What changed, what didn't work, what's next. A new entry every few weeks.
· Alpha
#4 The closed alpha, and where it's heading
Lostlings Online enters closed alpha. It's the very beginning: one town, one forest, a tutorial island and placeholder cats. The foundations are online, and the rest we build together with players.
The direction: every item in the world is made by a player. Gear and potions are sold by players only, every piece carries its maker's name, and the black market turns what crafters sell into loot in the forest. Every action matters, because someone at the other end of the chain needs it.
Testers shape the game: they report what's wrong, vote on the next mechanics and locations, and keep a founder's mark for good.
Sign-ups open soon. Follow the channels on the home page.
· Story and name
#3 Missing cats
The game has a name and a story. The name is Lostlings Online: “lost” plus “-ling”, a small creature, like a duckling or a foundling. The old working title sounded too much like a well-known series, so it had to go. The trademark searches came back clean and the domain is ours.
The story: house cats go missing. One fell asleep on the sofa after dinner, there was a flash, and it woke on an island, on two paws. Everyone you meet in the game came the same way. Somewhere back home the owners are still putting up posters, and that is where your character starts: a “missing cat” poster you fill in yourself. You pick the coat (ginger, grey, black, white or cream) and write the cat's name; the rest of the poster is the owner's: “Distinguishing marks: lazy, greedy and mouthy. If found, please do not return.”
Cats hate water, and here they live on islands. That was already in the game before the cats were: you wade, you swim until your strength runs out, and if you swim too far a fin starts circling. Now it finally makes sense.
The bigger change under the hood: the game is online. One shared world on one server, the server has the last word, and an account is the cat's name and a password. Every new cat wakes on a tutorial island of its own, gets its first tools from an old cat who came through long ago, and leaves for the shared forest once its first animal is down.
After the poster comes a short comic, four panels from the sofa to the island, drawn in the coat you picked: a full bowl, a nap after dinner, a flash, a strange beach. Someone is waving from the jetty: Old Bury, an old grey cat who came through long ago and now looks after the island. The people of the town are cats too, dressed by now: a cream merchant in a red coat and a black dealer in a hood who runs the black market.
Also new since the last entry: the forest grew new trees by tier (osier, birch, pine) and its ore became three metals (lead, copper, tin); the sea around the islands; fights by techniques (a sword's sweeping cut, a spear's thrust, a hammer's ground slam, all on Q), and a boar charge and a slime spit that mark the ground before they land.
Next: the first test with a few friends, on a rented server in Europe. Then the playtest waves for everyone on the list.
· Scope
#2 Less, but deeper
A day of decisions. Until yesterday the plan had five tiers of everything, five regions, and the monsters already in the forest. Building several maps at once is expensive at this stage: the rules will still change, and maybe the look of the art. So the scope is now one town and one forest, three tiers, and depth before breadth.
The forest is a diamond of three rings: the Quiet Grove with birches, the Old Wood with pines, the Misty Forest with oaks at the heart, five chunks of it. Iron veins sit in the two deeper rings. Cotton, coal and the other maps stay on a list; until they come, a stand in town swaps resources one for one.
The animals in play are the hare and the slime, then the fox, then the stag and the boar. The wolf, the bear, the ent, the golem and the werewolf are drawn, tested and parked in a drawer. They come back when the basics feel right, and the forest will lie again.
What the basics got today: the game saves itself in the browser, a modest start (an axe, a knife, a few coins, no experience), and gates: a tier-three tree needs a tier-three axe, and a tier-three axe needs practice with axes. Weapons and armor each train their own skill, Albion-style. A notebook (key B) keeps what you met and gathered.
The animals got their own habits. The hare has an awareness meter instead of a fixed radius: walk straight at it and it bolts from far away, pass by sideways and it only watches, come in short steps and stand still between them and it lets you close. Boars walk in herds of two or three and the whole herd turns on you. A wounded stag or fox fights to the end and chases you for a while when you run. A chased animal never stops dead; it tires and slows.
Next: the rest of the animals one by one, then the progression (evolving skills, the Voice of the wildwood), then balance in simulation, then an art pass. Playtests after that.
· Hello
#1 The forest lies
This is a gathering and crafting game: you walk into the forest, cut wood, dig ore, pick cotton, hunt, and carry it all back in a backpack that really has a weight limit. You craft at stations in a town ringed by mountains and sell on a market where traders set their own prices.
The twist is that the forest lies. Some old oaks are sleeping ents and wake up when your axe bites too deep. Some iron veins are golems. And in a pack of wolves, one may not be a wolf.
Where the game honestly is: a single-player prototype that runs in the browser. A shared server, where other players walk the same forest and trade on one market, is the next big step. Until it works, we won't call the game an MMO.
If you want to play the first tests, leave your email on the home page. One message when there's something to play.