Hi hunters,
Welcome to our weekly status update.
Rockies – Meet the First Species
The magnificent environment of our 11th reserve is almost complete. It’s the polishing that’s left, and for our art, animation and programming crafts it’s all hands on deck working on the species. My hope was to share with you a couple of screenshots of the Bighorn Sheep today, however it looks like we’re running into some problems with the horns of those ladies, so I’ll have to keep you hungry with these lovely Whitetailed Ptarmigans and will hopefully show you more wonderful beasts next week!
We’re still collecting suggestions for the reserve name here. Please’ share your best ideas!
Heavy Recurve Bow by InstinctiveArcher
On Wednesday we released a new bow, inspired by the real life creation built by our community member InstinctiveArcher. We are super proud and honoured to have it featured in the game and we really hope to have more community content of this calibre in the future. Apropos the bow, and especially for you competition junkies: if you’ve tried it out already. you probably noticed that it’s slightly more powerful than other two Recurve Bows. Based on this, we were contemplating not allowing it for the same competitions, but instead creating a separate category for it. We are interested to hear whether you think this is a reasonable and fair decision, and we look forward to your feedback on that 🙂
Game Patch
With our game patch yesterday we also released changes to the Ptarmigan behaviour and pop-ups for missing licenses that we thought could benefit from more in-depth explanation, so I asked our producer Philipp to share some insights and details on those changes:
Ptarmigans’ behaviour change:
The new behaviour of our beloved little ptarmigans is somewhat of a small game development dream come true to me, so I want to share a bit of backstory for it.
Some weeks ago, our client programmer Patrik was working on the fleeing behaviour of the Ptarmigan as they started hiding on the ground too early or had a couple of problems when flying away. Being the thorough programmer that he is, he dove deeper into the code.
Together with Carl-Oscar he discussed his findings and it created an urge in them to get more out of the untapped potential of the flying bird with the hilarious call. They teamed up to become an unstoppable force of pitching their ideas first to Daniel (he will never be forgotten) and then to the rest of the team. Everybody agreed that what they wanted to do were great additions, so estimations were made and the work began.
Naturally, it took longer than anticipated but yesterday the new behaviour was finally released. What rubbed Patrik and Carl-Oscar the wrong way was that spooking a group of lifelong Ptarmigan friends shatters the relationship among them so profoundly that they never want to meet up ever again. So, they changed it.
Ptarmigans will now reunite with their flock after being spooked, giving their behaviour a more realistic touch and hopefully create some heart-warming reunions. The other thing that bothered them about the well-being of a Ptarmigan is their ability to find food. The poor birds stroll around the same area where they spawn which makes survival quite tough. So, they changed that too.
As a flock, Ptarmigans will now migrate to different areas in different time intervals. This is especially impressive if you are caught off guard and see the flock taking off and flying. We thoroughly enjoyed testing it and getting in a new element of immersion. Personally, I like this story so much because it’s a great example of the passion and dedication of the team. We are not a big team but what we don’t have in numbers we make up for with heart and seeing two programmers researching real life Ptarmigan behaviours and pitching their ideas to the team makes working on this game even more enjoyable.
Missing License Pop Ups:
Another addition from yesterday’s update is a new notification pop-up for missing licenses. We received feedback regarding the previous system on the forums and it resonated with us as a lot of new players don’t receive the help they need to understand the license system.
Thus, Robin worked on a new system that informs you if you are missing the licenses for an animal that you picked up a clue for, spotted or want to shoot. There is a trade off in control, as you have to confirm the pop up but we hope that the current rules don’t make it too intrusive. There is a cool down system so you should only receive one pop-up per species every 5 minutes.
We hope this offers better balance between informing players and maintaining immersion. On a side note, it is possible to alt-tab out of the game, buy a license and continue the ongoing session. The bought license will kick in immediately.
Let us know what you think!
Finally, a new team member is here! Since our animation wizard Dick (you should know him by the brilliant scent hound animations) is currently on parental leave, we needed some more animation force to keep Morris company, and so Moe came on board. Read his info below and say hello in the forums.
Meet Moe
Hello everyone!
My name is Moe Awira and I just moved to Sweden & joined theHunter team as an Animator!
A little about myself, I’m originally from Aleppo city in Syria. I became fascinated with animation when I was 5 years old after I watched Disney’s A Bug’s Life! It was magical to see cartoon characters move and behave like they’re alive and make you sympathize with them!
In 2005 I got my first computer and started playing PC games and teaching myself animation after school using Flash! In 2010 I got my first full-time job as Animator at an animation studio in Amman city in Jordan. Afterwards I worked at several games and animation films in Jordan and Turkey.
Outside of work I enjoy playing games, watching movies, cycling, hiking and camping!
I’m glad to join this awesome team & looking forward to animating my first animal in theHunter!
That’s it from us for today, happy hunting!
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