The multiplayer chat server and database server have been upgraded! The new equipment uses the latest versions of all server software, and it is also running on more powerful machines with massive bandwidth. The results for players are faster downloads and greater user capacity. Invite a friend (or ten) to explore the game with you! There's room for everybody.

After a few weeks of internal beta testing and some minor tweaks, we have released beta 2 of Lost Adventure. In response to user feedback, the oyster shells that you use to trade for a potion with the shaman who lives on Lake Solitude have been enhanced to be easier to see. Additionally, the foliage tiles used for the ground have been expanded to include more detail such as pebbles and tufts of grass. Finally, the computer controlled "bot" players used to talk too much and were annoying users, so they have been shut up permanently. Enjoy! We welcome all feedback and comments on beta 2 and look forward another beta in the coming weeks.

We are proud to report that Lost Adventure is complete. With the completion of the agriculture system, all planned features have been developed. Over the last 18 months, the game world has grown to encompass well over an hour of travel time to see all four corners of the known world. Along the way you will meet a shaman hermit who lives on an island in the middle of Lake Solitude, a kindly seed dealer who will teach you the secret to sustaining life who lives by the foothills of Mount Nugent, and even other adventurers just like you. In your adventures you will find tools, gold, gems, and food to eat. You will explore lakes, rivers, jungles and mountains. You can build a virtual village complete with a well, a farm, wooden fortress walls, doors, torches, tool sheds, tee-pees, and so much more. Destroy enemy villages with your machete. Chop down trees. Search for pearls in oyster shells. Grow fruit and vegetables. Talk to NPC quest givers, and recruit your friends to your tribe. Lost Adventure is ready for you to play. We welcome everyone to get lost in our game world. Enjoy! You can play by clicking here.

Milestone eight is well underway. This time we are focusing on agriculture. Plants, seeds, irrigation and tools. You can dig a garden patch only if you have a shovel and only if the location you choose is touching a source of water. This will force villages to keep their gardens near the river banks, or you can dig long rows of irrigation ditches to supply ever growing gardens with fresh water from the river. Once you find the seed dealer NPC, you will be able to purchase special seeds that when planted will grow into food that has special effects. Eventually you will be able to harvest key ingredients after carefully tending to your garden patch for a few days - but be careful not to miss harvest time: plants will eventually wither and die at the end of the growing season.

Milestone seven is complete. There is now a detailed build menu complete with tribal banners, totem poles with different coloured eyes, torches, fire-pits, plants and fortifications designed to keep enemies out of your village. Buildings in the world are now intelligent: they can heal you, give you water or inventory items, or turn you away if you belong to the wrong tribe. Villages can now include a weapons workshop where you can find a machete and other tools, a fresh water well that can rehydrate you, and huts to sleep in to gain health. Each type of building costs a different amount of wood, and you can also destroy enemy buildings with your machete. Now that users can help to make the game world bigger, the game is starting to take on a life of its own.

Milestone seven is currently underway. This milestone will focus on making a tribal village editor system that tribes will use to eventually construct custom villages and cities. We have rendered many buildings, like shacks, tee-pees, long-houses, fences and totem poles, and anybody is allowed to help build the village that belongs to your tribe. You can also plant vegetables such as carrots, watermelons and more, but they do not grow or die yet.

Milestone six is complete. Lost Adventure now has a full feature stats and experience system, complete with levelling up, status bars displayed on the screen, and more. You can use an axe to chop down trees and collect lumber. Each time you chop down a tree you gain for forestry XP. Each time you recruit a member to your tribe you gain politics XP. Each time you find a new piece of treasure you gain explorer XP. This experience system really makes it feel like the game "notices" your actions, and you are rewarded for gameplay. With some luck this will help to make certain game mechanics addictive and rewarding.

Milestone six is the "experience points" system. Each player in the game has a large number of stats and skills the affect gameplay. For example, you can earn hunter XP by finding prey (such as oysters) that you can eat to regain your health stat. If you run out of health, food or water you will die and respawn in your tribal village. If you earn enough XP for a particular skill (such as farming, politics, warrior and more) then you will level up and your strength or intelligence will go up.

Milestone five is officially complete. Tribes are now a big part of the game. The tribe menu looks like a scroll or a piece of parchment. On it is a menu where you can join tribes or even create your own. If make your own tribe, you become a tribal elder and earn the power to recruit members and write a welcome message that everyone will see when they visit your tribal village. Tribe leaders can also promote trusted tribe members to "tribal elder council" and give other people the political power to also be able to recruit new members. You can now visit other tribes by clicking an enemy tribe name in the leader-board, which stores all sorts of interesting tribe related statistics such as the number of members, buildings and points the tribe has earned.

Milestone five is the tribe milestone. As the game continues to take shape, the need for a way to make users interact with each other has become the fundamental theme of the game. Tribes are groups of players who collaboratively work together to build a stable and powerful tribal village. Eventually you will be able to recruit new members, visit other tribes, and maybe even build your own village.

Milestone four is finished. Items in the world can now contain other items. For example, in the future we will be able to use this system to put gold in treasure chests, or weapons inside lockers. We also now have a MAP that you can use to teleport to different areas. The world is much bigger and better looking as well. We recently rendered a beautiful lake with realistic water that reflects the great looking sky. There is a small island on the water, and on the island a sleeping Shaman waits to talk to players. He asks players for a pearl in exchange for a magic potion. If you have the shovel inventory item and click the correct locations on the shore of the lake, you can find an oyster that may contain a pearl if you are lucky. The potion doesn't do anything yet, but in future milestones this kind of game mechanic (NPC, inventory items, quests) will really help add to the adventure gameplay we are looking for.

Milestone four is well underway. We have recently rendered, using Vue, a photo-realistic high resolution panoramic sky map. The sky has an orange sunset, beautiful clouds, a mountain in the distance at the horizon, and consists of literally several billion polygons. The scene took over 6 hours to render, but the results speak for themselves. You can see a small portion of this rendered matte image in the scrolling skyline title bar at the top of this web page.

Milestone three is finally complete! Numerous bugfixes to the chat and inventory system have been programmed, as well as AJAX request optimizations and chat improvements. You can no longer swear in the chat, and player chat bubbles fade away after a minute. The world has also grown in size and there are a couple forests, some buildings, a river, a bridge, an abandoned camp, and many plants and rocks scattered around the world.

We now have several avatars ready for use in the game - an amazon princess warrior woman with pigtails and a bikini, a regular fellow with short brown hair who wears a t-shirt and jeans, a powerful warrior with bulging muscles, and a tall dark and handsome suave gentleman. Additionally, we have rendered dozens of high-polygon fractal based trees and plants using a piece of software called Vue. We can now scatter highly realistic foliage around the world, complete with anti-aliased edges and partially transparent shadows.

Milestone three is well underway. Sculpting of detailed 3d avatars has begun using Poser. A basic walk cycle animation and a sprite bitmap have been rendered using ambient occlusion lighting, bump maps, and millions of polies. Although there is only one avatar for now, it walks around the world and looks pretty three dimensional compared to the hand-drawn toon art the the first mockup was using.

The online inventory database system, as well as many sample items with descriptions, weights, and icons, has been completed. This working adventure game style inventory system represents milestone two which is now officially complete! Now that you can actually do something, we need to focus on the avatars.

Milestone one is complete! We now have a functional chat-world with rudimentary inventory, animation, and chat. A working inventory testbed application has been developed. You can pick up items from the floor and they go into your inventory screen. The data is not yet saved in a database, but this serves as a functional proof of concept for the system. We also have some trees scattered around the island, and a few barrels and crates, as flotsam and jetsam from sunken ships.

The first working beta prototype has been delivered. We now have working browser inits, simplistic multiplayer chat, and a full screen viewport with a camera that scrolls around in a game level that is larger than the screen. Mouse movements and clicks are handled, and a mockup "island" has been sculpted using a 2d tileset consisting of sand, grass and rock.

The overall lore of the game universe has been mapped out. The focus of the game is going to be community building and player interaction. The preamble to the current setting begins like a disaster movie: the polar ice caps have melted, torrential storms cover the planet, and only the highest mountain peaks remain over sea level. The shattered remnants of humanity huddle like post-apocalyptic survivors, and normal people just like us have had to revert back to a tribal, lawless, and short lived existence. Food is scarce, water is plentiful, and everywhere the sounds of the world's last jungle echo throughout the foggy nights.

Welcome to the Lost Adventure blog! Lost Adventure is a browser-based multiplayer game set in a dense jungle. My name is Christer and as lead developer on the project it is my pleasure to take you on a journey from design to implementation. We are currently in the planning stage - a lengthy design document has been written and the majority of the features currently planned have been mapped out into a timeline of milestones. This early in the project it is hard to imagine how the game will turn out, so stay tuned for more updates, and wish us luck!