With the completion of the entire area of The Endless Forest, the end of the project seems to become in sight. There’s still a million things to do but we’re getting there.

In this step all the forest assets of Phase Three (ground, features such as the Drinkplaats and the Playground, trees, rocks and bushes) have been implemented. This time it was a lot easier to find all the 3D models and textures in our archives. Apparently by 2007, when Phase Three was originally released we had started being more organized about our game production. And I have also developed a useful system for analyzing the implementation of all these assets in the old Quest3D engine in order to approximate the look of the original forest.

While massively encouraging, this is really just the raw 3D assets. There’s still many features that remain to be implemented (the birds, the Drinkplaats activity, actually being able to jump on the rocks of the Playground, the soundscape, and so on) and a lot of tweaking to be done in terms of aesthetics (lighting, color palette, etc). As advanced as Unreal Engine may be, it really has trouble rendering transparency. And there’s a lot of transparent grass textures in this area! So working around technology limitations is still a major part of the job in 2020.

Next to Phase Three, we also fixed some bugs, added WASD navigation and an interface for switching window size and mode.

This work has been done over the course of the past month (*). If the current rhythm continues, I’m hopeful that we may be able to release a first real alpha version of the remake by the end of next month. Meaning a build of the game that gives a good idea of the finished product but lacks features and contains bugs.

Step by step.

Thank you for your interest and support!

—Michael & Auriea.

(*) This month has been entirely sponsored by generous donations of the players! Thank you all, in the name of the community!