Another weeks has passed and it is status update time. We were hoping for spring here in Stockholm, but instead the cold came back. Whoever is keeping the sun away from us, please don’t! We need spring now.

We’ve been kept busy fixing the last bugs on Hemmeldal and fine tuning the Brown Bear. It’s all coming along just fine and it’s looking legendary. If nothing unforeseen pops up we’re looking at a release next Wednesday, but bear in mind that in the wonderful world of game making anything might happen. So keep your fingers crossed. We’ve seen a lot of questions about species on Hemmeldal, and the initial species are the following: Brown Bear, Moose and Roe Deer.

It might seem a bit empty, but our plan is to add more species over time. It won’t happen next week, but eventually these three will be accompanied by more species.

We’d like to remind you of our Facebook page, make sure you like us there since we have special Facebook deals and competitions every now and then.

Expansive Worlds expanded this week. A new backend developer, Emil, started this Monday. It’s fantastic to have him on board. He’ll be working closely with Herman and Robert, mainly focusing on, improving your web experience. Emil will introduce himself properly later on.
We mentioned that Mathias joined us a couple of weeks ago, we feel that it’s time for him to introduce himself.

Greetings, hunter community!

My name is Mathias and I am the latest addition to the theHunter developer family here at HQ in Stockholm. I am currently on my way of becoming a full-fledged M.Sc. in media technology and computer science. As a part of my final examination at the University Of Linköping here in Sweden, I am doing my thesis work in collaboration with Expansive Worlds.

I won’t give away too much information on my mighty mission, but it just might (or might not) have something to do with investigating how to expand game concept’s by alternative platform usage (oops!). Well, that’s all you will get for now.

Please also note that as this is a part of my education, I am not a full-time working employee of Expansive Worlds. Basically, I work for em$’s, coffee and to get an excellent experience before I will graduate (also, the coffee is pretty damn good). I hope that you will one day will get to enjoy the result of my thesis work, though.

I will be here for approximately 15 more weeks, so we have got plenty of time to get to know each other. Want to fire some questions at me? Please refer to the comment section of this status update. Who knows, I might even answer a few of them…

I would like to thank the guys at Expansive Worlds for giving me this opportunity and for the hearty welcome.

Comments

So another Wednesday has arrived and and it’s finally time for a status update. It’s getting warmer in Stockholm so it seems as the long winter is soon to be over. We’ve had snow since November here so we think we deserve some warmth.

We’re planning to kick off a new event tomorrow and we hope that you’ll all enjoy it. It’ll be a full week of competitions and happenings, so make sure you check in every day, so you don’t miss out on all the fun.

We got a lot of great name suggestions from you, our beloved community. We’ve spent a lot of time going through your suggestions. A great deal of them were good, others kind of odd and some made us laugh. We finally, after tough discussions, decided on the name Hemmeldal. We’d like to give a warm thank you to BioTek who suggested Hemmeldalen. We think that the name Hemmeldal reflects the spirit of the reserve and has the right Scandinavian tone to it.

We’ve gotten a lot of questions about the new Species both in the forum and on Facebook. Initially we wanted to keep it a secret until we release Hemmeldal, but since some of you are way to anxious, here it come: * drum-roll* Say hello to our new “little” friend, the Brown Bear!

Besides the brown color preference the main difference between this new addition and it’s Redfeather Falls cousin, the Black Bear, is that it is a lot bigger. This size difference does not only make this beast a lot harder to put down but it also makes them more confident which translates into a somewhat less spooky species that is more likely to resort to violence when cornered*.

This coupled with the already notorious viciousness of the female Moose makes the First Aid Kit a highly recommended accessory when exploring this hostile reserve…

*Most Brown Bears are usually not very active predators, in fact only about 10% of the European Brown Bears diet consists of meat. This however does not mean that they won’t tear you apart if you surprise or corner them.

Comments

It´s Wednesday and status update time!

This weekend we’ll be running a special Tripod multispecies competition on Loggers Point – all preys must be shot from a Tripod. At the same time, starting at Friday 00:00 CET, we are giving away a free Tripod with every purchase of 5000 em$ in the Hunter Store!

Also new for the Tripod competition is a new type of condition – limited number of attempts – designed to fight the problem with spawn mashing. It’s quite simple, the number of attempts (game sessions) you have to get your entry into a competition is limited. Every time you start a new game session at a reserve where there is a competition active one attempt will be deducted. Once all attempts are used up no more entries will be registered for that competition. It’s possible to inactivate (pause) a competition, if you decide to do something else for a while, while inactivated no attempts are deducted.
The intention is to implement this condition (and possibly others too) throughout some of the standard competitions as well in a near future, in order to enforce fair play amongst all hunters. You´re all in favor of fair play aren´t you?

What about the new reserve then? Everything is going well and we´re in the final stages of tweaking a lot of small stuff and will get into more extensive testing shortly. An exact release date is not yet decided but we´re still aiming for the second half of March, which we should make if we don´t run into any totally unforeseen problems. We´re pretty sure you´re curious about the new animal and what that one is but we still want to keep that as a little surprise!

We´ll also start looking through all your suggestions for the name of the new reserve and try to conjure up something we think fits nicely. Thank you for all your suggestions, a lot of them really help as we get a lot of food for thought.

Last but not least, there has been a few of our dedicated long time players being slightly upset about the recent changes we have made to the old warden membership. We hope your playing experience doesn´t get too much of a blow by this and before we say; that´s that, we want to give all of you a big thanks for supporting theHunter while it was still very much in its infant stage (and it still counts just as much).

Happy hunting!

Comments

Hej alla jägare,

Thought it would be good to start off with some Swedish today since we’re getting so inspired by the coming Scandinavian looking reserve. 🙂

So another week has passed and a lot of our focus has been on the Valentine’s event. Many of you participated and some of you got the unique trophies. The number of trophies we handed out this Sunday was the following:
203 bronze trophies
301 silver trophies
144 gold trophies

So for those lucky, or rather skilled, hunters bagging a trophy can consider yourself owners of rarities.

We haven’t come up with a great name for the new reserve yet, so we thought we’d let you, our community, take a stab at it. Post your suggestions here, but please refrain from commenting on other players suggestions. We’d like the name to reflect the reserve and its environment and go well with our other reserves. Here are some more pics to get inspired by:

The new rifle, released last week, seems to be a big hit. We’ve gotten a lot of positive feedback on it, and as you know by now, we love positive feedback, so please keep it coming.

We’ve noticed that some of you have discovered the crossbow tracer arrows. We sure have some nosy hunters out there. We’ve decided to hold on to them until further notice. But they will be released eventually.

We have a new addition to the team. His name is Mathias and he’s studying to become an engineer and he’s going to work on his degree project while here. Mathias will introduce himself later on and tell you about what he’s working on. He’ll be with us for about 20 weeks, so feel free to give him a hearty welcome.

We’d also like to know what the interest is for another Video Tutorial competition. So if you’d like to participate in another one, let us know.

Comments

Dear Hunters,

Another weeks has passed and it’s that special time again, status update!

Many of you seems to be enjoying both the new rifle and the countdown to Valentine’s Day. That’s great news for us Devs. We appreciate all kinds of positive and constructive feedback.

If you haven’t gotten your loved something for Valentine’s Day tomorrow, remember that a theHunter membership is a great way to say “I love you” 😉

Today we will also tell you a bit about what Peter and Tomas has been up to lately, but first something completely different. We need to get some more help with moderating the forums. So if you think you’re up to that task, have a look here to see what our requirements are. If you think you match the requirements, please send a PM to NAOutdoors.

Now, some more details on the upcoming reserve. We are indeed attempting to make something that contain snow and convey a different climate than most us are used to in theHunter. While the previous reserve (Hirschfelden) was one step toward a different season there was no changes done to lighting or weather. The new reserve is a Scandinavian inspired landscape set during late fall and early winter and contain a slightly tweaked lighting and falling snow instead of rain which is a first in theHunter. There are several reasons for not going with even more snow than we have chosen to do here, some of them are technical but to larger extent aesthetically related which mainly affect production time and possible unknown pitfalls which we simply choose not to risk making better friends with at this time. The preliminary release date is late March, and so far things seem to go our way and we´re making pretty good progress. The fauna for this reserve is not yet carved in stone, but it will contain one new animal that belong to the same family as one of our older ones.

The images below show the current state of affairs. Some smaller details are still missing and some things might come to look a little different in the end but it should still give you a good idea of the final product.

The environment consist of mixed aspen and pine forests.

View from a hunting stand, and one from the top of a hill.

Comments go here!