Greetings Hunters!

Early Access launch is nearly upon us and we wanted to take a bit of time to discuss:

• How Steam Next Fest went

• Addressing the most common problems with the game

• What else we've been working on for Early Access!

You might want to settle in because this is going to be quite a hefty update!

Steam Next Fest

For those of you that don't know, Steam Next Fest is a really important event for indies game developers. As we don't have a publisher or a huge marketing budget (or any budget for that matter!) the best way to get people excited about our game is to let them play it. Typically it is the single, most effective marketing beat for small indie devs.

So how did it go for Hunters, Inc. Short answer - it went REALLY WELL!

Of over 2500 demos released during the event, we ranked #170. That the top 6 - 7%. In our category of Online Co-op FPS, we were ranked #6. Which we're especially proud of given the quality of the titles in this years event.

Event's like this are great because they help reinforce the fact that there are other people out there that want an Orc-y hunting FPS and more importantly, it shows us where we can improve.

Which leads onto ...

The Most Common Demo Complaints (and how we fixed them).

We gather up every review, steam forum post, discord comment and tweet and put them all into a monster spread sheet. As is often the case with parsing feedback, there are normally a handful of issues that dominate the feedback. In this case the clear leaders were:

PORKY TRACKING

ENVIRONMENTAL SAMEY-NESS

LIMITED AMMO

First off, the lovable tracking Boar Porky. He definitely has some issues and requires a bit of additional training. But the main issues we're that he could not follow the player very effectively and would not catch up to the players if they were far away.

To remedy this, we added:

• The ability for Porky (and all small monsters) to be able to jump up and over cliffs

• A burrow ability that allows porky to quickly catch up to the player if they get too far away

• General AI and path finding improvements

The result, is a much smarter, more effective Porky that will have you in the monsters lair in no time.

Next up was Environmental Samey-ness.
This came about due to a bit of a break through we had with level design. In an earlier update we raised up all the cliffs, to make it harder to escape enemies. Whilst that improved combat, it made the environments feel very repetitive as they had lost all height variation.

To fix this we:

• Went back through every module, and added some height variation to the arenas

• MORE IMPORTANTLY we did a review of every module and made them more visually interesting (and less brown!)

• We also added a bunch of new modules and points of interest, to make the levels just generally more interesting.

The last of the most common complaints was Ammo Scarcity. Every class has a ranged weapon, but we we're being a bit miserly with the ammo.

To fix this we created 2 new ammo nodes to the game. Breakable saplings and nodes which will award the player with arrows / spears and flame / bullets accordingly. These new resource nodes were then added to the mission generation logic and set to appear fairly frequently.

Next Up - The Road To Early Access!

We haven't just been addressing those 3 main points. We've been hard at work making tonnes of improvements and additions to the game!

// NEW FEATURES //

• Added 3 NEW MONSTERS!

• Added new environment modules and points of interest

• A bunch of new collectible Ore types

• Created new nav mesh for small monsters - Porky and enemies can now follow you up up cliffs!

• Ability for enemies (and porky) to jump across gaps

• Added offline play functionality

• Created unique crafting materials for new bosses

• Created supporter cosmetic pack + bundle

• Added a widget that pops up the first time you play with common settings and options

• Created new ammo nodes and added them to world gen

• Added the player customisation screen and interface

• Created the full upgrade path for each classes primary weapon

// IMPROVEMENTS //

• Updated and improved every environment module

• Players will now respawn in the field instead of at the airship

• Significant improvements to the Magmatic mutator

• Added the ability to toggle crouch

• Tuned the gravity to make the game feel less floaty (turns out Unreal defaults to 50% of earths gravity)

• Prioritised Porky catching up to players, rather than fighting mobs

• Filled collision under cliffs to remove little nav mesh pockets that were hiding behind walls

• Tuned how close small creatures and Boss monsters could get to walls

• Stamina and bomb bushes now added to spawer pool, so should be more evenly distributed

• Tuned gysers due to changes in gravity

• Improved the Session creation UI / UX by creating a nested widget

• Setup new ping icons

• Made it so players need to click through to progress initial message, so they are more likely to read our intro message XD

• Added Guild Master Gobbo messages for completing secondary objectives

• Increased the collision on all monsters

• Loot drops now increase based on difficulty

• Stopped boss monsters relocating only a short distance away

// BUG FIXES //

• Stopped boss monsters heads clipping into walls when retreating

• Fixed - some missing localisation

• Fixed - Porky nave mesh issues

• Fixed - Porky stretching vine traps

• Fixed - issue where enemies were spawning and idling

• Fixed - issue where getting hit would give you MOON GRAVITY

• Fixed - Issues where clients could not see other players cosmetics

• Fixed - Razan not sprinting on retreat

• Fixed - Missing collision on Razan

• Fixed - issue where occasionally secondary objective text was missing for clients

• Fixed - Issue where Mantara was setting people on fire even though it was DEAD

• Fixed - Ursanox icicles floating in midair

• Fixed - Issue where bosses would trigger massive dust cloud explosion on relocate

• Fixed - Issue where iron wasn't incrementing for clients

• Fixed - Bug causing overgrown mutated enemies to breakdance :(

• Fixed - Bug where ore labels were wrong rarity color

• Fixed - Issue where Shaman skull would get stuck "on" causing you to walk slowly

• Fixed - Bug where Mantara was warding 3 claws for each claw

• Fixed - Bug where Ursanox wasn't shaking off riders

• Fixed - Bug where Ursanox was awarding Razan Drops

If you've made it this far, thanks for your interest in our game and how we're trying to improve it with the help of community members like yourself.

We're really excited to launch the game into early access next week and can't wait for you to get your hands on the new features we've made!

As always, if you'd like to chat with members of the dev team, we can be found on our DISCORD CHANNEL.

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