We have started the remake of The Endless Forest thanks to your support.

Continue supporting The Endless Forest here.

Help us to make a beautiful free peaceful magical deer fantasy for all.

We have extended the campaign until 27 December (see below for details).

We reached Phase Two a mere few hours before the end of the campaign!

(we had reached Phase One on Christmas Eve)

We are Auriea Harvey and Michaël Samyn. We are a married couple and have been collaborating on digital projects for almost 18 years. We’re probably best known for the videogames that we have made with Tale of Tales. Games like The Graveyard, The Path, Bientôt l’été, Luxuria Superbia and Sunset. But it all started 10 years ago with the release of our first game The Endless Forest.

Every indie game developer starts with the dream of making a massively multiplayer game. Only to find out that those are incredibly big and complicated and not something that a smart creator starts their career with. But we did. We just began small and expanded the game in phases.

The Endless Forest being our first release, it was created with more enthusiasm than experience. And with technology that has not aged very well. Despite of that it became very popular and remains so to this day. But several years ago we had to admit to ourselves that the technology behind the game just couldn’t handle further expansion, or even our very special live events the popularity of which simply caused every player’s computer to lag or crash.

The Endless Forest has been our creative cornerstone and we want to take it further. We don’t want to hide it anymore out of fear that the technology wouldn’t be able to handle an increased amount of players. And we want to add all the ideas that we have come up with together with the players over the years.

To be able to do that, we want to recreate the game faithfully with modern technology. That is the primary goal of this campaign: to collect the funding necessary for the time, manpower and equipment that remaking The Endless Forest requires. Once that is done, we can finally expand the game further and invite everyone to join the wonderful community that has formed around it.

We are here at IndieGogo to ask you to help make that happen.

The Endless Forest in its current state has cost about 100,000 Euros to develop. But since the creative design work is already done and all of the assets have already been made, we can remake the game with less than half that budget. Still 40,000 Euros because the complexity of the game and the need for optimization (the entire point of this exercise) will take a serious amount of work. Additionally, many assets will need to be found, converted, tweaked or even remade to suit the new engine.

Most of the money goes towards keeping Tale of Tales running and paying our wages. Making games is our full time occupation. And The Endless Forest is a free game. We get some income from sales of other games, patronage, donations, teaching and lectures. But that is only about a quarter of what we need to survive. For the remaining three quarters we need your help.

Reaching the 40,000 Euro goal, complemented by our own contributions, will allow us to work for 9 months, pay for extra hardware and software and hire consultants to advise on the more complicated programming issues. Since we also have other projects running, development will be spread out over the next 12 to 18 months.

If we would not reach the goal, we will do our best with what we have, maybe start over with a modest first phase and let the current game run alongside it. And if we are really far under, we will add some new content that the current engine can still handle and the rest goes towards keeping the server up and running.

Remaking The Endless Forest will potentially create access to other types of funding. The local art grants organization that has funded a big chunk of the game as it is, the Flanders Audiovisual Fund, cannot support a remake but they have expressed interest in an expansion of the game, which is only possible with a new engine. So supporting this campaign is an investment in the future of the project.

The Endless Forest will remain free after the remake. And the remake will also allow Mac and Linux users to join. So your contribution will help other people to enjoy this game as well as yourself. And any player who supports the remake will get an exclusive deer costume especially designed for the ten year anniversary of the game. So the other deer will know who they have to thank for their fun times in the forest.

The Endless Forest was the first game that we released with Tale of Tales (in 2005). And it has influenced all the games that followed (and some by other developers, most notably Journey by our sister studio Thatgamecompany). Originally, in response to a commission for the Luxembourg Museum of Modern Art in 2003, we had designed a full-featured if somewhat surreal multiplayer online game. But when, after releasing a first phase of the game with a much smaller environment and far fewer features, we noticed how many players were extremely creative with inventing ways of playing in this very minimal game, we abandoned most of our ideas in favor of developing the game further in collaboration with the players. Not only did their activity in the Forest inspire all sorts of ideas but many players also actively designed things, some of which are currently implemented and enjoyed by all. We intend to continue that creative method.

While The Endless Forest offers a very relaxing and whimsical experience -we can’t help but feel happy and laugh hard when we’re playing- its design was, and still is, nothing short of radical. There is no formal gameplay in The Endless Forest: no quests, no tasks, no puzzles. There is no story in the game either -although there are many things in the forest that inspire imagining tales (shared by the players on the game’s very active community website). Apart from the configuration menus, there is also no language. We wanted to avoid text-based communication in order to prevent the verbal abuse that is all too common in online games. The deer avatars don’t even have names. Instead players, if they choose to register (which is not necessary to play!), select a unique pictogram to identify their avatar. Because of the game’s success, there have already been four generations of these pictograms, which adds to the history of the Forest. Even character customization, a staple of online games, has been designed as a playful social feature. In The Endless Forest you can only change the appearance of other players, by casting magic that can be acquired by having your deer avatar brush against trees, eat mushrooms, keep a sleeping deer company or sleep in a mushroom circle. The latter is a remainder of the game’s origins as a screensaver: when your computer would go to sleep, it would log into the Forest and appear as a sleeping deer.

The design of The Endless Forest is a prime example of favoring playing over gaming. This is a new form of entertainment made possible by the networked computer. It allows people from different parts of the world, different ages, different cultural backgrounds, genders and social groups to interact with each other in a completely egalitarian manner. In a sense, The Endless Forest is a realized utopia, or at least the fantasy of one (which we think is very important for the human imagination). There is no war in The Endless Forest, no violence, no famine, no stress. Only beauty and joy. Every action, even if they would be intended as malicious (which is kind of silly in the context) can always be interpreted as friendly and playful. The deer in The Endless Forest are simply incapable of causing harm. The emotional effect of this is tremendous and stimulates all sorts of fun social activities among players.

Next to the fun that players invent for themselves we, the creators, Auriea and Michaël, with our ancient deer avatars, have reserved special powers for ourselves in the Forest. When the mood strikes, we open up our magical toolbox and make it rain, make giant flowers explode, change everyone into frogs, make statues float and so on. We call this Abiogenesis (=life emerging from inorganic matter). We often do this spontaneously but also organize festivals to celebrate certain events throughout the year. There is no simulation of day and night cycle, weather or seasons in The Endless Forest. When it snows in the night you know that we have visited the Forest and made it so. This is not just an ironic reference to the divine powers of software creators but also, and more importantly, creates an active bond between the players and the makers. The Endless Forest is not just a consumer product for your entertainment. It is a living work of art, a sort of ongoing digital theater, that every player plays an active role in.

We feel that this sort of game is so rare and important that we cannot bring ourselves to abandon it to inevitable changes in technology. We believe that it should exist. Not just for the players who get great joy out of it. But also for the game design community as a demonstration of how totally free creative projects have a place in an industry and society that is all too often governed by financial need or pure cynicism. An offer of beauty and joy, with no strings attached. That is what this campaign is about. That is what you will be supporting. We need to continue this project! It’s important.

The Endless Forest was the first game we released. It was created in an engine called Quest3D. We have also created our most famous game, The Path, in this engine. A recent update of the Windows 10 operating system, however has considerably damaged the performance of The Path. And we worry that the same might happen to The Endless Forest. This adds some urgency to this campaign.

With The Graveyard we shifted to the Unity engine for creating games. As a script-based engine (Quest3D was a visual programming tool), it limited what we could do creatively as designers. But that did not stop us from learning and evolving. After The Graveyard, we made Fatale in Unity, and also Vanitas, our first iPhone game. Then we made the literature-inspired Bientôt l’été and IGF Nuovo award winner Luxuria Superbia. Last year we released our last game, Sunset, also made in Unity. That’s over a decade of artistic and technical growth since the release of The Endless Forest. We intend to pour all of that experience and know-how into the remake of the game. It will be so good!

For the remake we will use the Unreal engine that we have switched to recently (for Cathedral-in-the-Clouds). We find Unreal a much more solid choice than Unity, it is free for non-commercial projects and above all, it has a superbly designed visual programming editor, that will allow us to get back to our creative programming roots.

The Endless Forest would be nothing without its community of enthusiastic players who for some strange reason find great joy in prancing around as a deer through glorious infinite woods. The nature of the game inspires not only all sorts of good feelings but also astounding artistic creativity. Please allow us to share some of their tremendous output below. And trust us when we say that this is but a tiny tip of the magnificent iceberg.

Auriea and Michaël have been collaborating since they met on the internet of 1999. She was in New York, he was in Belgium. Immediately there was a connection and less than half a year later they lived together in Belgium. But it wasn’t just love and kisses! We were serious about our collaboration, even exclusive! At first we made websites together. One of them won a prestigious prize from the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art. In the beginning of the millennium the web changed drastically and we switched to making videogames instead. But our love for the internet was clearly still present when we made The Endless Forest. As outsiders to games our approach caused a few frowns here and there along the way. But we fought hard for recognition and title after title we showed the game community another facet of the endless amount of things you can do in this medium. We even founded a platform to support development of videogames outside of the usual formal conventions, called notgames. Then last year, after a final attempt to fit in we sort of called it quits, only to go back to our roots: free, playful-yet-sincere interactive experiences that inspire joy and awe, like The Endless Forest.

Lina Kusaite is an Lithuanian artist who lives in Brussels. When presenting 8, our never finished first game idea, at an event, she came up to us and offered to help. She made hundreds of wonderful drawings for us. We were so enchanted with her work that we promptly engaged her again for The Endless Forest. The earliest prototypes of the game contained regular deer. But when Lina came along, she kept drawing deer with human faces. We were surprised. That wasn’t our intention! We just wanted to make a deer game. But in the end we realized that she was right. Not only were her designs gorgeous, they also worked really well with all the magical things we wanted to happen in the forest. Somehow the human faces on the deer made everything plausible. Next to the design of the deer characters and many pelts and antlers, she also drew even more fantastical creatures like centaurs and tree deer. And these are a big part of the reason why we want to rebuild the engine so we can expand it. We want to meet her creations, see them live in the forest, invent stories about the impossible love between the Sun Deer and the Tree Deer, hear the sad song of the Sadawaar, hide from her Baba Yaga and so on.

Another collaborator we discovered when working on 8 is Laura Raines Smith. And it’s also like a love story because we never parted ways. Laura is the unofficial third member of Tale of Tales. She has animated all of our characters! Yes, all of them: the deaf mute girl in 8, the deer in The Endless Forest, of course, the old woman in The Graveyard, the Red Girls in The Path, and their wolves, Salome in Fatale (including a flabbergasting piece of rotoscoping for the Dance of the Seven Veils), homme and femme in Bientôt l’été and of course Angela Burnes in Sunset. Laura is an animating machine! And her style has brought so much flair to our work! Tale of Tales’ games would have been very different indeed without her wonderful work! And we know we can count on her for the new animations that we want to add to The Endless Forest. They will be amazing!

Gerry De Mol is also a Tale of Tales old-timer. The first music he made for us was for The Endless Forest. Gerry is a multi-instrumentalist specialized in guitar and all sorts of exotic string instruments. He is also a wonderful songwriter (but sadly only Dutch-speakers can truly appreciate his poetic talent)! Our collaboration started with the background tune for the configuration menu in The Endless Forest. Otherwise there was no music in the game back then. But when Abiogenesis was being made, we invited him to compose for the Twin Gods, including a cover of Do Re Mi from The Sound of Music (just because of the line “Do a deer, a female deer” -which is extra funny because all the deer in The Endless Forest are stags). And of course he also wrote the song that the deer dance to and that gets fuller and louder as more dancers join in. For Halloween, we simply reversed it to sound creepy. After The Endless Forest Gerry wrote, composed and played the song about death in The Graveyard and the music for Salome’s dance in Fatale. And when the time comes to add more music to The Endless Forest, his contributions will no doubt greatly enrich the experience. I bet we can ask him to use antlers as an instrument!

While we have a lot of experience creating software as artists with no formal programming education whatsoever, using a new engine like Unreal comes with a certain amount of risk. So far we have only created one prototype in the engine and we’re still unfamiliar with aspects of the editor that we will need for The Endless Forest (most notably networking and character animation). But a brief glance at the tools provided by Unreal fills us with sufficient confidence to tackle this considerable task. Nevertheless we intend to seek advice from seasoned professionals and are reserving part of the budget for precisely this purpose. In fact, when creating The Endless Forest the first time around, we worked with a programmer to flesh out the software structure as well as the base logic for networking. The cool thing about Unreal (as opposed to Quest3D) is that part of the problems have already been solved by the creators of the engine. So yeah, we can do this.

Another hurdle may be software formats. The Quest3D engine was very picky about formats for models and textures, and we may not be able to import them directly in Unreal. We will have to find the source files of these assets on old file servers and archive CD-Roms and then try to open them in contemporary versions of Blender and Max (or dig up old versions of these programs and hope they can export to a format that Unreal can read). One obvious risk is that some source files might be lost (either misplaced or on corrupted disks). Another is that the data may have become unreadable or otherwise unusable. In all those cases we will simply remake the models and textures faithfully.

And finally, we have other projects running simultaneously that we don’t want to neglect. Cathedral-in-the-Clouds is huge and there may also be commissions for art projects that we won’t want to refuse. This will impact the time it will take to finish the remaking of The Endless Forest. But simultaneously it will also put us in a more secure position, which may be useful in case we underestimated the time to re-create The Endless Forest. Another positive is that there’s a lot of (spiritual, technical and logistical) similarities between The Endless Forest and Cathedral-in-the-Clouds. They are both non-commercial projects with an uplifting purpose, they are both multiplayer, and both thrive on commissions and expansions. After all, The Endless Forest started on the ruin of a cathedral and was inspired by the legend of Saint Hubert! We don’t exclude some form of overlap between the two programs in the future.

The best thing you can do now is click the “BACK IT” button at the top of this page and invest some money in the future of one the most innovative, entertaining, artistic and free games ever. For your own joy in life and that of others. And for showing the world that unbridled creativity is a good thing!

But if you don’t have any money or you don’t like spending it or there’s some other reason that prevents you from doing the obvious, you can still help the rest of us by sharing the idea with your friends and family. Who knows? Maybe one of them can help. And if they do, they also help you because in the end everyone gets the game for free. So be selfish! There’s buttons for sharing the campaign on Facebook and Twitter and so on right next to that “BACK IT” button.

EXTENDED

We have extended the fundraising campaign of the second decade of The Endless Forest until 27 December. Hopefully the Christmas spirit will stimulate gift giving, either to the community in the form of contributions, or to yourself or your friends in the form of perks.

The generous contributions so far have instilled enough confidence in us to start the work on this project. But we still need to reach our target to be able to deliver a full remake of the game. And if we would exceed the target we could even start expanding the Forest.

Here’s the steps we are collecting towards:

28,000: Phase One

With 28,000 Euros we will be able to remake the first phase of The Endless Forest as it was originally released more than ten years ago but with glorious new technology underneath. The First Forest is only a quarter of the current forest in size. It’s the patch with poppies, hyacinths and ferns around The Ruin of the old cathedral. The deer avatars are identified by pictograms only. We will create a fifth generation of pictograms for new players. In this first phase, the deer can only engage in a minimal set of activities (sniffing, rubbing, jumping) and they all look the same (there’s no Forest Magic in Phase One). But the new engine will enable Mac OS X and Linux users to play next to those on Windows.

34,000: Phase Two

In Phase Two, the terrain doubles in size to include the area around The Pond, with the Twin Gods hill, the Crying Idol and The Little Bridge. The Old Oak will also be added in this phase. Forest Magic will allow the deer to change each other’s appearance. And there will be a bunch more activities and expressive actions for the deer to perform (dancing, laughing, and so on). The Abiogenesis system will give us the power to change the weather and organize spectacular live festivals.

At this point we should be able to implement at least some of the in-game perks such as the Tin Deer, the Valentine set, the divine sets, and so on.

40,000: Phase Three

In Phase Three, the current phase, the Birch Forest is added with sycamores, blue berries and fluttering birds. This area features The Playground and De Drinkplaats. As of Phase Three new players start their adventures as a Fawn, to grow into an adult deer after a month. Many more deer costumes will be added to celebrate Carnival and Mardi Gras. And our favorite Big Zombie Deer will appear again around Halloween.

To improve efficiency and performance of the technology, we will also consult with experts before we release the full remake of The Endless Forest.

46,000: Phase Four

Exceeding the target would allow us add a new area with grasslands and a cliff. The long desired grazing action will be added so the deer can munch on the new weeds to their hearts’ content. On top of the cliff, the mysterious Sun Deer will find a home, overlooking the grassy valley. We will add more expressive actions. And fawns will get to keep Forest Magic when they are old enough to do so.

52,000: Phase Five

In Phase five a new visitor will appear in the grasslands. The Sadawaar (or Shadhavar) is a mythical animal with a horn through which the wind plays heavenly music. The deer will be able to entrust this noble creature with their favorite costume so they can frolic and experiment without worrying about losing their unique looks forever. Next to the Sadawaar, two giant turtles will make their appearance that offer rides to the deer across the forest along the cardinal directions. In this phase we will also add a number of new deer sets selected from designs created by the community.

58,000: extra features

And then there’s a bunch of things we want to do that are not part of the game itself. Hopefully we will be able to take care of some of these even if we don’t reach this target. There’s a few tweaks we definitely want to make to the community site but we really should do a major overhaul. While The Endless Forest may never run on mobile devices, we do dream of a companion app that creates some connection to the game (like a way to see your deer or look into the forest through a 3D version of the realtime map). Similarly we would like to be able to conjure up some Abiogenesis effects even when we are not at our desks, perhaps via a mobile app, or a private web page. And finally we think it would be great fun if The Endless Forest could be observed in Virtual Reality, not by deer, but rather by owls sitting in trees.

What can you do to help? If you love the Forest, contribute! If you’ve already contributed, tell your friends! Post about the campaign on social media and share your enthusiasm for what we are trying to do with this game. After all, a forest is nothing without the living beings who inhabit it! We are eager to open up The Endless Forest to more players! And with your help we will make it!

UPDATES

We have added an extra reward to the Forest Believer perk. Everyone who contributes 300 Euros or more will get access in the game to the beautiful Golden Pelt that so far has only been worn by the divine deer orchestrating the Abiogenesis festivals.

On top of this, the Forest Believer perk also gives you access to a secret perk. Please contact us if you are a Believer (i.e. if the sum of your contributions equals or exceeds 300).

Pick the Forest Fan perk to 3d print a Deer figurine! The prints will cost around €18, printed on demand via Shapeways. You get a choice from many colors and your figureen can be either unnamed or customized with your in-game Pictogram and name!  OR go for the Forest Collector perk and get access to print the Sun Deer as well! The print of this exclusive deer will cost under €50, via Shapeways.

This costume was created a long time ago for the occasion of Valentine's Day. It allowed the two of us to meet in the forest as loving deer. Now we are sharing the love with everyone supporting the Second Decade for 100 € or more.

Pick the Forest Lover Perk if you want your deer to look like this!

Work-in-progress images of the Tin Deer set that comes with That Anniversary Look. Looking forward to texturing it in the Unreal engine!