I had the idea of the Endless Forest beginning with one acorn, and came up with this.

Fascinating idea posted by Quad, on The Endless Forest community site.

Not far from the truth, actually…:)

We will be holding 2 ABIOGENESIS parties in The Endless Forest! The first Friday, October 31st, at 9pm GMT/UTC and the second on All Souls Day, Sunday, November 2nd, at 9am GMT/UTC.

We’ll be performing the first ABIOGENESIS live from FOAM Brussels’ “All Hallow’s Eve celebration of the Guild for Reality Integrators and Generators.” ha!

Weather Report: Expect mist! ;)

The Undead Deer has come back from the depths to haunt the forest for another year! Join in this season of oddness in The Endless Forest and be ready to attend the All Hallows Eve ABIOGENESIS party coming at the end of the month!

Meanwhile, on a less spooky note, we along with The Endless Forest Club on DeviantArt have started an initiative to put together the first The Endless Forest Fan Art Calendar! The TEF community has made lots of fabulous artwork over the years and it is high time we all made something a bit more lasting than .jpgs! So, check it out and be a part of it!

We have organized this survey together with PhD student Eva Kekou and we’re only expecting official results in the Fall. But we’d like to share some things that are abundantly clear without scientific investigation.

Of the over 30 thousand registered members, almost 250 have taken the survey. That’s less than 1 percent. So a grain of salt is in order. Also because some of the participants have expressed enjoying taking the survey. So perhaps the results only represent Endless Forest players who like filling in surveys.

We knew that a lot of women and girls are playing The Endless Forest but the bare figures did come as a bit of a shock to us: only 41 of the 247 participants who answered the gender question in the survey are male. That’s less than 1 in 5. I’m not sure if we should feel proud or embarrassed.

The following graph shows how the participants are divided per age group.

So the majority of players are teenagers. At least those who filled in the survey. Something interesting happens with the gender balance as players get older, though.

As players get older, the gender becomes more balanced. In the age group of over 25, there’s almost an equal amount of men and women.

We always thought that The Endless Forest was a casual experience, in the strict sense of the word. Something you do leisurely, just once in a while. But that was probably because we were only thinking of adult players. As the next graphs show, teenagers spend a lot more time in the Forest.

The one child of under 10 who particpated in the survey, apparently plays the game every day. The older the players get, the less frequently they play.

Something similar shows up in the data concerning the time of an average play session. Some teenagers play The Endless Forest for several hours on end. I find that quite astonishing, and slightly worrying. Most play around an hour. As players get older, the sessions get shorter.

We also asked whether participants played other games than The Endless Forest. Most of them do (almost 90%). The games that were mentioned most were games in which your avatar is also an animal: Okami and Wolf Quest. The Sims and Zelda games scored pretty well as well, followed by World of Warcraft, Zoo Tycoon, Pokemon, Final Fantasy and, believe or not, Halo (almost 5%).

Another thing that caught our eye was how many of the participants had first learned about The Endless Forest through fan art on Deviant Art: 1 in 5 players! Followed closely by word of mouth (friends and family: 16%). Google searches came up third (almost 10%), followed by the community around the Wolf Quest game.

With the relentless creativity displayed by the players on The Endless Forest community site, it should come as as no surprise that over 90% of the players considers themselves to be creative, an artist or designer (either professional or hobbyist). And many of them participate in other forms of culture (mostly music and books, but also comics and cinema, and fewer visit concerts or theater).

Overall, we’re very suspicious of surveys and statistics. So we’re not taking this too seriously. But it’s an interesting indicator. I wish we could interest more boys and men in our games. But I don’t think we’ll add any guns and sports for that purpose. Maybe we should just admit that we make games for girls. I don’t see other developers being embarassed about making games for boys. ;)

We will publish the results of this survey at a later date (without divulging the names of the participants, of course). I think it will be quite interesting…

Possibly one of the more interesting things that came up during this interview with Belgium based indie development duo Tale of Tales was the idea that they are, effectively, experimental outsiders in the games industry simply because of their focus on story based, artistically motivated work.

Isn’t that weird? Can you imagine what the film industry would be like if narrative works were substantially less popular than action based films?

If you have half an hour to kill, have a read!

but wait… theres more! view the slideshow.
Great party! My head’s still swimming ;D
Biiig thanks to everyone who was there!!

Tuesday, July 15th at 9PM GMT we are holding another one of our (in)famous ABIOGENESIS performances inside The Endless Forest. This time we suggest, all you deer, take a swim in the pond. You will turn into a frog and shed your costumes, but in this heat that will feel so good! Now that you’re all cooled off, leave your deer behind for an out of body experience with the Twin Gods. Enjoy the party and spectacle in a whole new way by switching to ABIOGENESIS CAM mode with CTRL+W. Be carried through the forest and witness colors and forest magic like you haven’t before! Find out what time it’s happening in your area.

This performance will also be playing and playable at the E3 Expo in Los Angeles as part of the Indiecade Exhibition of Independent Games! We hear they’re also showing a giant art print of a still moment from TEF. If anyone happens to see it, and can send us a photo ;) thx.

The Cube Festival starts today in Issy-Les-Moulineaux, just South of Paris, France. Featuring The Endless Forest, among many other media art projects. The festival runs until 8 June.

There is Yet Another Windows Virtualization software. This time one that does NOT require you to install windows on the machine AT ALL! I tried CrossOver a year or so ago but found it lacked any 3d acceleration or DirectX emulation, but now they have a new product available.
CrossOver Games is a fancy, 3d optimized, re-packaging of Wine software emulation. Thus it works for both Mac and Linux to emulate an environment compatible with many PC video games. Read more about this on Joystiq, thats where I first heard of it.

Anyway, my tests with getting The Endless Forest up and running with it were mixed. The GOOD: It does a really fantastic job of running the game! It speeds along at over 30 FPS on my MacBook Pro. Since it doesn’t require a real Windows installation I had it installed and was playing in a matter of minutes. CrossOver Games is alot less expensive than VMWARE or Parallels and since you aren’t buying windows either its a good emulation solution. The BAD: I couldn’t get a network connection :( which of course renders the multiplayer experience of TEF unusable. I don’t know if the connection problem with TEF is just a problem with my network or my computer though, so if you try it then let me know what your experience was.

On the upside… It runs Guild Wars flawlessly. So maybe that is some consolation.