The crowdsourcing campaign to remake The Endless Forest so we can expand it is at 12% of its goal now, thanks to 120 lovely people putting their money into a project that everyone will be able to play for free and that encourages peace and tolerance and beauty and friendship across cultural and social divisions.

It is natural for campaigns like this to have a peak in support in the beginning and one at the end. And between those two peaks is a valley of only gradual progress. We are optimistic, but our peak wasn't really high enough to justify hope that we will reach our goal at the end of the month.

In comparison, our previous crowsourcing campaign, Cathedral-in-the-Clouds had reached a slightly higher amount at this point in the campaign but only succeeded in reaching its goal thanks to an enormously high peak in the last few days. I don't think we can count on a miracle like that for The Endless Forest.

So we will try to fight the valley as hard as we can, and try to create a bridge rather than let things slump. YOU are a big part of this! Please consider contributing to the campaign, if only a little just to keep it going. And definitely ask all your friends and family members to help. Explain how special the game is and how important it is for you. Promise you'll stop nagging about it if they back the campaign. Whatever it takes!

There are 170,000 registered Endless Forest accounts. If everyone would donate a quarter we'd be done. But of course that's not going to happen. So we all need to make up for the slackers (and the poor).

Good luck!

We are live!



Please share the link as far and wide as you can: https://igg.me/at/theendlessforest
Feel free to use the image above, or make your own.

Do let us know any comments or suggestions! This campaign runs over 30 days, so there's plenty of time to tweak and add.

PS: we're still accepting video, audio & text (see previous post)

Update 1 (2 November)
Update 2 (15 November)
Update 3 (18 November): 3D prints!
Update 4 (21 November): new perks!
Update 5: Lina!
Update 6: Campaign extended to 27 December!
Update 7: tin deer WIP
Update 8 (14 December): statistics

Deer players,


We hope you're getting excited for Halloween in the Forest! Because this year will be special!

Next week we intend to launch a crowdsourcing campaign for The Endless Forest on IndieGogo. The purpose of the campaign is to collect the necessary funding for a complete (and faithful) remake of the game in a new contemporary engine. As you may know, the current technology behind the game doesn't allow for much expansion and even severely limits the amount of players that can be active at any time. This has also been the reason why we can't do much Abiogenesis anymore.

But if the crowdsourcing campaign is successful, all of that is coming back. And more!

To convince people to co-fund the project, we want to enlist your help!

First of all, if you have a moment and you feel like it, please make a short video of yourself saying something about The Endless Forest (5-20 seconds). It can be very general, very specific or very personal. Just something you want to share about your feelings and experiences with the game. We will select as many as we can fit to be featured on the campaign page. You can use whatever technology you have: a phone or webcam recording is just fine. Try to shoot in 720p resolution horizontal, if possible.

Our request for a grant to develop Phase Four of The endless Forest (or The endless Forest II as we are starting to call it) was denied by the Flanders Audiovisual Fund. As you may be aware, any major expansion of the game at this point requires remaking the underlying software in a new engine. The VAF have a rule against creating remakes that they invoked to reject our request. We tried to explain that the purpose is to expand the game and that remaking it is simply a technical necessity to be enable this. But to no avail.

But we have not given up, and are planning to run a crowd sourcing campaign to gather the necessary funds. As we are moving towards a completely non-profit status, however, we will need to wait a bit before we do that, for fiscal reasons. We're hoping to run the fund-raising campaign in Summer or Fall of 2016.

In the mean time our gratitude goes out to those of you who generously contribute to the maintenance of the game's server thanks to which you can all enjoy playing together. Please consider joining them.

Best wishes for the holidays and the new year!

See you in the Forest!

Michaël & Auriea.

I tweaked some of the pictogram scripting but I'm not sure if this fixes all issues.
Please let me know if there's still problems with pictogram showing up on the map or on profiles.

Please ignore

Some people have found a way to create old pictograms for new accounts. Obviously this is not very nice. All new accounts with pictograms that already existed will be disabled.

So stop doing this now. Please.

Thanks.

Michael & Auriea.

UPDATE!
The pictogram registration script has been tweaked in an attempt to prevent this hack.
Please let us know if any issues would occur.
Or if you know how to use the hack, please let us know if it still works.

Today we are celebrating Tale of Tales' 10 year anniversary! Thank you all for being with us and playing our games. We may not have the time or the means to do much with The Endless Forest lately, but please know that your daily frolics through the Forest warm our hearts and soothe our souls. I'm not sure if we would have made it through these 10 years without you!

We have collected a bundle of experiments and prototypes from the past decade and are offering it as pay-what-you-wish (with a minimum of 5 USD) here (available until Christmas):
http://tale-of-tales.com/anniversary
There's an early single player prototype of The Endless Forest in the bundle too, with the souls around the ruin, for those who remember our very first event.

Thank you all for being with us.
And here's to another 10 years!

Michael & Auriea.

Ever wanted to support us without it costing you a dime?
If you are a Steam user, now you can!

Our new game Luxuria Superbia is almost ready for release. But to release it on Steam, we need a sufficient amount of votes on a service called Greenlight. That's where you come in!

If you have a Steam account and you have at least one game there, you can vote on Greenlight. So please do! Not only will you be helping our new game get on Steam in front of millions of gamers, you will also help us raise a bit of money (sales on Steam are huge!).

Without further ado: this is where you should go (corrected):
http://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=184212362
Click on the YES button, please!

Thank you!

Michael & Auriea.

PS: hope you're getting excited for the imminent Halloween festivities in the Forest!

Mudam is ending its support for The Endless Forest, after having hosted the game server for 7 years.

The Musée d'Art moderne Grand-Duc Jean in Luxembourg commissioned us to make a work of art for their online gallery in 2003. In response, we created the original prototype for The Endless Forest. In 2005 we were ready to launch the first iteration of the game and Mudam agreed to pay for the server required for allowing all players to interact with each other. Thanks to their support, The Endless Forest has been available for free until today.

Now, however, the museum has changed its policies and is no longer willing to sustain the cost.

Even though we haven't been updating The Endless Forest as much as we may have wanted to, and even though we can't promise any changes in the foreseeable future, we do want to continue to maintain the game in its current state and offer it to the public as a place of peace and harmony, free of charge. To do that, we will need to find a way to pay for the server.

The monthly cost of hosting the server is 165 Euros. This is not a lot of money. And we already have a voluntary subscription system in place. All we need is a few more people who are willing to commit to sending us a few Euros every month. And then we can continue as before.

Click "Read more" to see how you can help!