Your deer avatar will live for a full year. If you want to continue playing with all the abilities you've gathered, you will need to procreate. There are plenty of attractive hinds in the forest.

In the original design of the game, 12 deer-years would be compressed in 1 human year. So that your deer would be born, grow up and die over the course of a year. For a week every month, deer would be able to procreate. I guess this means that the game would go through the 4 seasons once per month, a week per season and always the same: first week of the month is Winter, second Spring, etc. Could be very interesting! Smile

But as you know, we have abandoned these plans long ago, in favor of designing the game with you, the players.

These symbols are easy enough to memorize to recognize your friends and still disconnected from the humans behind the avatar sufficiently, to encourage spontaneous playing together with total strangers.

when they login, this pictogram appears above the head of the deer avatar (in a reference to the legend of Saint Hubert, who was converted to Christianity after encountering a deer with a crucifix between its antlers)

This solution was part of the original design of the game. To create generations of pictograms, which would contribute to the story of The Endless Forest.

It wasn’t designed specifically for adults. We always thought of it as open to any age. But it was originally commissioned by a -very adult- museum of modern art, that is still hosting the server. And it has been developed with arts funding, also very serious and grown-up. But we don’t mind the kids playing at all.

I must admit that we did actually not set out to make a game for active player creativity back in September 2003 when we came up with the initial idea for The Endless Forest. For us, all that mattered was to create a believable environment filled with elements that inspired imagination, (passive) mental creativity.

http://i369.photobucket.com/albums/oo133/Endless_Encyclopedia/Special%20Sets/RedRamAntlers.jpg
We liked the design but not the execution in 3D.
Hopefully we'll get a chance to make a new version of them and release them.

http://i20.photobucket.com/albums/b236/ultimatedolphinluver/TEF_bubblywums_20080127_182939_304x.jpg
They were released with all the Mardi Gras sets, but were mistakenly put into the games. They were never meant to be released and were taken out soon after. I loved those antlers! Afterwards when they were taken out, if you were wearing them you appeared to have no antlers on your head.

First of all, we are very critical of the concept of choice. Second, we have grown very attached to the deer's faces. At first, when Lina designed them, we didn't like it. We wanted normal deer.

The Ruin has been there since Phase One. There was only one extremely early beta-test that didn't have the ruin (but a fence around that area instead).

During Phase One (I think) there was a deer who logged in every day at the same time, just to stand in the middle of the ruins, never moving, never interacting. So the Twin Gods dropped a cage over it, trying to elicit a reaction.

How do you feel about the way some of us have developed our deer into characters with backstories, personalities, etc.?

We love the creativity that The Endless Forest inspires. But sometimes, especially on the forums, some players forget that not everybody is playing the game like that. And what they say often sounds very confusing.

In our first prototype, there was a limited number of mushrooms and when you would eat it, it would be gone and grow back slowly.

And the feeling of things being out of your control is definitely part of our design, part of the "story" of The Endless Forest. It's about losing control to some extent, but enjoying what remains all the more. I guess (I'm not a critic).

I like the current situation quite a bit, where you're praying to the Twin Gods but you don't actually know whether they are good or evil gods, especially given the presence of Christian symbols, and the fact that you're a deer, a deer with a humanoid face, even.

We don't like the idea of defining your avatar's look outside of the game. We want to put as much as possible in the game and make it playful.
The appearance should be part of the "story" of the game and not just a cosmetic thing. We like things to be meaningful.

We simple do not want to play that game. Knowing somebody's gender changes the way you interact with them in a way that we feel is not compatible with The Endless Forest.

I like the idea of dark areas as well. But I'm afraid of the effect they might have on some players. When we were doing Halloween the first time, the amount of reports on asocial and aggressive gameplay rose noticeably.

"I think it would be nice to have seasons! Like spring, summer, fall, and winter. Imagine how awesome that would be! Smile"

This was in fact part of the original design of the game. Seasons are important to the life of a deer because its behaviour changes with the seasons (most importantly, during the mating season...).

We're not big fans of customization because such things tend to take you out of the game. Everything should happen in the game as much as possible. And since it's a multiplayer game, preferably make sense in a social context (maybe something you can do together).