- July Bug Fixes #2 - 1 August 2025
Super small bug fix patch to fix the issue where for some users the tutorial would not load at all.
- Lost Abroad Café v1.06.02 -- Bug Fixes - 11 July 2025
Over the past several months, we have seen an increasing number of bugs relating to customers walking up to the counter and not ordering. This was caused by spotty service from our text-to-speech provider, and we made updates in our backend to make multiple attempts to create sound for the randomly generated order combinations for each voice. However, this past week, the service has apparently gone down completely without notification.Thankfully, this has given us the kick in the butt we needed to move off this provider and fix the issue for good. Over the years we have generated nearly 90,000 unique soundbites covering almost every combination of items that can be ordered in Lost Abroad Café (although not necessarily for each type of character), and rather than set up a new dependency we have decided to simply use what we already have by only generating character-order-sound combinatio…
- Lost Abroad Café Update - Anti-Greetings! - 19 May 2024
We have a short but sweet update that's now live in Lost Abroad Café! Anti-Greetings Previously, you could easily just tap any greeting you like when a customer came up to your counter and they'd give you their order. It wasn't very engaging, and it didn't make a difference which option you selected. But now, occasionally we'll sneak in an "anti-greeting" option, or something that wouldn't really make sense to say to a customer walking up to your store. For most languages this will be saying "Goodbye" instead of "Hello" or "Welcome" to start. Be careful, pay attention, and choose wisely! https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/6043d3eecf5af74e6a69b565/6aa0bc9d-c8b0-4f78-b93f-2f516ab709bf/anti-greetings-final.gif?content-type=image%2Fgif New Game Survey In case you missed it, the Principal Educator for Lost Abroad, Jack Du, sent out an email this week with some exciting news: after 2…
- Winter Update - New Café Environments, Pets, and Bug Fixes - 20 January 2024
We have some great gifts for you in the New Year with our Winter Update! Let's take a look! New Café Environments For stores in Seoul, Tokyo, and Mexico City, we have new environments that reflect the look and feel of these locations! Check them out, with more coming! Pets (via Refer a Friend) Ready to liven up your coffee shop? There are now 18 different pets you can get to roam your store! Dogs, cats, rabbits, ducks, and even some that are more rare! Each time you use refer a friend via the language select screen and they complete the tutorial, both of you will receive a new pet to roam your store. If you're learning multiple languages, don't worry -- your pets will follow you along around the world! Bug Fixes A few of you encountered an interesting bug with the equipment upgrades: if your device was set up to use a language that uses a comma instead of a period for the decimal separa…
- Fall into Language Learning: Autumn Update - 3 November 2023
Get ready to Fall into Language Learning with our Autumn Update! This is our biggest update ever, so get ready to open your coffee shop, serve your customers, build your business, and learn a language while doing it with even more new features! New Greetings "Hello!", "Welcome", "What can I get you?" -- Just like when we introduced new ways for customers to order in the Spring, now we're giving you the ability to choose how you greet your customers! Each language now has multiple options to greet your customers -- use the question mark icon to learn their meanings, and choose the one that works for you! New Language-Specific Items Every language has a new food or drink item customized for that location. Check out your store to see what's new! As one example, in Korean we have added "바나나 우유", or Banana Milk, as a new item in the fridge! Banana Milk is a beloved beverage in South Korea, o…
- July Update - New Music, Sound Effects, and Pronunciation Guides - 31 July 2023
New Music and Sound Effects Over the past several months we've been working with two great community members, vxlkyrie and Hero A, to compose custom music for each language you can learn in game! The new beats do a great job at capturing the feel of each country, so check them out and show some love on our Discord channel! In addition to the new music, we've added sound effects to enhance your in-game actions. Whether you're filling cups with water, coffee, or milk or skillfully moving plates and pastries around, the audio feedback provides a great new tactile experience while serving your customers! Pronunciation Guides When learning a language that doesn't use the Roman alphabet, it can be difficult to get started with reading. So we've introduced Ruby Text for Chinese, Japanese, and Korean that shows a transliteration of the words above the characters themselves. In future updates, w…
- June Update - New Management Mode and Interactive Intro - 30 June 2023
We at Lost Abroad hope you're having a great start to your summer! We've got some cool new updates to help you start or continue your journey with Lost Abroad Café! New Management Phase We've made three improvements to the Management Phase: The equipment purchasing screen is no more, and now you can see everything you can purchase right on your countertop! See what your completed coffee shop will look like, and confirm before you purchase. There's now an equipment counter in the upper left of the screen to show your progress. Buy up everything you can, and reach 100% (at least, until we add even more content!). The menu is now an actual object underneath your countertop (to the left of the cups). Click on it during gameplay or the management phase to review all your available orders. New Interactive Introduction When launching a new store for the first time, you'll now be walked through…
- May Updates - New Order Methods, Environment, and Leaderboard! - 29 May 2023
We've got some great new features and updates to announce for May! First up, earlier this month we added several new grammatical patterns to Lost Abroad Café to reflect how, in real life, not everybody orders the same way. In English you might say "I'll have a large coffee", or "Large coffee, please", or many other variations. For all 7 available languages, there are now at least 4 (and in some cases more) ways that customers will order! In order to not be overwhelmed, when opening your store customers will only use one method. However, as you serve more customers, new patterns will be unlocked. Keep playing and learn them all! Here are a few samples of our new order phrases: Additionally, we've made several fixes to the language used -- in romance languages there were some issues where the wrong masculine/feminine words were used, and there were some other spelling/grammatical errors a…
- April Update #1 - Countertup Upgrades, Customer UI, and Strawberry Milk - 26 April 2023
In case you missed it, earlier this month we announced our equity crowdfunding campaign on Wefunder, which has already amassed nearly $25,000! Check it out, support us, and become a part-owner of the Lost Abroad company! Additionally, in the past few weeks we've seen two more content creators play Lost Abroad Cafe. Check out Korean culture YouTuber Zuzu play Korean, or watch vtuber LiLi_Pupp do a full playthrough on Twitch of Chinese (plus a little bit of German and Korean). New Features Countertop Upgrades Firstly, we've noticed that as you all have become more skilled, you've been craving the ability to queue up orders and serve customers even faster. To help you achieve that, we're introducing purchasable countertop spots! You'll now be able to purchase additional spaces to work with during gameplay. This means you can keep more coffee on hand or even some hot water to drop in a tea…
- March Update 2 - Refrigerator, Bottled Water, and Concha - 30 March 2023
Super exciting news: Lost Abroad Café has been featured in our first YouTube Let's Play! @DadDude, a gaming YouTuber, just posted his playthrough completing all the content (that is, all the content before today's update) for Japanese! Give his channel some love, and check out the video here: New Features Refrigerator + Bottled Water Continuing to fill out the serving counter, we have a new piece of equipment that will be a hub for additional new items: a mini-fridge! Located below the pastries/food, the refrigerator will allow you to serve ready-to-eat/drink cold items to your customers. The first item you can add to your mini-fridge and begin serving is bottled water! (Spanish Only) Concha As mentioned, for players with a shop in Mexico City we've added the concha (literally meaning "shell" in Spanish), a type of "pan dulce" (traditional Mexican sweet bread roll). Look out for more ad…
- March Update 1 - Expanded Time Modes - 18 March 2023
"I feel like we should have way more than 60 seconds to serve customers" "I would like to be able to change how much time I am allowed per cafe session." "I think the duration for each session feels too short for me. 60 s to prepare everything seems too short" I'll cut straight to the chase this time: you asked (very nicely!) and it's here. Our newest patch includes... New Feature: Expanded Time Modes! Use your in-game coin to purchase upgrades to play for 2 or 5 minute rounds and get Lost Abroad for even longer Bug Fixes Overlapping text With the addition of longer orders, we ran into an issue where sometimes words would overlap each other on the last line. We've made the overall speech bubbles a little bit wider, and introduced some checks to make sure this bug doesn't continue to occur. Tutorial Order Replacements When pressing the question mark next to a menu item to practice it, th…
- Lost Abroad Café - February Update #2 - 25 February 2023
For our second and final update of February we have a few exciting features and necessary improvements and bug fixes New Features Achievements Everyone loves getting rewarded, and now you too can celebrate as you serve more and more orders to customers. We've got a small set of achievements set up now, with many more to come! Can you 100% Lost Abroad Café? Note that for now these are in-game achievements, but we'll link them to Steam profile Achievements in the near future! Sandwiches A staple all around the world, you can now serve up sandwiches as a food item in your coffee shop! And for the first time, not all languages will have the same option: Asian languages will get one sandwich, and romance/European languages another. This is our first test on setting up different menu items for different languages, and going forward we'll be able to get even more specific and culturally releva…
- Lost Abroad Café - February Update #1 - 7 February 2023
Our first update of the new year is finally here! We've got three highly requested features ready to roll out Multi-Item Orders Multi-Item Orders was the winner of the December feature poll on our Discord, and we're super excited for it to go live! Once you've served at least 50 customers in a specific language, new customers have a chance to order two separate items at once (ex: "I'll have a coffee and a muffin"). This obviously is a super common grammatical structure, and it challenges you to complete orders faster than ever. To help you keep track of what you've already given a customer, the items will float in front of them until their order is complete. See how well you can continue racking up customers with Multi-Item Orders! Clickable Word Descriptions Learning a language is tough, and starting out it's at it's hardest when you can't understand anything. That's why we've ported o…
- Lost Abroad Café Early Access Launch: Join the Language Learning Adventure! - 31 December 2022
We are thrilled to announce that Lost Abroad Café is now available for Early Access on Steam! Our team has been hard at work creating a unique and engaging experience that combines the fun of a café management game with the challenge of learning a new language. You can choose to learn Japanese, Korean, Chinese, Spanish, French, Italian, or German while serving coffee, tea, and snacks to customers in a virtual café. We typically have 1-2 updates per month and are actively building out new language content/equipment, new features like our leaderboard and upcoming achievements, and will be getting into more game polish with updated graphics, UI, audio, and more! Learning a new language has numerous benefits, including improved cognitive function and memory, expanded career opportunities, and the ability to connect with people from different cultures. With Lost Abroad Café, you can learn a…
