Howdy hunters,

Here is our weekly status update, including what we’ve been up to at Expansive Worlds.

Sneakathon 2016

So, yesterday we launched a new hunting event which we’re planning to run every year – Sneakathon 2016. We combined a couple of tough challenges, featuring some of our most spooky species, into a set of missions for all non-competitive souls as well as a final Roe Deer competition. The feedback for the event has been very positive so far, which makes us happy campers. To help you out in the Sneakathon, we reduced the price on all Sneaky 3D clothes by 50%, which is even cheaper than our regular bundles. In the spirit of sneakiness, there’s also a brand new fall leaf camo variation of our favourite Ghillie suit, designed by Gostwind in our 2014 outfit competition!

Player Survey

Here’s a reminder that the player survey we launched last week is running until the end of this week. The number of entries so far has been overwhelmingly high, but we’re still missing a couple of thousand opinions. Your opinion counts, so please take the opportunity to share it with us. You only have one opportunity per year, and we’re looking forward to discovering the results.

Lock&Learn – Deer Diary

As you may remember, two weeks ago we started a regular live-streaming project, Lock & Learn. Our community intern Johanna is learning the ropes of theHunter and sharing her journey with everyone in weekly Twitch streams. Without question, theHunter is a challenging game with a rather steep learning curve, which can be overwhelming for new players, so with this project we wanted to show (in an entertaining way) how one takes their first steps in the game, learns from their mistakes and evolves into a bad-ass hunter. Johanna has already completed two streams, you can catch a recap of her first episode, The Moose Karma, here, and here is the recap of her second one, Deer Diary – watch it carefully and enjoy it thoroughly 😉

Unfortunately there will be no stream today, but next week Johanna will be joined by our veteran hunter ForstHeld, and a little birdie told me they will take to the fields of Hirschfelden where Forst will give Johanna some Red Fox hunting lessons. Anyway, hope to see you on next Thursday at 16:00 CEST on Expansive Worlds’ Twitch channel.

Next week’s free species

We are continuing our experiment with free species rotation, and tomorrow Brown Bear and Moose will become premium again, while Alpine Ibex and Wild Boar will be free to hunt for the next 7 days. From next week onward the free species rotation will occur from Thursday to Thursday.

Team news

And now on to some team news. In the last few months, theHunter squad has undergone many changes. A bunch of people have left us and many more have joined. So, today we’re saying goodbye to our awesome animator Hampus, who has been with us for three years and has done some amazing work. The best of the best including the ibex fighting and labrador retriever animations. Good luck Hampus, you’ll be missed!

No goodbyes without hellos, and today we’re also welcoming a new member into the theHunter family. His name is Kristoffer and he’ll be working with us in the capacity of tools programmer, a completely new role for Expansive Worlds. Kristoffer’s work will be happening deep down behind the scenes, as he’ll be optimizing our engine tools to make the jobs of our programmers, artists and designers more efficient. Read Kristoffer’s intro below and say hello to him, although you won’t feel the direct impact of his work, what he does is extremely important and had a significant impact on the end result.

Hello there!

My name is Kristoffer Bergman and I’ve just joined Expansive Worlds as a Junior Tools Programmer.

I come from a small village near Lund in Skåne and just recently moved to Stockholm. At the age of 16 I made my first “game”: a console based “Hangman” in Java that I made during summer vacation, and seeing my brothers play around with it and having fun just felt amazing. The “I made this, they like it, they are happy because of me” feeling was absolutely addicting, so naturally I was gonna spend the rest of my life at my computer, programming.

Fortunately for me, this didn’t come with a particularly big life change. Spending unhealthy amount of time by the computer has for a very long time been a big part of my life, and I have been playing video games ever since I got my first Gameboy Colour.

Until I found a job to have as an excuse for programming 24/7, my path was unclear. During my early school years, I was the go-to-guy before any math or natural science test to explain things, and I ended up really enjoying to help people understand how stuff works. I love programming just as much as helping people, so I dreamt of becoming a teacher as well as becoming a programmer.

Then I found The Game Assembly, which had a program in Game Programming. I didn’t even realise that “Game Programmer” was an actual job. When I got in, my dream of becoming a programmer was about to be fulfilled. The only downside was that this meant I wasn’t gonna become a teacher and help people. However, one day at one of our school projects, the content creators were annoyed because their tools weren’t working. I helped them solve it and ever since then I know that til the day I die, this is what I want to do.

We are finishing this status update with a short video about our parent company, Avalanche Studios, in which some members of the Expansive Words’ team have been spotted. I thought it would be interesting for you guys to see where we work and put some faces to names of those who work on the game, and who you (hopefully!) love 🙂 Enjoy!

Happy hunting!

Discussion

Hello hunters,

Before you plunge into your weekend hunting, we wanted to catch a couple of minutes of your time to share some news.

On Tuesday we released a small patch with some fixes and a nifty new item. Two Person Tree Stand. Following its release, some people asked us to add the functionality to change sides in the tree stand, and boom, your wish is granted (well, it will be granted in one of the next game updates, right now Patrik is hard at work coding it ;))

Player survey – Tell us what you think!

As I announced last week, today we’re launching our annual player survey. We collect your feedback every day from what you share with us in the forums, support and social media channels, but once per year we launch a bigger questionnaire asking you all sorts of things about theHunter, the universe and everything. Such surveys help us reach as many of you as possible and collect a vast amount of community data, to make sure that we are developing the game you enjoy.

The theHunter 2016 survey will be open for 10 days, from today until May 2nd midnight CEST.   It will take you no longer than 15 minutes and we would appreciate your honest and detailed replies. Naturally, you can only participate once, but please ask your hunter friends to complete it as well. If you answer all the questions and fill in your theHunter name at the end, you’ll be automatically enrolled in our em$ draw, where we will randomly choose five players and gift them 1000 em$. You can also choose to submit your answers anonymously. Please note that even if you let us know your name, the information you provide will not be stored with your account details, shared, sold, distributed or used in any other way that may harm you.

Complete the survey

Introducing free species rotation

Many of you probably remember that back in January we added an additional free species, Pheasant, and exchanged Mule Deer for Whitetail, which made it possible for guests to hunt five species for free. Today we’re adding another little tweak to the free species portfolio, a.k.a. Rotation of Free Species. As a part of this change we’ll rotate two of the five free species every week to bring more variety to guest hunts. The weekly rotation will occur on a Friday to Friday basis, and we’re starting today with exchanging Pheasant and Snowshoe Hare for Brown Bear and Moose. Free animals will be announced in status updates, via banner images, and social media. Please note that this in an experimental feature, nothing is set in stone yet, we are trying this out to see how it will be received and reserve the right to roll it back at any time. The information about the free species on our website and Steam store page will remain unchanged for now.

Hunting friends IRL

This sort of news always make me super happy. Last weekend there was another real life meetup of our awesome German community Jagdfreunde (Hunting Friends in English). We wrote about their first meet-up last year and it looks like the bonds are only getting stronger! 23 hunters travelled from different parts of Germany, some of them as far as 500 km to spend quality time together in the German community Willingen/Upland. The joint Hunter Score of all the participants was a whopping 37276, the average 1775.05 (wow) and the honourable hunters present were: babba01, barbarillo, CZ75Mamba, ForstHeld, Harry91220, KlausDieterMeyer, Lennox1983, Lobo78, Lou24, markus84, Meradim, michi1259, Onkel666, Pratze, Schwungi, schwungijunor, sepp201167, Silvano1, stoiba3, Tarismo, TonyRaptor.

Having great time in a picturesque place with like-minded people, sharing some wurst, drinks and theHunter stories, all spiced up with some fishing and bow shooting. Not much can beat it, wish I had been there too 😉

Here’s to the next year meet-up and Waidmannsheil!

Hunting Horn bonanza – Results

It’s time to announce the results of our Hunting Horn Bonanza video challenge! The amount of entries for this one hasn’t exactly been overwhelming, but we want nevertheless to thank the guys who put efforts into creating their videos and everyone who watched and commented on those. The team has been unambiguous when choosing the winner. Congratulations RegimentsTyp2! Your video is awesome, we showed it to the whole Avalanche Studios team during one of our meetings and everyone loved it.  Please contact me and let me know a prize of your choice (5000 em$ or a “Pathfinder” Membership Bundle).

We also wanted to celebrate blendy who took the second place in this competition and offer a consolation prize of 1000 em$ or a 3 month membership. Get in touch with me to claim it, and thank you for your participation!

Welcome Mattias!
Finally, here is the introduction of our new 3D artist Mattias, say hello and welcome!

Hello everybody, my name is Mattias Nordin.

I’m a 3D artist, previously worked on titles such as Little Big Planet and The Division.

I’ve just joined this awesome team of digital hunter-makers a week ago, and I’m looking forward to working here!

A little about myself, I’m originally from Hässleholm in Sweden where I was born and raised. I decided that I wanted to make games in 2007, so I got into the school called Sofe (School of future entertainment) in another small Swedish city, Karlshamn. While studying there I worked on Little Big Planet up until 2015. After a short stay in Malmö (at Massive game studio), I’ve now moved to Stockholm, where it all happens!

My hobbies and interests are mostly related to playing games. Right now I play a lot of BG:Siege of Dragonspear, Dota2, Cs:go and Factorio. I love to travel and spend time with my girlfriend. Everything from hiking to big city weekends and lazy beach holidays. I watch a lot of movies but not that many tv series, even though there’s always time for Rick and Morty!

I’m excited to be here and to (continue) make an awesome game.

Happy hunting!

Discussion

Hello hunters,

It’s Thursday and it’s the status update time.

Goodbye Tomas and welcome Mattias!

To start with, we’ve got some team news for you. Our 3D artist Tomas, the creator of many an outfit, reserve, weapon, trophy and whatnot in theHunter, has left Expansive Worlds. It’s with a heavy heart we see him go but wish him only amazing things on his new roads and adventures. Say goodbye to him in the forum – he will appreciate it 🙂 Tomas’ place in the team will be filled by Mattias. He is a fully fledged 3D artist with a bunch of gaming projects under his belt and we’re excited to see what he’ll bring to theHunter. Check our next status update to get to know Mattias!

Get better twice as fast!

The double XP weekend we promised a couple of weeks ago, after we’d fixed the issue with stats not being registered properly, is happening! From tomorrow, Friday 14:00 CEST lunchtime until Monday 14:00 CEST you will get double points for increasing your tracking, spotting and weapon skills. Good chance to catch up on your numbers, so don’t miss out!

Lock&Learn with Johanna

Today we’re starting a new live-streaming project, “Lock & Learn”. Our wonderful community intern Johanna will be streaming from our official Twitch channel as she learns the ropes of theHunter, sharing her journey with you! She will be streaming every week on Thursday at 16:00 CEST from our official Twitch channel. Make sure to join, share your tips with her and of course ask some questions. We hope you can make it!

Hunter score update

Here is a heads-up from our backend developer Emil. If you’ve noticed that your Hunter score doesn’t get updated immediately after you’ve finished your hunt, don’t fret! Emil has deployed a small adjustment to make it easier for our servers, so achievements are now cached for one hour, so it will take some time for you to see your updated Hunter score.

Odds and ends

Next week we’ll be launching our large annual player survey, this will be your chance to share with us the good, the bad and the ugly 😉 Make sure to check our next status update for more details.

Here is a small reminder about our hunting horn competition. You still have a couple of days to make your video and win a nice prize!

And finally, you can now buy the premium .45-70 Lever Action Rifle Engraved. Grab that piece of art and set off to our most challenging reserve, Settler Creeks, to try your luck in this special big game challenge.

Happy hunting!

Discussion

Howdy hunters!

Welcome to this week’s slightly belated status update.

First we’d like to shed some light on the recent server problems. As our producer Philipp announced in the forum on Monday, our servers fell victim to scripting attacks which led to significant service interruptions. Despite the safety measures our backend programmers implemented in an attempt to circumvent the attacks, our infrastructure continued to take a beating through Monday, Tuesday and Wednesday, forcing the servers to their knees. On Thursday Emil and Calle carried out a major change which we hope has put an end to the issue. There have been no subsequent outages or service interruptions. We will continue to monitor server performance to ensure stability so that you can continue to enjoy the game. On a side note, you can be absolutely sure that no personal data was accessed or compromised in any way.

In the hope of removing the bad aftertaste following the lost weekend, we added 3 extra days to existing memberships on Monday. Today we’ll be adding another 3 days as well as some sweet consumables – 100 bear and hog baits as well as a large bottle of scent eliminator to everyone. Just start the game before April 22nd and you will find these items in your inventory.

During the recent issues, you may have missed the release of a really nifty piece of equipment – the new Hunting Horn. It’s awesome, great fun to use, and we wanted to celebrate it with a little video competition. The only restriction is that your video must not exceed 2 minutes, contain no copyrighted material such as music or images, otherwise the sky is your limit. Make a little orchestra with your friends, stage a mini hunt, go nuts! You can find the thread with the rules here. The winner of this contest will receive a nice little prize of 5000 em$ or a Pathfinder membership bundle (winner can decide). Looking forward to your entries!

And lastly, a note from our QA manager Dennis; there seems to have been a bit of confusion regarding the hog feeders lately, and a lot of people have been reporting unusual behaviour which they believe to be a bug. We’ve done some digging into this issue and we can confirm the hog feeders work as intended. This means that you need to pick up the right location for it to attract pigs. You can find the extensive info on how they work in our wiki.  What causes some confusion is that the feeders had been bugged before and for a long time, so they attracted pigs from all over the reserve. This has been fixed, together with the bear barrels bug fix back in 2015.

That’s it for today!

Happy hunting!

Discussion

Howdy hunters,

We are back from the Easter break and the exciting stuff I mentioned last week is starting to happen! Earlier today our backend programmer Emil performed server maintenance during which he deployed some important changes to how hunting statistics get saved in the database. Long story short, with these changes we are hoping to see the end of the tracking, spotting, travelling and skill data getting lost if the game doesn’t close properly. You can find the details of the server update here. Unfortunately, your already lost stats will not be registered retroactively, but we’re planning to run a double XP weekend soon, so you’ll have a chance to catch up! Stay tuned.

Just a couple minutes ago we also released a game patch with a bunch of cool things. Apart from some (did I say some? lots!)  fixes, we’re also listening to your feedback and trying to stick to our promise and invest more time and resources into improving the quality of the game. So, our sound designer Greg has given new voices to several weapons (he is super grateful for all the suggestions you shared with him in this thread). And our animation team has been revamping some old weapon animations to make them more alive and realistic. Here are some notes from our animation intern Morris, who has been mostly working on this, explaining the changes and the super cool video he made for you showing the evolution of the animations.

Revamped animations

Now that we have three animators on the project we feel that we have the time to begin reworking some of the older animations in the game. The way we’re approaching this is in layers, so for now we’re mainly focusing on the bigger animations per weapon; reloads and pumps. And when these are done and we have more time for more revamps we’ll continue with the next layer (could be idle variations, movement-animations, how the hands are holding the weapon, etc).

In the video we show an excerpt of how some of the animations are now (the old animations) followed by the new rework of those animations. Main things to notice is that with the new animations we’re focusing on a couple of things to improve:

• Show the weapon from a better angle during reloads/pumps, i.e. if the character is inserting bullets we try to pose the weapon in a more natural way so that the player can see what is happening.
• Less robotic movements. Explains itself 🙂
• Head and spine-movements during third person animations. Previously only the arms have been moving during the third-person animations, and it has been something we’ve wanted to fix.
• Different animations depending on whether the player is in standing or prone position. Only a minor thing, but some reloads will look a bit different in standing and prone for more immersion.

Free species weekend

To celebrate these hefty improvements and to thank you for your passion and loyalty, we’re making all animals free to hunt from today until the end of the weekend. Why yes, Polar Bear will be in a huntable mode and free as well (and will remain in the huntable mode until we communicate otherwise). While this is mostly good news for guests, we wanted to do something for our members as well, so we put together a large equipment sale (starts around lunchtime CEST tomorrow) during which you can stock up on tents, tripods, blinds and similar stuff, because one can never have too many of those babies. There will also be a little weekend competition for you, check back for more news tomorrow.

Meet Johanna

Last but not least, we have another new face on the team. Meet our 2D/Community intern Johanna, she will be helping us with social media and, well, 2D graphics. She has already been studying the forums, learned some ropes from you guys and harvested her first Mulie! Say hello to Johanna 😉

Ohoy!
My name is Johanna Schramm and I am the new 2D/community intern here at Expansive Worlds, helping out on theHunter.
I am a game graphics student with a passion for social media and graphical design, currently finishing my bachelor’s degree at Södertörns Högskola. I have previously studied graphic design and communication as well as English. I am born and raised in Stockholm, where I also live today with my fiancé and our cat Strumpan (Swedish for sock). I spend most of my spare time on cosplay – making costumes from games/films/comics etc. (you can check my official Facebook page, if interested) and I also love art and eSports.
The first game I remember playing is Keen 4 on Windows 95. Ever since I have fallen in love with the magical world of games more and more. An interest that has led me all the way here!
As a child my family went camping for a few weeks every summer. We would sleep in a tent and hear the animals roaming around the forest, go fishing and cooking our food outside. I hope this has prepared me for this great hunter adventure!
I hope to create content that you can all enjoy. I’m truly astonished by the passion theHunter brings out in the community, and I’m super excited to be a part of it!

That’s it for today, happy hunting all!

PS: There have been some questions about our traditional April Fool’s pranks. To the utter disappointment of our stand-up prankster game designer April Primera, responsible for all our previous gems (such as this, this and of course this), this year we’ve decided to follow the feedback we’ve read in the forums and not do anything foolish and instead focus on more serious things, such as bugs.

Discussion

Hello hunters,

How are you doing on this glorious Thursday? It smells like spring already in Stockholm and everything and everyone in the office (even Dennis!) has suddenly become all chirpy and is smiling uncontrollably.

Yesterday we released a game update with bug fixes and the new rifle, the 7.62x54R Bolt Action, which might remind you of a certain iconic Russian piece of weaponry 😉 Apart from boasting awesome aesthetics, it is also permitted for a vast number of species. The community response thus far has been overwhelmingly positive, which makes us very happy campers.

We are continuing to work on fixing things and improving the game. For example, our animators have been working on revamping some weapon animations, and our sound engineer Greg is collecting your feedback to improve weapon sounds. If you have something good and constructive to share on this matter, please do leave a post here.

New forum and wiki

The server move we’ve been writing about for the last couple of weeks is finally complete and now all our assets are safely stored and functioning in the cloud. The final step of the move was the forum and wiki. During the move, our 9 year old forum received some love in the form of a facelift and improved functionality, and it performs much better on mobile browsers. The first colour theme we launched with received critique for its brightness, so we jumped right onto it and gave the forum the earthy / coffee / rusty look and feel which we hope you’ll enjoy much better! Have a look and tell us what you think!

Our official wiki has been moved onto a third party platform called Wikia which is the most vibrant wiki community in the world. You can access the English wiki here (the old link redirects there as well) and German (still a work in progress) here. With this move we wanted to try a new experiment and open up our French and Portuguese wikis to the community. If you are interested and know French or Portuguese, just create an account on Wikia and start editing! We of course will have trusted admins and editors who will go through everything added and remove unacceptable content. If this experiement works well, wikis in other languages might follow. The English and German wikis will remain closed, it means that you will still need to apply to join the teams. If you have any questions about Wikis, send a PM to myself, David Lucas or our Wiki champion HooCairs.

St Patrick’s Event

Coming back to the topic of spring, today is St. Patrick’s Day! It’s become a nice little tradition in theHunter to celebrate this day with some festive activities. This year we’ve prepared something sweet for you too, check this announcement for details. And hurry up, the event will go on until Tuesday only, at which point we’re kicking off our Easter event. Check back on Tuesday to learn what’s up.

Team update

Finally, onto some staffing news. First and foremost, theHunter ship has got a new captain, ahoy! Hannes, who was theHunter’s producer, has left for pastures new, and Philipp Strecker, who many of you already know from the forums and who has acted as an interim producer for the last couple of months, has now been officially appointed as the Live Producer. Phil has a great knowledge of the game and community and we’re sure he will do an excellent job of steering the theHunter ship through the sometimes turbulent waters of game development.

Another lovely piece of news! We now have a new artist, her name is Ami and she has just joined the team as a (mainly) character artist. Ami’s intro is below, enjoy!

Hellu!

My name is Ami Jansson, and last week I joined the awesome theHunter team here at Expansive Worlds. I’m a 3D artist and my job will be to model animals among other things for the game, which I’m really excited about. I just recently moved to Stockholm, having spent the last 10 years in Malmö, and before that in a smallish town called Kalmar in Småland. Like quite a few of my colleagues I’ve attended The Game Assembly, and after my graduation I worked as a Character Artist on Tom Clancy’s The Division.

On my spare time I like lifting weights, engaging in deep discussions about politics, metaphysics and psychology, and play pen and paper role playing games. I also like reading horror fiction, write stories and draw digital art. I don’t have any pets, but I hope to keep a cat, a dog and an aquarium with jellyfish one day, as I’m a big time animal person.

The first game I remember playing was the first Doom game back in ’94 (an exciting and horrific experience for a four-year-old), and I later moved onto more child friendly games like Little Big Adventure 1 and 2. My favorite game of all time is The Longest Journey, a game that inspired me to one day join the games industry myself.

I knew games were going to be a big part of my life, so I began studying to become a programmer, but neither the school or the classes felt right so I dropped out. I’ve always loved drawing but never thought of it being something I could become a professional at, until I attended the Game Art program at The Game Assembly. I share an equal love for 2D as I do for 3D.

I’ve already got the privilege of talking to some of you on the forum, and you seem to be a friendly bunch of people, so don’t hesitate to shoot me a pm if you’d like to talk. 🙂

Cheers!

That’s it from us for today!

Happy hunting!

Discussion