Author: Michael

The Endless Forest 3.30 released with new feature “De Drinkplaats”

De Drinkplaats

Download The Endless Forest here. It’s free. Like, for real, not as in “free to play”.

We have upgraded The Endless Forest engine and added a new feature to the game for the occasion of the exhibition Fantastic Illusions which opened in Kortrijk last week. It’s an exhibition of work by contemporary Belgian and Chinese media artists that explores the idea of immersion (there’s two games in it: The Endless Forest and Flower). The show ran in the Museum of Contemporary Art in Shanghai in September and can now be seen in the Broelmuseum in Kortrijk until February.

The Broelmuseum collection includes several paintings by 17th century Flemish painter Roelant Savery, many of them featuring animals very prominently. One painting, entitled “De Drinkplaats”, or “the watering hole”, served as the inspiration for the addition we made to The Endless Forest.

In The Endless Forest, De Drinkplaats is a peaceful place where players can bring their deer to have a drink from an eternally flowing source. When they do, however, they change into one of the other animals that inhabit the forest, often of disproportionate size (including the new raven and bunny!). The more players gather in the place, the more magic happens (courtesy of ABIOGENESIS).

More information here.


new Bunny character new Raven character
This could be you!

The Making of the Dance of the Seven Veils

still from the video In all the discussion surrounding the experimental nature of FATALE, it’s easy to forget the amount of hard and loving work was put into its creation. So we decided to pay homage to one of the most complex elements in the production -the Dance of the Seven Veils- by putting together a “Making Of” video, documenting the collaborative effort.

Watch the video here!

From the musical composition and performance of Gerry De Mol over the improvised choreography of Eléonore Valere Lachky to Laura Raines Smith‘s painstaking effort to animate 4750 frames by hand, the clip shows how music, dance, video, animation and realtime rendering and scripting come together to deliver a performance unique to the medium.

FATALE on Steam

FATALE on Steam

If you’ve been waiting to get FATALE on Steam, now is your chance, here.

It’s great that a mainstream games store like Steam wants to support our experiments. It really shows the desire of the medium to grow. And that’s a wonderful feeling. Even if FATALE is not your particular cup of tea, more diversity is always good. Because we all want this medium to be the medium of the 21st century.

All IGF 2010 videos

Compiled, for you. And for us. We like watching game videos during tea time. And thanks to delayed airplanes, I was able to compile all the videos of the games entered in the Independent Games Festival this year into
a YouTube playlist (181 videos!) and
a Vimeo channel (36 videos).
Enjoy!

We still need to go through all 306 (!) entries but some immediately stood out, like A Slow Year, Lose/Lose, TRAUMA and Wait but there seems to be a lot more where that came from. The overall polish of the games this year seems much higher. And 2D platformers (still) reign supreme. Though I also noticed a much higher amount of 3D games than in previous years. And less (pseudo) self mocking games.

More later.

FATALE in Games TM and Edge

Fatale in EdgeFatale in Games TM

There’s a 4 page interview about FATALE in the current issue of Games TM (89) that was made before the release of the game. And there’s a rateless review of FATALE in Edge online, which I enjoyed because it’s about what the writer discovered while playing and how he appreciated it.

Video games rarely offer the chance to look so deeply at a single character, or to spend so much time lingering over an environment and enjoying it for its own sake. Tale Of Tales is a small team, but they went across disciplines to find experts in every field, from the art to the music to that wonderous dance sequence. Plenty of indies wear primitive graphics as a badge of honor; Tale Of Tales pulled off Fatale with a team of less than a dozen.

Presenting in Italy

On Thursday, at 9 am, we will be presenting our work at the View Conference in Torino. It’s a very general event about the use of computer graphics in all sorts of fields.

VIEW Conference is the premiere international event in Italy on Computer Graphics, Interactive Techniques, Digital Cinema, 3D Animation, Gaming and VFX.

VIEW 2009 will continue to focus on exploring the increasingly fluid boundary between real and digital worlds. Through lectures, meetings, tributes, exhibits, screenings and demo presentations VIEW will reveal the new digital frontier sweeping from cinema to architecture, from automotive design to advertisement, from medicine to videogames.

There’s presentations by people from Electronic Arts, Industrial Light & Magic, Pixar, Sony Pictures Imageworks, Blue Sky Studios, etc. Us, intimidated? Naah… 😉

Here’s the full program (PDF).

Visit The Graveyard today -for free

It’s All Souls’ Day today. A day to commemorate the dead. Over here, we visit cemeteries today and put flowers on the graves of family members and friends who have died. It’s a day of silence and serenity.

Those who prefer to commemorate the dead from home, can visit last year’s Independent Games Festival finalist The Graveyard. For the occasion, today, the full version of the game can be downloaded for free.

Get it here:
The Graveyard for Windows – Free
The Graveyard for Mac OS X – Free
Only yesterday.

—
You can still download the trial version of The Graveyard for free here.

Weekend of the Dead in The Endless Forest

Halloween (today), All Saints (tomorrow) and All Souls (Monday) are special days in The Endless Forest. Then the world we know as idyllic and sunny turns grey and chilly. Bats circle in the air and mist clouds float over the land. There’s graves everywhere, and burning candles, as we commemorate the dead. The giant Lord of The Dead (also know as BZD -the Big Zombie Deer) visits the forest and tricks those who want to treat him. Through the extended weekend, the Twin Gods will be making their appearance too for additional tricks and treats!

Dead in The Forest

If you happen to find yourself in Scotland today, head down to Inspace in Edinburgh, where Tale of Tales’ creepiest stories are on display in a fitting Halloween décor. There’s six computers to play The Path on. And a computer from which the Dark Lord of Darkness can be controlled. Now is your chance to terrorize the innocent!

Are indie games too cheap?

(…) if Machinarium sold for just $10 more, a price I would still pay for the game, many gamers would instantly be turned off of the title. Not because they don’t feel the title is worth their money, or even because they don’t think it’s worth $30, but, rather, because they are accustomed to getting indie games at super cheap prices, despite how much money, effort, love, and creativity was put into the title.

Geoff Gibson, DIY Gamer

John Jackson responds to this that the problem is not that indie games are under-priced but that AAA games are over-priced. And to some extent, he is right. He just doesn’t seem to realize, however, that what you’re actually paying more for when buying a AAA game in a store is not the game itself but the wages of the shop attendant and the truck driver, the heating of the store, the bribes to get shelf space, the advertising and marketing, and in some places additional taxes. If you subtract all of this, you are indeed only giving $20 out of the $60 you paid to the developer and publisher of the game, the same amount as you pay to an indie developer who sells their games via digital download from their own website. This sounds fair (as long as the customers can accept that most of their money goes to other things than the actual production of the game).

If AAA games would be sold online, and not through expensive retail, their price could be the same as that of indie games.

But what should that price be?

Continue reading “Are indie games too cheap?”