been working on. Filling feeders and barrels from the launcher to let you focus on real hunting. Please note that it is still very much work in progress.

Next status update will be published in two weeks, in the meantime, as always, see you and talk to you on the forum!

Happy hunting!

Discussion

Howdy hunters,

Good to see you in our woods! It’s been two weeks since our last status update, hope you haven’t missed us too much, with the new, apparently hugely popular Rustic trophy lodge out and all that. But you know, it’s July outside, and Sweden being Sweden, the action in town is slowly dying out due to the vacation season. We at theHunter are also pretty much decimated by the it, so you will see fewer and less regular updates in the next month (same goes about our support reply times), but we’ll be doing our best keeping you in the loop with the most important things going on in your favourite studio and your favourite game 😉

So, next week we are planning a small game patch with a fix for the longstanding issue of the slow loading inventory and GUI. We are also looking to collect information about other annoying bugs that are making your game experience less enjoyable. Please let us know your top three in this thread and don’t forget the link to the bug report thread on the bug report forums.

This Monday we had scheduled maintenance lasting for a couple of hours during which we moved to a new database all the crazy amount of your kills, achievements and poop found, among other less exciting things. Glad to see you survived that withdrawal. The move went smoothly, with a couple of minor errors that Luna fixed right away. For us this move is a significant infrastructure change, making our backend work more efficient, but you probably won’t notice any changes, except for how the leaderboards are being ordered. Now, if two animals have the same score, the oldest (earliest) kill will take a higher position.

There are a couple of hours left to submit your entry in our game design competition. We have already received a bunch of nice ones, but the door to the fame and glory path (not to mention Contributor title and em$) is still open and our ptarmigans in particular could use some of your love. One of the winning designs of our last challenge (Grizzly missions by drakle) have just been added to the game. We hope you enjoy them!

Finally, to give you something nice to contemplate over the weekend, here are some things we’re working on. Luna has started on the function to fill your barrels and feeders from the launcher to make your life a bit easier, and she is making a great progress so far. Roberto is baking a completely new type of collectables to add an extra level of immersion to game – a little bird told me they’ll even have their own leaderboard – whoa! Patrick is busy crafting insane and wonderful missions and competitions for our regular Summer Fiesta event that is going to start pretty, pretty soon. Linus is taking a stab at a new species. And David is working on a new frontend / backend feature that sometimes makes him cry but will probably be very welcomed by all of you. All in all, we are keeping ourselves busy, and lots of exciting stuff is coming. Thank you for playing and supporting theHunter Classic!

Happy hunting!

Discussion

Hello hunters,

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 😉

Happy hunting!

Discussion

Howdy hunters,

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:

December 2012
May 2013
February 2014
October 2014
September 2016

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!

Happy hunting!

Discussion