Category Archives: Development Log

The Unreal Forest: step 26

Development Log, The Endless Forest,

Motivated by bug reports and criticism of players following the release of beta 4, I started to tweak the remake of The Endless Forest so it would resemble the original game more. The two areas I focused on were controls and aesthetics. I’m happy with the changes I made to the controls but ran into a lot of trouble trying to make the game look in Unreal Engine the way it does in Quest3D. Part of the reason for this is that we painstakingly adapted the look of the game to the rather primitive rendering capacities of that old engine. In my frustration I decided to just make the game look good in Unreal and not worry about whether it resembled the original or not.

I started with the material used on the floor. Since the view of the game is top down most of the time, the floor has a great impact on the overall look of the game. I reused the textures from the original game but increased their resolution through an AI-driven process in an application called Topaz Gigapixel AI. I was quite impressed by the new detail in the high resolution textures. There’s textures for dirt, grass, light and shadows that were blended in a very specific way in Quest3D, unavailable in Unreal Engine. Instead of attempting to mimic that system, as I had before, I started over from scratch, with the same textures, but using blending methods specific to the new engine. I also added some relief and detail through normal maps generated by NormalMap Online based on the original textures.

The new material graph for the floor shader. UV maps for different areas and layers on the left. The column of textures are parameters that are changed for types of floor. The light gray rectangles are for special areas: ruin and pond.

It took several days and several start-overs to get a result that I liked only to realize that now seams were visible between the tiles that make up the floor. I discovered these were not only caused by the uprezzing of the textures, but the new shader also made visible UV mapping errors that had not been visible before. So I corrected these in Blender.

In beta 4 the shadows were colored by three extra lights shining in the opposite direction of the sun light, imitating the natural effect of bouncing light. I replaced this by a Skylight element.
None of Unreal’s built-in methods for simulating fog was capable of hiding objects in the distance. As a result, geometry popped in abruptly when crossing forest borders. This was fixed by replacing the fog by a shader on a plane in front of the camera that colored objects based on distance. Sometimes primitive methods work better that attempts to simulate physical reality.

To complement the increased resolution of the floor textures, I also uprezzed the textures of the ruin, the playground, the watering hole and the trees and added generated normal maps.

The camera angle was also tweaked slightly to resemble the original game more. And the controls for walking, jumping and interacting with obstacles were also fine-tuned for smoothness.
The strange error of the swimming frog floating in the pond was also corrected.
I tweaked the shader of the tree foliage to become transparent when it is in front of the camera in order to have a better view on the deer.

At the end of this process the overall look of the game was actually similar to the original when I reduced the contrast in post processing. So I added a slider in the game’s options to change the contrast. Personally I think the goal of making The Endless Forest look better than the original has been achieved. But I will let you be the judge of that.

Phase One, near the ruin with the old oak in the distance. At the top the original game, at the bottom the remake.
Phase Three, on the playground. At the top the original game, at the bottom the remake.

Note that trees and plants are placed in a very different way in the remake. Instead of the wonderful system available in Quest3D that allowed us to manually place threes and decor, I created a system in Unreal that places trees randomly within certain parameters. This is why they don’t appear in the same locations. The advantage of the new method, while we lose some of the deliberateness of the original, is that the forest can change in the future and that the density per area, similar to the original by default, can be increased by the player. The resolution of many textures was increased through AI but the 3D models remain the same as in the original.

I didn’t feel ready to release a new beta version because there’s still a number of bugs and issues I want to address first. And because I’m going on honeymoon.

Let me know what you think!

The Endless Forest II beta 4

Development Log, The Endless Forest,

I was hoping to release this version to the public at large. It worked well and looked good on my computers. But to be on the safe side, I decided to release it to the community of players of the current game first. Just in case some minor issues needed tweaking before a public release.

Thanks to the diligent research of several Endless Forest players, a flood of bug reports rolled in, making it abundantly clear that this build, even for a beta release, is by no means ready for the public at large.

Many issues, sadly, seem to be related to performance. Apparently the 2005 engine of the old game runs better on many computers than that latest Unreal Engine 5. That’s a disappointment!

I know I’m getting older and might be slightly jaded after half a life time working with computers, but technology seems to evolve in a direction away from what we used to call the “personal computer”. Creative software seems to be geared more and more towards large commercial corporations and big budget projects. I like using Unreal Editor but, especially for an mmo-type game like The Endless Forest, it’s an unwieldy monster. To simply make a build of the game takes a week because of all the steps the process entails, and the massive amount of data generated. Even in the end, the compiled game which is exactly the same as the old one, is a ZIP file of 270 MB and requires a bunch of runtime prerequisites. While the old game is slightly over 50 MB. No need to say that this slows development iteration down. Especially in a one-man operation. I’m sure big companies have all this stuff streamlined and distributed over several departments. But for single creators making anything other than a drawing, a piece of music, a video or a 3D model, has become extremely challenging.

The Endless Forest, however, is beautiful. And I believe it deserves to exist. More and more so, even now. So I’m grateful for the effort that many players have put in. Pray for me that I can figure out how to fix all these issues.

The Endless Forest II beta 3

Development Log, The Endless Forest,

With any luck this will be the final closed beta version of the remake of The Endless Forest.

Some major networking errors were fixed in this release. Hopefully it all works well now. Because I really only half know what I’m doing or how Unreal Engine is supposed to do networking. So development is going through a bit of trial and error.

In this version a lot of small bugs were fixed, notably relating to some Abiogenesis features.

I also figured out what was making the previous build so huge: a completely unnecessary file over a Gigabyte in size! Each time I build the game, the process is different, even when I use the exact same version of the engine. The old way didn’t work anymore but the new way is fairly smooth, except for the hours that Visual Studio takes to compile things. I have to reserve the better part of a week just to make a build.

A download link has been sent to all backers. Thank you for your support!

Life & work in 2022

Cathedral-in-the-Clouds, Compassie, Development Log, Personal, The Endless Forest

Even though it feels like I spent most of my time exploring my new faith in 2022, I also got a lot of other things done. I released software, wrote books, started a new online identity, studied music and languages, traveled, interacted with my family and improved my health.

My ongoing remake of Tale of Tales’ first game, The Endless Forest, saw three releases this year: an alpha and two beta’s. That’s right: the game is in beta stage now, which means that, after five years of work, the remake is complete, barring bugs and errors.

I also created a new virtual reality piece called The Viriditas Chapel of Perpetual Adoration for our other ongoing project Cathedral-in-the-Clouds, the website of which I revamped for the occasion. And I launched my own personal website. I haven’t had a personal website since 1999, when Zuper! merged with Entropy8. New Twitter and Instagram accounts accompany this new online identity. Although I’m not very active on social media.

I made two books. Ex-Atheist is a series of confrontations of my thoughts on many subjects before and after my conversion to Catholicism. Some of these were published during advent. And Weekends in Gent is a book I made for my children with notes I had taken when they were young. I gave them a hard copy for Christmas.

In the beginning of 2022 I had serious doubts about playing music because I could not manage to free up the time required to reach the technical level I desired. But, also thanks to playing together with other people, I gradually accepted to just do what I can. This actually helped to improve my technique and culminated in a concert in January 2023. I also started studying a new instrument. Next to the viola da gamba, I’m trying to learn the cello. My guitars, however, have been a bit lonely this year.

I continued to study Italian, especially through online video conversations with two teachers. But I also read a bunch of Italian books. And I have started learning Latin too, to help me figure out what all those texts mean on buildings here in Rome and said during mass.

In total I spent almost three months alone this year as my partner traveled for work. On some of these occasions I visited my home country of Belgium to see my family. But we also traveled to Belgium together (for Christmas), and to Venice, Palermo, Firenze and even the nearby Eur, which we had never seen in person. All but one of these trips were made by train, which can be quite an adventure!

My daughter visited us in Rome in the beginning of the year. And we swapped houses with her mother in the summer. During an unexpected trip to Belgium because of a death in the family, I had the pleasant experience of reconnecting with several cousins. My son caught Covid on his birthday, my mother in summer and I soon after, in spite of three vaccinations. Hopefully that’s over now.

I continued Alexander technique lessons, this year finally without a face mask. Next to not smoking, not drinking alcohol and eating very little meat, this year I have stopped drinking coffee and quit watching pornography. I did manage to get a nasty cut in my thumb after it got caught between the front door and its frame. Going to bed early, getting up early and napping in the afternoon has been the perfect rhythm for me that I will continue in 2023.

The Unreal Forest: step 23 – beta 2

Development Log, The Endless Forest,

I spent all week on creating a build of the second beta version of the remake of The Endless Forest. It’s a complicated process because Unreal Engine only allows the building of a dedicated server program through a custom version of the engine built from source downloaded from a GitHub repository and a C++ based project, rather then one based on Blueprints, the visual programming language that is the main reason why I use this technology at all. The new version 5.0 of Unreal Engine seems to have made this process even more complicated and unpredictable. Following the directions failed but through trial-and-error juggling with many gigabytes of data I finally ended up with a software package that works. The resulting program is twice the size of the previous release built in Unreal version 4 (and 10 times the size of the original game which is exactly the same) and requires an up-to-date graphics driver and a recent version of Visual C++ runtime (included with the download).

Welcome to the future!

Anyway, I’m extremely pleased with this build. We’re getting very close to a final release. Fingers crossed!

If you are a backer, you should have received a download link. If not, please let me know.

23 Days

Cathedral-in-the-Clouds, Compassie, Development Log, Viriditas, ,

The Viriditas Chapel of Perpetual Adoration is not the first of my projects to deal with Christianity. In fact, a long thread throughout my creative career connects various references to Christianity, culminating in the ongoing production of Cathedral-in-the-Clouds. When the fundraising for that project started, I made sure that people realized that I was not a believer but instead interested in Christianity from an aesthetic and cultural point of view. Seven years later I can no longer claim the same.

The Viriditas Chapel of Perpetual Adoration is my first work of art as a Christian. Twenty three days after the release of Compassie, on Silent Saturday 2021, I heard God’s voice for the very first time and my life changed radically as a result.

Compassie was a piece about sadness. It’s the classic pietà scene in which the Holy Virgin holds the dead body of her executed son. In virtual reality, you take her place. In front of you there is an ocean of darkness. Behind you a luscious landscape that forms the backdrop of a cross floating in mid air held somewhat ridiculously by four cherubs. He has risen! We are saved! But you turn back around and stare into the dark. Your son is dead. You are inconsolable.

Compassie playthrough

I enjoyed how Compassie gave me a place where I could be sad. I remember enjoying how the VR goggles would hide my tears. I felt safe to let go in there, to silently endlessly cry about the sadness of life. I was certainly having personal problems at the time. But there was also the quite obviously desperate state of the world. Between the political polarization of society and the ecological crisis, I couldn’t see much hope.

Compassie was my tribute to this state of desperation. Christ became the symbol for the solution that everyone knows exists. But we killed Him, or we ignored Him and the promise made through His sacrifice. We know what a beautiful world looks like (just turn around!), we even know what it would take to get there (just turn around!). But somehow we find ourselves incapable of choosing that road and following it. We are stuck. Indulging in our misery. Too prideful to believe.

In hindsight, through the lens of my Christian faith, it is quite clear to see how Compassie was a subconscious “cry for help”. I was balancing on the edge of an abyss with nowhere to go that didn’t lead to destruction. I was ready for God. But I did not know that then. Until 23 days later.

Viriditas pseudo-playthrough

For me, The Viriditas Chapel of Perpetual Adoration expresses quite well how my new found faith makes me feel. Astounded by a beauty that borders on the surreal but remains framed within a long tradition. I feel loved, I am grateful, I bow down in awe for the glory of God. It feel lightheaded with joy. I am becoming myself, the one He created for Himself. Like millions of others that have now become my kin. And then with all that splendor in my heart, the lights go out. And I find myself alone with Him. His body and blood, soul and divinity, embedded in a simple disk of bread, exposed on the altar. In the dark of my closed eyes I smell the incense, I feel His warm hands around my heart, the stubble on his cheeks catching the tears on mine as he embraces me and whispers His breath of life into all of me.

I did not believe

Cathedral-in-the-Clouds, Viriditas,

The Viriditas Chapel of Perpetual Adoration is the first work of art that I have created as a Christian. But this is far from the first time Christianity inspired me. In fact, the theme seems to have followed me throughout my creative life. God has been tirelessly knocking on that door and I kept wondering “What on earth is that noise?”

I grew up in an atheist household but I attended catholic schools. Hence my familiarity with Christian narratives. I have also long preferred old art. As a result Christian themes and iconography were no stranger to me. And as a designer of immersive spaces, I was drawn to churches for inspiration. I even regularly attended mass simply for the experience, to “see the machine performing the function it had been designed for.” But I did not believe.

1988 As a teenager I made clothes for myself. On one of my jackets I had sewn a bronze crucifix found at a flea market. But I did not believe.

1992 Right after school I created lots of art objects. I often used imagery from mass media and advertising. For one piece I mounted the logo of a brand of toilet paper in gold on a piece of black cardboard shaped like a baroque frame. The logo was a lamb. But I did not believe.

1995 In the early days of the web there had been a bug in the Netscape browser that allowed defining the body tag more than once. Thanks to the slow speed of modems this could be used to create animations that were otherwise not yet possible. When that feature was removed I created a web site called The Church of the Multiple Body Tag in protest. It referenced the choice between Jesus and Barabbas and the number of the beast. But I did not believe.

1995 In my first net.art piece called Home I made a sort of crucifix of a framed portrait of Kate Moss, two guns for hands and an electrical socket for feet on a wallpaper background. And only now, almost 30 years later, I discover that in that image, the model is wearing a necklace with a cross. But back then, I did not believe.

1996 My last net.art piece with Group Z, Belgium was called I confess. It was an online confessional with a game interface that forced you to admit all the sins you had committed as an artist. But I did not believe.

1997 In the early web days I was involved in several collaborative projects. One of them was on the hell.com domain for which I created the web interface. But I did not believe.

1997 The website collaboration with Olia Lialina started when she said her plane had crashed and she was writing from paradise. So we named the site Heaven & Hell, after the internet connection we discovered between the two. But I did not believe.

1999 When I met the love of my life we were separated by an ocean. We started creating together the day after. We were so overwhelmed by our experience that we reached for the grandest thing we could think of to express our love in the wires: the Pentateuch. Our web site unfolded a love story inspired by the first five books of the Bible. We called the whole thing The Godlove Museum. But I did not believe.

1999 Genesis was about two souls meeting online. Our relationship was both amorous and creative. We represented ourselves as saints, used baroque ornaments and sacred music. But I did not believe.

1999 When farao let Auriea go after several dramatic plagues, we made a website called Exodus. But I did not believe.

2000 When dealing with immigration laws and learning the customs of a new land, we made a chapter of The Godlove Museum inspired by the Bible book of Leviticus. But I did not believe.

2001 In our first interactive 3D piece, Eden.Garden, we used scans of our own bodies to represent Adam and Eve in a Garden of Eden generated from the code from any web page. Genesis was quoted directly. But I did not believe.

2001 In preparation for our first experiments with 3D, Auriea and I had scanned ourselves kissing. With The Kiss we created an immersive environment inside of the mesh of our entwined bodies that shared one heart that was shaped like a cross. But I did not believe.

2001 We called a small web project Per omnia saecula saeculorum, referencing a well known trinitarian doxology, with music from Handel’s Messiah. But I did not believe.

2002 The attack by US president Bush on Afghanistan was accompanied by rhetoric that seemed to come straight from the Old Testament. Simultaneously Auriea and I realized how different our cultures really were. We mixed quotes from Bible and president and even Jesus made an appearance in Numbers. But I did not believe.

2003 Our first videogame creation attempt, simply called 8, was inspired by a fairy tale, not a biblical text. I did include a chapel in my design for the palace of Sleeping Beauty. And the music we had chosen before working with Gerry De Mol was Pergolesi’s Stabat Mater. But I did not believe.

2005 When we figured out how to create and release a game, we made one in which deer would have glowing signs between their antlers, as in the legend of the conversion of Saint Hubert. At the launch of the project in the former abbey of Ename online players would convert visitors of the exhibition. And the central feature of this first phase of The Endless Forest was the ruin of a church. But I did not believe.

2006 Long after the previous chapter, when we had already given up on the web as an artistic medium, we created the last part of The Godlove Museum, Deuteronomy, in which we remixed the previous parts with Bible quotes about rules and regulations to express the sadness of not being able to enter the promised land. But I did not believe.

2008 In The Graveyard you play an old lady who visits a cemetery and listens to a song. It was inspired by my memories of the peaceful combination of solemn graves and lively nature in the cemetery of the small town where I spent my adolescent years. And by my grandmother who was still alive at the time and deeply catholic. I was profoundly struck by the cheerfulness with which she expressed her desire to join her husband who had died shortly before. But I did not believe.

2009 Fatale tells the story of the execution of John the Baptist. You play his ghost in his final night on earth, free to contemplate the love of Salome imagined by Oscar Wilde. Another biblical story. But I did not believe.

2010 When the first iPhone came out we created a Memento Mori for it the name of which, Vanitas, referred directly to the biblical basis of the concept from Ecclesiastes: “Vanitas vanitatum et omnia vanitas.” But I did not believe.

2011 During a research project called Cncntric I explored my interest in sacred architecture and medieval cosmology. I was mesmerized by how the architecture of a church would lead the visitor from the square that represents earth to the circle that represents heaven. And the geocentric conception of the universe, while disproven by Copernicus, still made a lot of spiritual sense. I love the idea of our planet floating in the embrace of ever expanding spheres and finally by God Himself. But I did not believe.

2013 We named Luxuria Superbia, a game the simulates sexual pleasure in an abstract and playful way, after the Latin words for two mortal sins: lust and pride. But I did not believe.

2015 Sunset takes place in San Bavón, the capital of an imaginary South-American country. For couleur locale, the dates in the game were accompanied by the mention of the Christian saint or feast of that day. But I did not believe.

2016 LOCK was a simple game structured along a gigantic geocentric universe. The name was an abbreviation of Loci Omnes Caelesistis Kyries which means something like “All Places of the Heavenly Lord”. But I did not believe.

2016 Liberated from the pressure of making commercial videogames, I found myself free to explore my life-long passion for Christian iconography en symbolism in old art and architecture. This culminated in a giant umbrella project called Cathedral-in-the-Clouds. I wanted to create opportunities for contemplation inspired by Christian narratives that I felt should be considered equally valuable to modern culture as Greco-Roman mythology. Backed by a successful crowdsourcing campaign and inspired by visits to numerous cathedrals in Belgium, France, Italy, Spain and Poland we created a prototype for a virtual reality cathedral. And the project even lead me to leave my country and move to Rome, around the corner of the Vatican of all places. But I did not believe.

2018 Cricoterie is a Virtual Reality program inspired by the Theater of Death of Polish theater make Tadeusz Kantor. As such it addressed the theme of religion and featured crosses and a priest. I relished the opportunity to deal with completely serious subject matter. But did not believe.

2021 After several rejected proposals for Christian themed dioramas -which turned out to be the most controversial subject of my already somewhat defiant career- including a tribute to Saint Ambrose, a chapel for Saint Anthony and a virtual sculpture of Adam and Eve, I managed to create a pietà in Virtual Reality. In Compassie I have the user take the place of the Holy Virgin sitting at the bottom of the cross with the dead body of her son on her lap. But I did not believe.

Michael Samyn, Rome, 14 October 2022.

The Unreal Forest: step 22 – beta 1

Development Log, The Endless Forest,

More than five years after the crowdsourcing campaign we’re happy to announce that the remake of The Endless Forest is finally complete! It has taken us a lot longer than expected to recreate in its entirety the multiplayer game in Unreal Engine. But the first beta release is ready for all backers to be downloaded and tested. And we’re already looking forward to continue expanding the forest -after the necessary bug fixing, of course.

If you have backed the project and you have not received an email with a download link, please let us know!

If still you want to support the project, play the beta and acquire some of the perks, please do so now because the campaign will be closed soon. The donation page is here.

The work on the remake began in earnest early 2017. The Endless Forest had been the first game we released, in 2005. At that time we had not fully developed a system for archiving data. On top of that, the old engine, Quest3D, used file formats for 3D models and textures that had become obsolete. And to make matters worse, the file server on which most files were stored had crashed and we had to painstakingly restore the files hidden on it.

Both Unreal Engine and Quest3D have visual interfaces to programming. This is essential for us, visual artists, to be creative with expressing logic. The paradigms of both engines, however, are extremely different. So more than translating the logic into another language, a lot of it had to be rethought within the new framework.

Since The Endless Forest is a multiplayer game, one of the first things we had to figure out was how to program networking in the new engine. Unreal Engine is set up quite well for match-based networked play with a limited amount of players of whom one acts as the server. This model, however, is unsuitable for a massively multiplayer game like The Endless Forest. We needed a server to be available at all times and no limitation the the amount of players that could log on. Sadly, the process of creating such a thing, is quite cumbersome in Unreal Engine and not very well documented. After a lot of trial and error that involved compiling Unreal from source code and converting our game to C++ we figured out how to do it. But it remains a complicated task, each time we want to release an update. Add to this the limited ways in which networking logic can be tested within the editor, requiring that this tedious compilation process must be followed simply for testing and debugging many network-related issues.

That being said, Unreal’s visual programming system, called Blueprints, is a joy to work with. And the editor contains wonderful tools, paradigms and interfaces to make many tasks easier to do, once one figures out how to use them.

In this early stage, we also implemented the endlessness of The Endless Forest, which means that the game world wraps around itself. This is quite tricky, especially in a multiplayer context. Unable to re-use the logic from the old game, we came up with a new system that works quite well.

Next we implemented controls so we could actually play the game. That was encouraging. Followed by new activities and animations of the avatar.

The Endless Forest, while extremely important, was not the only thing that we did in our artistic lives. We were also invited for art residencies in Poland and Rome, during which we worked on other projects. This of course slowed down the work on the remake.

But by the end of 2017 we did manage to add Forest Magic to the remake, a major feature by which players can change each other’s avatars’ appearance. This feature was finished when we came back home in early 2018

In 2018, work was interrupted several times by an invitation to present at the Freeplay festival in Melbourne, by participation in the Videogames exhibition in the Victoria and Albert Museum in London, by the presentation of our VR theater Cricoterie in Warsaw, by an award at Indiecade in Paris and a panel presentation about The Endless Forest in Dundee.

Nevertheless, in the summer we made a spectacular step forward simply by adding the floor model and textures of the first phase of the game. Suddenly the remake started looking a lot more like The Endless Forest! So far we had been working on flat floors with symbolic colors. It was nice to feel that forest atmosphere a little.

By the end of 2018 (in October, November and December) we had implemented the buttons and animations for emotions and activities such as dancing, the trees and bushes and flowers of Phase One and the elements that make up the area of the ruin. And as a crowning achievement, we managed to compile a server for the game so that we were able to release a first playable version of the remake as a Christmas gift to all backers.

In January 2019, we finished the first phase of the Endless Forest, the area around the ruin and in February we implemented weather changes. In March, then, the new game was connected to the database of the old game which allowed players to login with their own accounts. Thanks to this, we were able to hand out the first perks to the backers in an Easter release that included a whole new outfit to celebrate the ten year anniversary of the game that triggered the crowdsourcing campaign for a Second Decade of the game.

After this, work gets interrupted again by presentations of Cricoterie in the Foksal gallery in Warsaw (our first solo gallery show!), the Tinguely Museum in Basel and the Game Happens festival in Genova. Simultaneously, we also organized our move from Belgium to Italy, which was accompanied by a lot of hard work and stress.

Once settled in a little in Rome, at the end of 2019, we added the second phase of The Endless Forest, the area with the pond, which we continue working on in the beginning of 2020. In February, after finishing Phase Two, we release another playable build for the backers.

After this I started working on a completely new project, a VR piece called Compassie, that I had been fortunate enough to get funding for in Belgium. By this time, the money from the crowdsourcing campaign had completely run out and we needed other sources of income.

The work on this new project was interrupted for adding the third phase of the forest environment and many of the elements that bring it to life. After adding the Drinkplaats, we felt that the remake was sufficiently complete to release a first alpha build to our backers in October 2020.

I then returned to Compassie and continued to work on it until its release in April 2021.

After this break, I dove back into the Forest, so that in the summer of 2021 we were able to release a second alpha build of the remake that includes the fawn character for beginning players and lots of interface additions.

To support ourselves further, I accepted a commission from an old client for an interactive museum exhibit. This project dominated the second half of 2021.

In early 2022, I implemented a lot of the Abiogenesis systems that we use for doing live performances in the game. And even though the results of this are not immediately visible to the players, we did release a third alpha build, in order to test these features on the network.

I dedicated the lent period of 2022 to the remake of The Endless Forest. In an effort to release a first beta version of the game (meaning the game is complete except for bugs) by Easter, the day of the Resurrection, I removed all other activities from my agenda. So in the meditative atmosphere of a life of fasting, with no Italian lessons nor playing music, I managed to stick to the schedule almost perfectly. Backers can now download and play the first beta of the remake of The Endless Forest! While this is a major milestone, it doesn’t mean that the project is finished. There’s lots of known bugs that still need to be fixed and undoubtedly many new problems will come up during this testing phase. But the finish is in sight!


Thank you for your support and patience!

Michael Samyn.

The Unreal Forest: step 21 – alpha 3

Development Log, The Endless Forest,

In the third alpha release of the remake of The Endless Forest we have concentrated on a number of special features such as the seasonal environment changes and Abiogenesis technology. So these may not be immediately visible unless you catch us testing. The idea is to evaluate these features before we proceed with the next step. And as mentioned with the previous alpha, testing server-client interaction is not fully possible in the Unreal Editor.

If all goes well enough, this will be the the final alpha release. The next release should be a beta version. So this version is still incomplete. But we’re getting there.

Work on this release was interrupted for a while by a client commission the proceeds of which were invested into The Endless Forest. And by a long overdue trip to my homeland Belgium. I had not seen my parents and brother in two years because of the Coronavirus pandemic. Some time was also lost by attempting to upgrade to a newer version of Unreal Engine but failing to compile the editor from its source code. So we’re still using version 4.25.1 at the moment.

The remake of The Endless Forest is taking a lot longer than expected. So we’re happy to see that the current game is still running and that the player community is as enthusiastic as ever. We’re grateful for all the moral and financial support and are looking forward to seeing you in The Forest!

Thank you all and see you soon!

Michael Samyn.

PS: If you backed the game on Indiegogo or via PayPal and you have not received an email with a link to download the alpha 3 build of the game, please email us!

The Unreal Forest: step 20 – alpha 2

Development Log, The Endless Forest,

A second alpha build of The Endless Forest Second Decade has just been released. Backers should have received a download link. It contains almost all features of the original game. The biggest chunk missing now is the Abiogenesis effects. But there’s also a lot of bugs remaining. I wish I could fix them already but I have to interrupt the work for another project now. We are compensating for our hopeless underestimation of the budget collected through crowd sourcing with income generated by such other projects. This delays things a little more but we are getting closer!

Lots of things have been implemented since the first alpha release of October.

The loading of saved data (for the avatar’s appearance, among others) was restructured. This is particularly complicated because we’re combining local saving and online saving.

Bug detection in online features is particularly complicated in this project because one cannot run an online game in the Unreal Editor and it takes an entire day to build a new server package. And Unreal requires perfect compatibility between servers and clients.

The Action Bar display was tweaked a little and a slider was added to the menu to change the size of the buttons. Many other items were added to the menu to the point where it can be considered complete for the remake. Several things from the old game were omitted because they are not relevant anymore. And new options were and will be added.

An option was added to invert camera zoom and to change camera rotation speed and direction. And a switch was added to put the camera behind the avatar

Joystick control of the avatar and of the Action Bar was added as well.

A system for localization of the menu language was implemented, starting with English to Flemish. But it doesn’t seem to work in the build yet.

The screensaver feature was also added: now the camera turns around the sleeping deer. And the option to observe other players in this rest mode was added as well.

Our beloved fawn is back!

A big feature is the implementation of the fawn avatar that new players use in their initial month. It turned out to be impossible to import the original files used in the current game correctly. But thanks to Blender we managed to put the fawn back together and even succeeded in having the adult deer and the fawn share animations. Then all the fawn’s textures and antler meshes where excavated from our less than perfect archives. And finally all the ways in which the fawn logic differs from the adult deer were implemented (magic that times out, for instance).

The game menu was further expanded with toggles for pictograms visibility, morphing (used for blinking and roaring), Abiogenesis performance camera and sound. Volume sliders were added for ambient sound, sound effects and music. The credits were added to the menu, including the names of the backers of the crowdsourcing campaign.

An exciting new feature was added too: a slider to increase the density of the forest, which may now be feasible on fast computers.

A lot of research was done in the Abiogenesis system, especially with respect to initializing semi-permanent changes (such as time of day, weather, huge crocuses, confetti, etc.). Different approaches were implemented in this alpha to test which work best. So that we can finalize the system in the next phase of development and add all the Abiogenesis content. After which the remake should be complete and ready for a beta release.

This project is taking a lot more time than expected. We are grateful for the patience of the players and also for the fact that, against our fears, the current game is still running, despite of the ongoing evolution of technology. Hopefully it will continue to do so until the remake is done. Soon!

A big thanks to all the backers for their support!

Michael Samyn.