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!

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