Dear Hunters,

It’s status update time again and we have so many cool things cooking right now.

First, we like to, once again, apologize for the downtime the past weekend, we know the added days to your memberships won’t make up for the loss of precious theHunter time. We hope that as many of our free members as possible seized the opportunity to try out all the reserves when we gave you two days of full memberships.

We have a new team, temporary, member. Her name is Palina and she’ll be helping us out for a few days. She’s shown great interest in our animals, so she’ll intially help Peter and Tomas out in creating the fox.

In last weeks status update we mentioned that we’ve been working on a new logo. We can tell you that it is finally done. This is what it looks like:

And here is a screenshot of how the new logo will look like on the new loading screen:

The reason for a new logo/identity is that we feel that with multiplayer theHunter is entering a new phase and we want to show that visually in the games identity. As you can see we’ve kept some elements from the first logo, from 2009, just to keep the connection to our heritage. The new logo will be rolled out over time so we won’t change it on the website until the new site is launched.

So what about multiplayer? We’re very close now. There are still a few bugs that needs to be squashed and some additional polish to be done. But it booth looks and feels pretty awesome. At least from our perspective. Our fantastic team has put in an incredible amount of work into multiplayer almost working 24/7 for the past months. So bear with us, good things are coming, but we need to make sure it’s good enough to release.

We got a package today. It’s a new “toy” that we are somewhat excited about. Below is a picture of Danny trying it out. We will tell you a bit more about later, but we’re interested in knowing what you, who know what it is, think about it. Would it be a good addition to theHunter experience?

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Howdy hunters,

Another Wednesday has arrived so it’s that special time of the week again: Status Update!

At the moment most of us are working our bu**s off so we can ship multiplayer as soon as possible.

Our client developers, Andrés and Daniel, are going through data from our alpha and beta testers and fixing bugs in an impressive pace.

Tomas and Peter, our art team, are busy working on the new third person characters  outfits, environment tweaks and lots of other art related stuff.

The animators, José and Hampus, are getting close to finish all new animations for weapons reloading and using equipment.

Björn is making sure game play is still as good in multiplayer as it is in the game today.

Robert, Herman and Emil are almost seeing the light at the end of the web site tunnel, so we’re getting relatively close now.

Unfortunately this doesn’t mean we can communicate a hard release date yet, since we still feel that we need more time to test it before we ship it. Saying that, we are aware that when we finally release the multiplayer version there might still be some bugs in there. This is, sadly, unavoidable, since some bugs will be so rare that we need tens of thousands of players for these to show up, but we’ve planned for bug crushing, and polishing, after the release. Our aim is always to have  an as bug free game as possible, even though some takes a long time for us to fix since some bugs difficult to recreate, as some of our more seasoned hunters have experienced over the years.

Here’s a sneak preview of what lifetime statistics will look like on the new profile pages:

We’ve gotten quite a few questions regarding if free members will be able to play multiplayer games. They will be able to join multiplayer sessions, if the creator allows that (it’s a setting when you create the game), but free members won’t be able to create their own sessions.

An exciting piece of news is that we’re working on a new theHunter logo. We feel that when multiplayer is released it should also be shown in our identity. Like a fresh new start. We’re close to finalizing it, so if you’re lucky you might see it in next weeks update 😉

Happy hunting!

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Status update time. A little late we know!

It would be quite wrong to say not much has happened since last week, because we´re pushing on toward the multiplayer release. Most things though are taking place “under the hood” and the biggest change is that we have now moved on from the initial alpha stage to a beta stage in development and testing. What this mean is that we now put most of our focus on fixing bugs and add the last touches to all the required features. All in all we´re making good progress.

For some weird reason we have also gotten quite into competing in the Lanebandit minigame that is available in your Huntermate. Perhaps you should all do some practice because we might just want to add a leader board on the website in the future 🙂

Also, thanks for the great and concise feedback on the Red Fox that was mentioned last week. Perhaps we should do this more often. As soon as work is commenced on the fox your pointers will be taken into account as far as possible with regard to certain technical limitations.

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Status update and feedback time!

Of course we are still very busy working on multiplayer. Right now our focus is reaching the “feature complete” stage where we stop adding new things and work primarily with getting everything already in there to work without problems, and also add the last touches to the graphics.

Red Fox work in progress

On Friday morning 08:00 CET we will perform a series of server upgrades, including physically moving all our servers to a new location within our current data centre and making infrastructure changes which will substantially improve our bandwidth and scalability capabilities. The website and forum will be unavailable during this time, for approximately one hour.

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Dear Hunters,

It’s another sunny day in Stockholm, so we’re quite happy here. Another great thing is that it’s Emil’s birthday today! So take the opportunity to congratulate him today.

This morning we got invaded by some builder that wanted to change some doors to a ventilation shaft in the office, so now we have two rather large grey steel doors in the office. It’s not very pretty.

We’d also like to remind you about the video competition. Deadline for entries is on Monday next week.

Almost everyone in the studo’s got full focus on multiplayer. So even though there was a bank holiday in Sweden yesterday, some of us were busy working, since we want it to be released just as much as you guys.

We’re getting a lot of questions about when multiplayer will be released, and to be frank, the only answer we can give right now is when we’re done testing and we have removed all known bugs. Due to the extreme focus on multiplayer we don’t have time for much else, so we hope you understand why we don’t have a lot of exciting stuff to tell you about. We will however show you a little preview of what the new map will look like:

One of the new cool features on the map is that, in a multiplayer game, you can draw, strategies for example, on the map so the other players in the session can see.

Happy Hunting!

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Hey hunters,

Another lovely Wednesday is here, it’ almost sunny here in Stockholm, so we’ll briefly update you on what’s going on.

Alpha testing is going well and we sent out some new invites to get more people in a few days ago. We know that many of you are anxious to get to test multiplayer and we’d love to let you all do it, but right now we have a great, and efficient, team reporting things for us to address and we couldn’t cope with feedback from many more players. We will however grow the number of tester more over time, so keep your eyes open for info on Facebook and Twitter to see when this happens.

As a reminder, when we select players for testing we have certain criteria, one of them is that you have to be a very active player, another important one is that you can never have  shown up in our cheat detection.

We’ve started another Video Tutorial Competition and we hope we will many entries since we know thta many of you are fantastic at creating videos. These videos are great for new players and if you are the winner there are some smashing prizes for you. Submit your videos here

As we’ve mentioned before we’re revamping the backend of the web and game, and the plan is to release this at the same time as Multiplayer. We’re also re-designing the frontend of the web and parts of the game UI. Below is a screenshot of what the inventory might look like in the future (bear in mind that this is work in progress):

We hope that you like what you see 🙂

Happy hunting!

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