After several months of activity behind the scenes, Michael Samyn and Auriea Harvey have opened The Endless Forest community website to the public. The Endless Forest community of players had been growing steadily and had started to burst out of the Tale of Tales web forums. The new community website offers a place where players of the game can post artwork and images, keep diaries, and check if their friends are online through a live map of the game world.
The Endless Forest is a game without goals or competition. It challenges the imagination and the creativity of the players. Many of them are very talented artists themselves. The new community website offers a platform where their design ideas, artistic impressions and fan art can be shared. A veritable online gallery of some pretty amazing artworks.
The Endless Forest Community Website has its own domain at
http://EndlessForest.org
Login requires being registered for the game, which -as always- is entirely free. But most of the content is available to anyone.
The Endless Forest is a free multiplayer game that can be used as a screensaver. It has been growing steadily since its launch in September 2005. With over 200,000 downloads and more than 25,000 registered players, The Endless Forest is a thriving active community to be proud of.
"The original design of The Endless Forest was created in response to a commission from a museum -the Musée d'Art Moderne in Luxemburg (Mudam), who still host the server. So when it was launched, we thought we had made an artistic statement that would hopefully be appreciated by some art lovers and perhaps get some respect from our peers. To our pleasant surprise, however, the game increasingly exceeds our all too modest expectations. Thousands and thousands of players joined up to experience the tranquility and bliss of a world without violence, without chatter and without anything to do but enjoy. And a vibrant community emerged around it. Despite the continued claims of so-called industry professionals, there is a huge potential for interactive entertainment that is not games in the strict sense of the word."
Tale of Tales is a game development studio located in Gent, Belgium and headed by Auriea Harvey and Michael Samyn. Their focus is on the artistic use of the interactive medium, as was recently demonstrated in "The Graveyard", a very short game in which you play an old lady who visits a cemetery. Meanwhile, Tale of Tales are very hard at work on their IGF-nominated horror game "The Path", scheduled for release in early 2009.
All this and more on http://Tale-of-Tales.com