Bear Island

Notice

First Season

Camp is open to invited bears only. New trails open each season.

Notice

The Ranger Station feels like one now

2026-04-19

Notice

The way in feels like camp now

2026-04-17

Notice

Bug Fixes & Refinements

2026-04-16

Notice

Ranger Station & Major Update

2026-04-16

The Island

First Season · Notice

What is Bear Island?

Bear Island is a multiplayer browser camp where you play as a bear.

You check in, walk the trails, chat around the campfire, play mini-games, paint, collect sand dollars, and read the bulletin board. New trails open each season.

Camp is invite-only for the first season. If you don't have a Trail Pass, ask a friend who does.

About the build

Bear Island

I built Bear Island myself, nights and weekends, over the last few months. Node, Socket.io, and Phaser 3, running on a VPS I manage myself.

The longer I built, the more tooling I needed. So I built it:

A world editor — animator, layers, boundaries, weather and time-of-day — in place of Adobe Animate
A paint studio where campers' art persists into the world — in place of Photoshop
A bulletin board with audience routing, one post to either surface — in place of WordPress
A ticket system for bug reports and suggestions — in place of Jira
An advanced admin panel with role-based capabilities and Trail Pass onboarding — in place of an IAM platform

My day job is on the other side of software — helping sales teams pick tools, adopt them, and see if they worked. Some of that sensibility shows through here.