FEST is our Festival Engagement Software Template, a Twine-based framework invented by the Hand Eye Society in response to the global COVID-19 pandemic in 2020. With the closures of many public arts spaces for many festivals and organizations due to the pandemic, the Hand Eye Society developed FEST to hold successful interactive online festivals for the arts community. Hand Eye Society’s use of FEST has been a trailblazing innovation in the development of online events.

FEST has been used for 11 online festivals since its inception and was first offered as a solution for Broken Pencil’s Virtual Canzine 2020, an online festival developed in partnership with Hand Eye Society. Since then, it has been used for many of the Hand Eye Society’s festivals, as well as festivals from other partnered organizations. Wordplay, Comics X Games, and Super FESTival events, the 2021 Toronto Comic Arts Festival (TCAF), and Long Winter 2021. FEST allows for a safe and engaging online festival experience that can be seen by attendants all around the world and boasts a variety of features, including sales, embedded content, streaming support, interactive games, and live networking. FEST has been responsible for promoting hundreds of games and artists and over $150,000 in exhibitor sales across events.

FEST has been used for: Super FESTival (2022, 2023, 2024, 2025), Toronto Comic Arts Festival 2021, Wordplay 2021, Comics X Games 2021, Virtual CanZine (2020, 2021), and Long Winter (2 events).

The Hand Eye Society uses FEST to make robust virtual festivals possible. If you are interested in having Hand Eye Society develop an online FESTival for you, please contact us at info@handeyesociety.com

You can find playable examples of some of our FESTivals below. Please note that not all FEST experiences have been archived and the archived versions of these events may not work as they were intended live.