Onwards and upwards we go with the developer presentations! This time it´s Dj P himself laying down a few antics from the day he was born. This post will be split into two, the first one featuring the past and the other the present. Hopefully you will get a sense of who he is and what he is about.

Dj P, nickname of Peter Johansson, is currently the Lead Artist/Art Director/Designer at Expansive Worlds. The nickname Dj P was invented by EW staff after a recent and miserably failed attempt at organising a music playlist at a party. The other nickname “Little Peter” comes from the fact that he is almost seven feet tall (and don´t go on to ask! He knows what you’re thinking right now and the answer is “no I don´t”).

Dj P In theHunter style, with his favourite Swedteam cap!

But first things first, to make a long story short and highlighting some of the essential stuff. I grew up on a small farm outside a city called Örebro in the middle of Sweden. I know how to hand milk cows, drive tractors, wheel loaders and the meaning of “hard work”. I started drawing when I was about six years old (being the only one in my entire family doing that). I was doodling myself all the way through school paying more attention to practical and creative subjects rather than mathematics and grammar. Nowadays I can’t help but partially despise the education system for failing to inspire and teach how all those theoretical subjects apply to real life rather than the classroom itself as they are quite essential after all. After school I worked at the local radio station for about one year designing, building and maintaining web pages. Like every other westerner around the turn of the millenium (It seemed at the time at least) my dream was to become a web designer as HTML and the embossed graphics had become my religion. I also helped out doing radio but quickly concluded it was not my thing, and being really scared at the time about public speaking didn’t really help me either.

Early work. Could have made a pretty good movie?

By pure chance someone at a newly founded game company found my online portfolio. I recieved a mail from the company asking if i’d like to  work for them, and I ended up moving a few hours away from home to Stockholm. At the time I begun working for that company (Called GRIN) I knew close to nothing about making games and my job was only to paint textures for the 3D models that was created by others. Nine years later I had picked up enough things though to have progressed from being a “Texture Artist” to a “3D artist”, going on to work as ”Lead Artist”, “Concept Artist”, “Art Director” including other “Senior Artist” duties as well. By 2008 GRIN had grown into one of the biggest game developers in Sweden, with a staff amount to almost 300 people in three studios in Stockholm, Gothenburg and Barcelona, and people (myself included) made trips to the US and Los Angeles flirting with the Movie industry. In 2009 and the later part of the global financial crisis the games industry was suddenly hit harder than anyone had anticipated causing the company to suffer from several large title productions being terminated by publishers (naturally crapping their pants on their expenses). The company was decimated to about a hundred employees working in the Stockholm office, but only a few months later the one project still being worked on was also revoked by the publisher causing the entire company to go bankrupt. In hindsight it was of course a very sad but also interesting experience, and probably also a hard life lesson to see so much hard work and serious effort just going straight into a black hole. Two weeks after the initial announcement the company was bankrupt there was nothing left but a deserted office full of dusty hardware. I bought my office chair at the foreclosure auction for 50 swedish crowns (less than $10).

My chair. Best one I ever had!

When a company goes bankrupt in Sweden the government step in and pay people equivalent to the salary they would get through their resignation period (paying the high taxes in Sweden is not always a bad thing). I ended up getting several months worth of salary giving me the opportunity to try something I had been thinking about for a long time, setting up a company of my own and go freelance. I did a few jobs for a movie company and another game studio but soon found myself missing the creative atmosphere within a studio, and not to mention the social aspects of going to the work every day and hang out with other like minded people. I started looking for full time employment in and around Stockholm again but failed to get any as the studios were still holding onto their money like crazy until the financial climate turned back toward the better again. Around christmas I knocked on the door to the Avalanche office and asked to talk to someone (I’m not one who belive that sending an email is enough to make an impression when looking for work). I was rejected at the time but encouraged to come back in a few months. So I did, and I got an appointment with the studio Art Director. Which was too busy too see me when I got there so I got to talk to two other guys, and here´s where things got really interesting!

I came across theHunter already back in early 2009, pretty soon after the game became available to the public. I remember trying it out at work just to have a look at the pretty graphics and was instantly hooked. I’m a simulation/technical person by heart and was struck by the immersion when walking around in the woods, while asking myself; how the ¤#%& should you be able to find any animals in this… mess (of vegetation)! But I was soon successful, and a paying member.. I knew Avalanche Studios was involved with creating content for the game and during the interview I asked (half joking) if they would be interested in hiring someone to work on that project. Naturally I didn´t really think I would get to work on such an obscure project, and I had absolutely no idea that Avalanche had (apparently) acquired and signed the rights to the game just a few days earlier and was planning on setting up an entirely new company to continue developing it. I was totally blown away by the coincidence as it turned out that was the reason I was brought in to the interview in the first place. Of course I got super excited and they told me they would get back with a small work test for me before they could make the final call.

I went home and improvised as I wanted that job more than anything else! While I’m always careful to follow direction and guidelines I´m not the one sitting on my ass if I don’t get any, or if you’re too slow delivering them. I modeled and textured the head of a moose (the very same but slightly tweaked head being used on the Moose in theHunter today). My spontaneous effort was apparently very appreciated and I was hired!

My improvised work test.

Continued in part 2.

Comments go here!

Now this is the story all about how
My life got flipped, turned upside down
And I’d like to take a minute just sit right there
I’ll tell you how I became the intern (and later employee) of a company called Expansive Worlds

First of all, I should probably introduce myself to those of you who don’t know who I am (for the record, shame on you if that’s the case). My name is Daniel Gutierrez Gustafsson, but people call me Danny, and I’ve been a game programmer here at Expansive Worlds for over a year now, first as an intern and now as an employee.
I think it’s time for me to post a picture of myself:

Gosh, I love that one.

I’m an avid gamer. I’ve played computer games since I was a kid. That’s probably why one beautiful day for four years ago I decided I would become a game programmer. Why not an graphic artist you ask? Well, good question. And the answer is that my graphical skills are as good as a programmers, coder art with other words.

I started studying game programming after the summer of 2009, and after two years I got an internship here at Expansive Worlds. I must say that those two years were in hardcore mode, studying six to seven days a week and at least 10 hours a day. But anyway…

Since I started working with theHunter I’ve been doing a lot of different things, but one of those things that I would like to go into detail is the auto/manual reload feature.

One day, after finishing a task,  I decided to implement a feature a lot of people in our community asked about; the possibility to manually reload a weapon instead of being forced to reload after shooting.
I assumed it couldn’t be that hard to implement. Big mistake.
Since I didn’t think it would be that hard, I just started working on it right away on the main branch. Usually, we use different branches of the code base (or graphic resources for the artists) depending on how much time the feature will take. For example, something like a new environment is made in a different branch than let’s say, the next weapon to be released, because the weapon probably goes live earlier than the environment. The main branch is the one that is used for the features that will go live in the next game update.

I personally thought that implementing this feature wouldn’t take longer than a couple of days. So wrong I was.
Long story short, the way things worked at the time made it pretty hard to implement the manual reload without breaking other things (often the auto reload).
After a week or so I realized that we had to change some animations for some weapons. We had to remove all the cycling, pumping and cocking/decocking animations from the reload animations (since they were in the same animation), and have them by themselves.
At this point I couldn’t just roll back all the work I had done (since it worked for almost all the weapons and because I had been working on it for over a week), so I had to ask José, our animator, to drop whatever he was doing at the time and help me fix the animations. This wasn’t problem free either, and after a week of going back and forth with them we decided that they were good enough.

Before releasing something live we always let our beta team test everything we do, so we released it to them. They found a lot of bugs, so I just sat and fixed them one by one. I think this took probably another week.

Finally, we released the game update with the auto/manual reload feature. It wasn’t perfect (I remember some bugs that found its way to live), but it was good enough.

This feature took me almost three weeks to implement, instead of two days. So what did I learn from this? Well, never assume anything. Things will never go smooth, they will always take at least π-times what you thought beforehand.
But now I know.

tl;dr: I <3 U!

Until next time
Gangnam Style,
Danny.

Click here to go to the forum discussion about this post

Hello all this is Robert speaking, newly appointed CEO of Expansive Worlds taking over after Stefan.
In case you didn’t know, I have been on the team for some time already, since december 2011 to be exact, as responsible for our web, server and game engine development. During this time I have been working very close with Stefan, and as sad as it is that he has left us I am at the same time very excited about taking his seat. Plenty has happened already since I first got here, still it feels like we have just begun. I for one have tons of ideas – and so does the rest of the team – and we have lots of great new things in the pipeline for you. I strongly believe that now and going forward will be the most interesting time yet for theHunter.

Now this is a Dev Blog entry so lets get a bit more personal. I have been pretty much flying under the radar until now, in terms of being active publicly in the forum, and I think most of you haven’t really had the chance to get to know me. Daniel started a thread in the forum a couple of days ago asking what you would like us to write about, and what you would like to know about us and what we do. I like that idea and figured some Q&A’s would be a good way for you to get to know me a bit better. Below are some of the questions from the thread and answers from my point of view.

Q: Where do you see the future of The Hunter going?
A: I see theHunter growing its user base, as well as growing in terms of content and features, to truly become the best and biggest online hunting game there is.

Q: Do you play the game?
A: It depends on how you see it. I don’t play much on live, but I do enjoy it a lot the times I do. However, developing a game obviously involves a lot of testing, which means most of us do play a lot, just not on live and perhaps not always the way you normally play the game. Sometimes we all play at the same time in the office to test and play around with new features. Also when we change to a new season most of us play, because that’s the only time its even slightly possible to make it in the leader board, even if its just for a brief moment ;-).

Q: Are you active on the Forum?
A: Yes, we all are. I don’t post that much, and some post even less than I do, but we all read the forum and follow what’s being discussed. It’s a good and instant way to get feedback, and as an example we do catch a lot of bugs and problems through the forum.

Q: What’s the motivation to work as a developer for a hunting game
A: I did not join the team because its a hunting game, I joined because it was (and is) in many ways a very interesting and different project compared to other games. We utilize the web a lot, and much of the technology we use is very modern, even cutting-edge (in some areas), so for me coming from an IT/web-background rather than Gaming it was a perfect match.

Q: Post a picture of yourself
A: I suppose it’s fair to see who you are dealing with, check out my linkedin profile https://www.linkedin.com/in/robertarnesson

Q: How do you prioritize, and how do you deal with constantly changing priorities?
A: Prioritizing can sometimes be difficult as I always have more on my table than I can handle. Overall I try to follow a “lowest hanging fruit” type of strategy, which simply means to prioritize the things that will have the most impact in relation to the time needed. But sometimes you have to make time investments and break this strategy, and sometimes you might even prioritize something simply because its fun (and thus may be worth doing right away).

Q: What did you have for breakfast in the morning?
A: Every friday there is catered breakfast at the office. Other days there is always fruit, nuts, bread, müsli, and whatnot free for all (and great coffee too btw) so I usually don’t eat much breakfast at home, perhaps just a “knäckebröd” on the fly in the car.

Q: How long does it take to walk to work, and do you prefer walking or the bus?
A: I think I’m the one living closest to the office (approximately 4 km), yet I’m the only one driving to work. I love anything on 2 or 4 wheels

That’s all for now folks, happy hunting!

Click here to go to the forum discussion about this post