We didn’t get as much done in January as we wanted to in the Eternal City. But we made up for that in February at home in Ghent.

All of the Forest Magic has been implemented! So now the deer can collect antler spells (by rubbing a tree and eating the pine cone that fell out), mask spells (by eating mushrooms growing on the side of a tree), pelt spells (by keeping a sleeping deer company) and shape-shifting body spells (by sleeping in  a mushroom circle) and cast them on another player to change their appearance with any of the antlers, masks, pelts and bodies in the current game. And the other deer can remove them, by sneezing.

Finding all the models, textures and sounds required a lot of searching in old files and folders. The Endless Forest was our first release and we only learned how to organize things during its production. To make matters worse, the file server we were using back then had crashed beyond repair. Or so we thought. Thanks to a little program called R-Studio we were able to recover most of the data on that disk.

Adding the antlers, masks and pelts to the remake of the game was fairly straightforward, but the animations of the frog, dove, bat, squirrel, rabbit and raven bodies that the deer can shape-shift into took a bit of extra work. Luckily Unreal Engine is well streamlined for these sorts of jobs.

The visual effects for spell casting are done in a different, more efficient way than in the old engine. But they look similar enough, if not slightly better (although we’re not exactly working on aesthetics yet).

We’re quite pleased with the progress we’ve made. And wish we could just keep going. But in the next few months some other projects will be demanding our attention too. We will still try to make as much time for The Endless Forest as possible. But we need to be patient.

Our gratitude goes out to all the backers for their support!
You should have received a message about 3D printing the deer models a few weeks ago. The file for printing it yourself will soon be available. We’re running a test on our Ultimaker as we speak.

You can still join the project. The budget for a full remake has nearly been collected. Less than 1000 Euros to go.

―Michaël & Auriea.