To encourage new contributions in the remaining seven days of the IndieGogo campaign, we have added three perks.

Forest Believer

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.




Forest Magician

If you contribute 500 Euros or more to the campaign, we will create a pelt, mask or set of antlers in collaboration with you. When ready, this little bit of your magic will be added to the game for all players to enjoy. We will contact you after the campaign to discuss your preferences.

Forest Patron

For 1000 Euros, you get access to a colored 3D print of your own deer avatar with your chosen pelt, antlers and mask. The model will be created to your specifications by us especially for 3D printing (many of the in-game models are not suitable for 3D printing yet). We will send you a private link to Shapeways where you can have the model printed and shipped to you (at a cost between 60 and 80 Euros for a figurine of about 6 inches (15 centimeter), depending on the actual model).

We just love how the 3D prints of the deer model turned out! They are so delicate and beautiful. We hope many of you will make prints of it! Click on the image for full resolution.

When you support The Endless Forest on IndieGogo for 20 Euros or more, you will receive a link after the campaign is done, to a private page where you can print the deer model through a service called Shapeways in a color of your choice (see swatches on picture) and, if you like, including your pictogram and name. The cost of printing is 18 Euros and shipping cost is very reasonable (since the object is small and light). The figurine is 11 centimeters tall.

You might have seen this one in the Forest years ago, when we introduced the Mardi Gras sets. We have kept it to ourselves all this time because it is so special: it was designed for two deer standing together facing each other. This one, too, was inspired by concept art by Lina Kusaite.

The Forest Lover perk on IndieGogo give access to this set.
Please support the Second Decade of The Endless Forest!
Auriea and I are more eager than ever to work on the game. Make it happen!

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.