A new generation in The Endless Forest

When we hit the 50,000 registered players mark, we didn’t realize how close we were to running out of names for our deer. If that’s not a nice testament to how two people who know next to nothing about mathematics can still make complicated computer software, I don’t know what is. 😉

New Deer Names

Behold the new generation of deer names in version 3.31 of The Endless Forest.
Good for another 50,000 players!

When we designed The Endless Forest, we wanted to avoid language as much as possible. First of all because language puts a barrier between people, and we wanted The Endless Forest to be harmonious. Secondly, we wanted to avoid violence and competitive behaviour as much as possible. Language is often used in multiplayer games for insults and other out of character behaviour. So we decided to have no chat in our game. And we came up with the idea of using abstract symbols instead of text-based names to identify 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.

The Vision of Saint Hubert The symbols are made up of a limited range of elements that are combined to form pictograms. Players can choose a pictogram for their deer when they register for the game. 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).

Since the amount of elements from which pictograms are composed, is limited, however, there are only a limited amount of unique pictograms. And we ran into that limit last month. So we closed registration for a while and created a new pictogram “alphabet”.

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. First generation deer will be older (wiser, more experienced, etc) than second generation deer. And so on.

You can name your deer here.
Please note that you’ll need the very latest version of The Endless Forest to see the new pictograms (version 3.31). You can download it here.

The Endless Forest is free thanks to the continuous support of the Musée d’Art Moderne Grand-Duc Jean in Luxembourg. Registration is not required to play the game (it just makes it more fun).

The Path now available in Russian, Danish, French, German, Hungarian, Italian, Portuguese, Romanian and Spanish

The Path, in Russian

Last week, 1C released a full translation of The Path in Russian. So now our friends in Russia, Belarus, Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, Ukraine, Armenia, Azerbaijan, Georgia, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Moldavia, Tajikistan, Turkmenistan and Uzbekistan no longer need to fiddle with badly made torrents. They can simply get the game here.

And thanks to the help of many volunteers, you can also play The Path in Danish, French, German, Hungarian, Italian, Portuguese, Romanian and Spanish, next to the English and Dutch available in the normal release. A patch that translates the game to any of these languages can be downloaded here. Credits for the translations can be found here.

Oh, and there’s also the Polish version, of course, published by Topware. We still have a few copies available in our store.
More languages will be added later. We’re working on Arabic, Czech, Japanese and Korean at the moment.

Tale of Tales is 6!

That means discounts! :)

Six years ago, on a freezing snowy day like today (at least that’s how I remember it), the document that founded “Tale of Tales BVBA” was officially published. To celebrate our anniversary, we’re discounting our three commercially available downloads for the week. As a lucky coincidence, this means you can still get a quick and cheap and very original Christmas gift for your loved ones! :)

From now until next Saturday, you can get The Path for 6.66 US Dollars (30% off).
Available from the regular page.

Plus, The Graveyard and FATALE are bundled together for 6 US Dollars (50% off!).
Available only through these links:
FATALE/The Graveyard bundle for 6$ PC version
FATALE/The Graveyard bundle for 6$ Mac version

These offers are valid until 26 December.

The Path wins a Quest3D Award

Quest3D Awards 2009

Much to our surprise, The Path has ended up second in this year’s Quest3D Awards.

When you start the game you immediately notice this game is different. Your first instruction is “Stay on the path” and visit your grandmother. If you do so the game ends and you start over. What could be the intention behind this game? This game offers an experience no other game can so this alone makes it deserves a spot in our Quest3D awards.

Quest3D is the authoring tool that we used to create the game. It is mostly used for architectural visualisations. So the winning projects are usually these amazingly photographically realistic spectacles. Hence our surprise.

Quest3D is a great tool to make games, though. Especially for the code-allergic and the artistic (like us). Its realtime visual programming system is second to none. That’s right, both The Path and The Endless Forest were created by connecting little virtual blocks together with little virtual wires. We believe that one day, this style of programming is going to supersede coding, much like C++ and Javascript have removed the need to punch in zeroes and ones today.

The Path in Quest3D

This is part of the “source code” of The Path, in the Quest3D editor. There’s hundreds of little flow charts like this and together they make the whole thing tick. And look pretty. :)

The Path selected for IndieCade festival

Our short horror game ThePath has been selected for the IndieCade festival. The award ceremony, exhibitions and conference take place from October 1 to 4 in Culver City, Los Angeles, California, USA.

IndieCade

Sadly, we will not be able to attend the event -because we are w o r k i n g– but it looks like it’s going to be great!

Up Down Up

After suffering a technical problem overnight leaving our servers down, We are back up! So The Endless Forest Community is back, Our store is back, The Path – Prologue is available again.

And speaking of the Prologue… There was an issue where it wouldn’t run on Mac OSX 10.5.6. The Path full game runs happily on that version. Transgaming (who handled the port of the game) had made the Prologue 10.5.7 only without telling us. We’ve had them roll this back. So now, if you’re on Mac you can run both the game and the demo on OSX 10.5.6 upwards. If it wasn’t working for you before we invite you to download the Prologue again.

But its probably a good idea to upgrade your OS anyway. Because Apple puts new graphics drivers in every system upgrade making all 3d games run better, smoother, faster on your computer.

Okay… end of announcement. Lets hope we never suffer downtime like that again.

“The Path – Prologue”, a new chapter. Free.

The Path - PrologueInstead of extracting part of The Path and releasing it as a free trial, we made a brand new chapter, similar to parts of the game, but not the same. It should give you a free taste of the atmosphere of the game and be a good test for your computer’s ability to handle our technology.

In The Path – Prologue, you control the mysterious Girl in White. There’s a not a lot of gameplay in this demo. This should inform players looking for that sort of thing that The Path is perhaps not for them. It’s just about exploring the forest and pondering the sights.

Something strange seems to have happened. Did it really happen before the Red Girls visited the forest? How is that possible?

Download The Path – Prologue here!
Available for Mac and PC.

The Path on the Mac. Now.

It wasn’t easy to shoehorn the DirectX-slave that is Quest3D into the seductive arms of Mac OSX, but with the help of the friendly people at TransGaming and Act3D, we did it!

Now there’s no more excuses to stay on the PC path. The OSX forest is filled with temptations. Give in to your thirst for Knowledge of Good and Evil. Come, Adam, come! I have a sweet and juicy apple here for you!…

The Mac version costs the same as the PC version. $9.99.
Which means Good because it is 666 upside down.

Get it here. Now.

Oh, and for the occasion, we have made some new desktop wallpapers (in Mac resolutions only) and… new Deluxe Edition USB sticks!

Thank you, Vikas and Blair and Daniel and Mark and Rob and Paul and Ferry and Remko and Jos!