Hello there! We've released Hotfix #2, which should address most of the remaining major issues. Here's a full breakdown:

0.3.0-beta+418 - 2025-02-12

Added

• Updated the localizations made by community translators.

Changed

• If completing crafting action did not consume any materials, it will not tick down the actions remaining
• The big while away screen is now shown if you have more than 10 steps (instead of 1000) and you were away from the game for more than 30 seconds. Otherwise, shows the small popup.

Fixed

• Fixed the language on network connection errors
• Fixed the gear set item sorting issue where attributes were listed incorrectly
• Fixed the crafting recipe material requirements issue
• Gear sets now checks for the highest quality available, not the highest quality you know of
• Fixed the blank screen in WalkPedia
• Fixed the visual glitch when first time opening WalkPedia
• Fixed skill levels being incorrect in WalkPedia
• Fixed consumable attributes not having their attribute requirements checked properly
• Fixed the map showing incorrect step estimates when traveling (and in WalkPedia)
• Fixed chest drops not adding history data
• Fixed that on fresh accounts creating characters should work again
• More fixes to the game throwing you out for no good reason
• Fixes to validation logic
• Fixed that newly created characters should be visible when going back to main menu from settings
• Fixed the basic sickle attribute color
• Fixed the grammar error on the equip gear sets error
• Fixed the missing check from crafting with fine materials
• Fixed the duplicating gear set slots when copying current items to a gearset
• Fixed the weirdness in gear sets when it comes to rings
• The shop stock should now be updated also when opening through the world map
• Fixed the navigation buttons on Android 15 by including additional SafeArea for BottomModalSheets
• Fixed the travel bug
• Fixed that the current locations were shown a bit weirdly in while you were a way
• Fixed the crafting counting bug when it comes to DA, DR and NMC

In a flash turnaround, I have now experienced the step counter malfunctioning on two different days.

I couldn't figure out what did it a few days ago where I ended up with only 3,000 steps after about 2 hours of walking around, but just now I clicked on the Green character tab to check my total step count so far, but it wasn't updating, then when I tapped the purple activity tab, that had stopped updating as well and I was stuck on 22 remaining steps for an activity for hundreds of steps after that.

I restarted the app and was able to recreate that same problem by clicking on the green green character tab and then the purple activity tab.

since I usually don't click directly over to the character tab with the green bittom button, i tend to swioe over instead, I'm wondering if it's some bug with that.

​

Hello and welcome to another WalkScape devblog! ​

Last week we released the massive work that had been going for the last couple months, reworking the game engine, our servers and more. As expected, this amount of changes came with some bugs that were not spotted in our internal testing. For the next week or two, we'll focus on fixing the issues. A list of the issues that are currently known is here: ​

Reddit post of known issues ​

This development blog post will be a bit shorter one than usually, as post-release our main priorities are to fix any issues or bugs that arise, so there aren't much news to share.

Buy Me a Coffee fix

Buy Me a Coffee had an issue due to their APIs being quite buggy. We've now deployed a fix to this, and anyone who were previously having an issue with their BMAC supporter tier not showing up should now have it working. The speed that BMAC is connected to WalkScape account should also be quicker. ​

Please let us know if you still have an issue with BMAC by contacting our email! ​

Anti-cheat improvements

With the engine rework, we've also released our improved anti-cheat. ​

The new system has shown some really great results, and we've banned a bunch of players that we've caught cheating in the game. We're very happy with the new system, and it should support hundreds of thousands or even millions of players, so definitely a lot more scalable than our previous solutions. Our new anri-cheat also can be more easily improved over time, which is also a great things. ​

Most of the time, I like to stay quite tight lipped about our anti-cheat development so that potential cheaters can't prepare for what we're working on. However, a lot of people are always quite skeptical if fitness games are able to run anti-cheat measures effectively. I think it's mostly due to people's experience with Pokemon Go, and how badly it was handled there. ​

We take cheating very seriously, and will keep improving our anti-cheat as much as possible, and already have some effective solutions in place. And it's definitely possible to build anti-cheat solutions for games like these! ​

Short term plans

Like covered in the previous development blog post, we'll be fixing the bugs for next week or two until we have the game stable again. Then, I'll be moving onto building our new improved development tools (devtools 2.0) so we can start delivering new content again! ​

We already have art and designs for multiple new content updates, and our goal with devtools 2.0 is to remove any bottenecks from developing and releasing new content of the game. Maxchill and floursifter have been hard at work, and we can't wait to get these things released! ​

Until next time

That's it for this time! ​

Considering how massive this rework was:

It goes without saying that we were expecting a lot of issues, but I'm actually surprisesurprised how few there were. The biggest and most tricky issue to solve is the issue we have with the new server tech, where there's a memory leak. This results in the server restarting every 5 hours or so, so if you're having hard time connecting it's often resolved if you try again in few minutes. ​

Thanks for the patience, and we'll keep working on fixing the new issues! I might include a couple small QoL improvements here and there too - we have a pretty good list of suggested small improvements that wwouldn't take that long to implement. I already implemented a few in this update: banking from the bank button in inventory, starting actuvities from the world map, wardrobes in all settlements, and so on. ​

Keep walking, and stay hydrated everyone!

Since the latest update I am experiencing big performance issues (everything takes ages to load) and the map is now quite broken. As you can see, the icons are displaced, but its still able to click on them and travel to them.

Anyone who is experiencing the same?

I had to update the app, but is this the update that was announced in the blog post? Or was this an update that had to do with the scheduled maintenance? Because i don't notice any difference in the step counter. I do have an older phone, but from my understanding it should have been much better now. Unfortunately, it still counts at most half the steps i take, usually even way less. I have a pedometer that does count them accurately.

Since the server maintenance yesterday I can't log into the game. Does anyone else have this problem too?

Since a few hours, I can't connect anymore. I get the error message displayed in the screenshot.

It does not matter if I have LTE or WLAN. I emptied the cache and tried again, but that also did not help.

Sneak peek into something Maxchill has been working on that’ll be very exciting!

Hello and welcome to DevBlog #53!

Today, we have an announcement about the engine rework (and maintenance), extensive information about smart watch integration (including a survey), and some exciting news and sneak peeks related to in-game locations.

Also, we just posted a one year celebration post - if you haven’t already, you can read it here! Thanks for all the amazing comments ❤️

Let's dive right in!

Smart watches

Smart watch testing has begun

In a recent discussion on Reddit, players pointed out that because iOS implementation for smart watch support would already be possible, they'd like us to work on that. We've been holding off on this until Health Connect on Android is functional in order to release smart watch support for both platforms simultaneously.

I've been tunnel-visioned in thinking that in order to keep the game fair and not prefer some devices over others, we must release the smart watch support for iOS and Android simultaneously. Supporting smart watches would be quite easy for iOS at the moment, while adding support for Android might still take longer depending on how well Health Connect works and is updated by Google.

However, we're in Closed Beta and it would be good to build out this feature, even if only for iOS, and get it into testing. Having it integrated into the gameplay would also make supporting Android quicker later on.

We’d like to ask the community’s opinion on what our ideal proposed plan for smart watch integration is. We are opening a survey where you can voice your opinions on this issue, and it helps us to set our priorities again. This plan is simply:

• Develop and release iOS smart watch support in the coming weeks.
• Iron out bugs with the iOS community while developing Android support.
• Fix bugs, and release Android smart watch support when ready.

Here are some points to take into consideration on this survey:

• If you are just using your phone, there should be no difference in your gameplay.
• Developing and releasing the smart watch integration for iOS first would likely iron out most of the possible kinks and issues there might be when building smart watch support. This means that when Android smart watch support is ready for release, it'll likely be already quite stable.
• Having this released on one platform at a time makes it easier for us to troubleshoot, as we know everyone using this feature will be on iOS.
• Like discussed by many, smart watch support is for many people a barrier they've mentioned why they haven't picked up WalkScape yet. Having this feature on iOS might increase Patreon & BMaC support, making it easier for us to hire another dev down the line.

Link to the survey

Proposal: how would it work?

We've already begun testing smart watch support for iOS, and here are our current findings. We're exploring various options to ensure using a watch will be as easy and smooth as possible.

When you first open the game or visit the settings menu, you would be provided with the option to choose your step source. The phone is the default, and additional options only appear when other compatible devices are available.

In our current proposal, you can choose a single source for your steps—either your watch or your phone, but not both. While we'd like to offer more flexibility, we face several limitations:

• Apple Health calculates total steps from multiple sources, but using this total would prevent us from implementing proper anti-cheat monitoring. This isn't currently viable.
• Steps from third-party devices like Garmin come through their own apps (such as Garmin Connect) to Apple Health. We need to maintain a whitelist of trusted third-party sources, which works best with a single selected step source.
• Managing multiple step sources introduces significant complexity. Though we want to explore this possibility, implementing multiple device support would require substantially more development time.

For the initial version of smart watch support, we believe letting players choose one source—whether it's their phone, Apple Watch, Garmin Watch, or another device—is the most reliable approach.

How would these options work on iOS

There are other technical limitations with smart watch support that we've found. These are iOS-specific, and might be entirely different on Android.

Apple Watch

Based on our current testing results, we can't poll your steps from Apple Watch in real time. There is some kind of limiting factor in Apple Health, and we'll try to see if there's a way around it. But at the moment, it seems that if you have Apple Watch selected as your source, you won't be able to see your steps update in WalkScape while the game is on. Steps would only be updated when you open the game (including bringing it foreground from background).

Third party watches like Garmin

Third party watch apps only provides third-party watch step data in around 15-minute segments (we’ve been only able to try Garmin Connect so far), and this data isn't available in Apple Health unless you go into the third-party app and sync it. So if you have a Garmin watch, for example, selected as the source, you would need to go into Garmin Connect and sync it for the steps to be counted in WalkScape.

Implementation & development

That’s the result of our testing so far! We've already managed to put together a system into the game where you can switch the source for your steps, and those would count as your steps inside WalkScape on iOS.

The system still needs a bit of polish to be release-ready, but we would like to first hear from the poll and the comments to this development blog affirming if we should prioritize this now over other features. If that's a yes, we'll aim to release smart watch support in the next few weeks for iOS. We would likely also start more in-depth testing on Android to see if Health Connect is in a state where we could support it in-game.

I'd like to hear from you if the proposal for the system, especially considering the technical downsides, sounds good. Also, if there are alternative proposals for the design, we would love to hear them. One thing we've been thinking is that smart watch steps would only be used when loading in background steps, but the game would automatically revert back to the phone's pedometer when it's on. This way, getting real-time steps would still be possible.

Also, just to keep in mind—this is the proposal for an MVP solution we can put together quickly. We'll keep improving it based on feedback and what kind of solutions we might find. Apple will also likely keep developing their systems, which might enable better integration in the future.

Engine rework announcement: release on Jan 29th, 14.00 UTC+0

We are finally finished with the engine rework and ready to release it!

IMPORTANT NOTES

• The maintenance will begin on 29th of January (Wednesday) at 14:00 UTC+0. Due to extensive infrastructure changes, server migrations, and other tasks, the downtime length is uncertain. We expect it to last at least 5–6 hours, possibly longer.
• Due to the complete rework of the game's local storage system, steps taken during maintenance will not be counted. Before maintenance begins, please open the game to claim your steps and verify that your character has synced to the cloud. You can confirm this by checking the leaderboards to see if your character's information is up-to-date.
• Our timeline may change. I'll keep you updated about any changes, with the most current information available on Discord.

This is the largest change the game has had from a technical standpoint so far — almost everything has been refactored, optimized, and tinkered with, including our server technology. I've never done this kind of massive migration on a production server before, so please be patient with us and be prepared that some things might go wrong.

Even though we've spent the last few weeks testing everything as well as we can, there will be new bugs and issues with the reworked engine. Sending us bug reports is much appreciated.

Engine rework: what has changed

The game engine's functionality has undergone a complete rewrite. Additionally, I've refactored most of the game logic code and improved performance across nearly every aspect of the game. This improvement should be quite noticeable for players who have experienced slowdowns in the past.

List of changes & fixes:

• Server-side code is mostly rewritten. Authentication and saving the game now takes only a few hundred milliseconds, depending on your connection.
• Game engine is rewritten and now uses multi-threading for all of its processing. This should result in everything being much faster to process and the game's UI being a lot smoother.
• Anti-cheat is vastly improved. I'll not get into details on exactly how, but we've made a significant jump on our anti-cheat.
• Communications between the server and client are now for the most part both encrypted and compressed. This should result in smaller data usage, faster loading, and improved privacy from malicious third parties.
• Issues with steps not being counted when the game's loading of steps is interrupted should be fixed. With multi-threading, we're now able to cancel step loading with certainty when it's interrupted by an error, closing the game, and so forth.
• WalkPedia now loads very quickly with multithreading.
• A lot of previously reported issues and bugs have been fixed as well. There are too many of them to list here.
• Battery consumption of the game should be even less.
• Android version of the game now uses a new rendering engine (it's been on iOS for a while now).
• Character save system & save data is completely new. Player save files should now be around 12 times smaller on the server, so creating backups & restoring those is now easier and more cost-effective.
• Fixes to the Buy Me a Coffee supports not syncing up properly

What's new

• Gear sets have been added to the game. I still want to add a bit of polish to the system after this update, but it already works pretty well.
• In-game notification bubbles (drops, XP) have been reworked and improved. You can now see things like Realm reputation gains too.
• "While you were away…" has been reworked and improved vastly. You can now see much better what has happened while the game wasn't open.
• Added unequip all gear & tools buttons to the gear view.

Testing Notes:

• Opening the game from fully closed should now take less than 3 seconds (except for the first time logging in, which takes longer as that initializes a cache on server), regardless of where you are on the globe. Please let the team if you are seeing load times longer than this.
• There is now an FPS counter built into the game, found in the Settings menu. If you are seeing any lag in game, please send us a screenshot with the FPS counter turned on so that we can investigate!

Game now includes an FPS counter to help players send us performance reports

Engine rework: what does it do for WalkScape?

The engine rework as a whole took a significant amount of development time, so I'd like to also clarify its importance. I know many people might feel like the time spent on this was unexciting.

WalkScape started off as a personal hobby project, and to be entirely honest, at that point I didn't have as much knowledge in everything that goes into creating game engines. And often it's impossible to plan things ahead perfectly. Over the first year of Closed Beta, we saw some issues that were simply impossible to fix or improve with how the engine was set up (losing steps on network loss, for instance), and to improve the game's performance massively, we needed multithreading. To accomplish these goals, the way the game runs needed to be reworked completely.

It was a massive undertaking. We're now looking at nearly a thousand files changed and around 10K lines of code changed, removed, or added. The way the code is now organized and structured is also much better, which makes it easier to increase the size of the development team.

Doing these changes later would've meant that there would've been a lot more to rework into being multithreading-compatible.

But most importantly: now that everything in the engine follows a very clear pattern, adding new features should be much faster, simpler, and less error-prone. Previously, when adding new features, I often had to do a lot of maintenance on existing features to make it all work together.

I want to thank you all for your patience with this. Three months without an update was a long wait, and we know that.

Going forward

In order to address the "content droughts" where new content practically can't be added to the game, we have a solution planned. We call this devtools 2.0 (we've mentioned those here and there before), and these are practically fancy tools that allow floursifter and maxchill to add content to the game without needing to do any programming.

We already had the "devtools 1.0", but those had design flaws which made them dependent on me building new updates and doing a bunch of manual tinkering whenever floursifter and maxchill had made changes or additions. And my time is often stretched thin on all kinds of things, resulting in a bottleneck. Floursifter and maxchill have already during this engine rework made several content updates worth of designs.

This is why I think after this update goes live, we need to shift our priority first to finish devtools 2.0. I'll spend the first couple of weeks fixing issues that arise with the update, but then I think we must get the new devtools ready. After that, back to roadmap.

What the devtools 2.0 will enable is that whenever floursifter and maxchill have new content ready, they can release it to the players without me needing to do practically anything. This means that our feature development pipeline is separate from our content development pipeline. Balance updates, content additions, and other things should arrive at a much more stable schedule.

I'd love to hear in the comments what you think. For the first planned content update, we only need the new tools partially completed, which I'm estimating would take me around 3 weeks to finish. After that, we can keep delivering content while I can also expand the tools while working on new features.

Until next time

Needless to say, this devblog was really long! But there were a lot of things to cover, and I hope you enjoyed reading it.

We also really appreciate feedback on the things we covered here, and filling out the survey will give us guidance on how to implement the smart watches.

That's all for today—time for me to go back to making sure this incredibly large overhaul goes as smoothly as possible.

Stay hydrated, and keep walking! ❤️

First Year Of WalkScape!

Welcome to the special development update! We’ve reached a significant milestone - WalkScape is now one year old!

To celebrate this, I’ll write here all the significant things that have happened so far, and also share some testimonials and interesting statistics. Let’s dive in!

The Timeline

• 19.01.2024 — WalkScape Closed Beta release.

We had originally hoped to release the Closed Beta earlier, and after a lengthy crunch, I managed to get everything ready for the release during the 18th. However, Apple's review process took a surprisingly long period of time. After multiple hours of waiting, the first version of Closed Beta (0.1.0+72) was released around 6 AM Finnish time. It was a long night! The first wave of WalkScape had 750 players.

• 20.01.2024 — Leaderboards added to WalkScape Portal.
• 20.01.2024 — I flew to London to show the game at Pocket Gamer Connects London.

Gotta say that I was very tired during this trip, having just spent the last few weeks staying up all night finishing all that was needed for initial Closed Beta release, and then flying to London straight afterwards.

• 07.02.2024 — Improvements to the Patreon & Buy Me a Coffee integrations.
• 28.02.2024 — Wave Two for WalkScape began.

With Wave Two, our player count increased from 750 to almost 5,000. We also released a pretty large content update to the game that went live with the Wave. This Wave focused on activities for the transformation skills, as well as plenty of beloved unique items spread throughout Jarvonia and GDTE.

• 13.03.2024 — Post-Wave Two update released with pedometer fixes.

During the first few months, even after this update, a lot of my time was spent on trying to perfect the pedometer in WalkScape. For the most part, we had difficulties on fixing weird pedometer behavior for Android devices. Sadly most of this work was also wasted, as Google released a fix to it with the introduction of Recording API.

• 15.03.2024 — Another pedometer fix update released.
• 18.04.2024 — Myzozoz joins WalkScape development team.

After spending a couple weeks on review process, we hired a new developer to WalkScape - myzozoz! Our increased Patreon & BMaC support finally allowed us to hire another pair of hands to work on the game. Before this, I was the only developer working on the game, and floursifter worked on community management & content design, and maxchill worked on art.

Around this time, another fix to pedometer issues was released as well.

• 16.05.2024 — Android pedometer finally fully functional.

A couple of weeks before this, Google had released Recording API. I had worked around 2 months at this point trying to perfect the Android pedometer on my own, and suddenly Google released an API that fixed it overnight.

Also, the website was reworked from scratch, and Wave 2.5 date was released.

• 01.06.2024 — Wave 2.5 began.
• 27.06.2024 — A new update with a bunch of new features was released.

After a couple of months spent on the pedometer, we were finally back to adding new features to the game. We released Friends system, WalkPedia, major content rebalance, Shop rework and Adventurers Guild with a few new locations and a bunch of new content to the game.

• 11.07.2024 — Achievements added to WalkScape.

Another update released, adding the achievements system to the game. The team also went for Summer vacation around this time, and it was my first vacation I had had in years, so I was very happy!

• 20.08.2024 — Syrenthia update released, and Wave 3 begins.

Our most massive update was released, adding Consumables and a ton of new content, including a new realm to the game. At this point, we started to feel that our internal development tools and engine were starting to get stretched to their maximum, and they urgently needed improvements. The update was actually pushed out from an airplane while me and myzozoz were flying to Gamescom.

• 19.09.2024 — Not a Cult turned one year old.

The company I founded for WalkScape had completed its first year! It was a lot of learning for me how to run a business, and I had at this point worked on WalkScape full-time for around 8 months.

• 03.10.2024 — Pocket Gamer Connects Helsinki, and winning the Best Indie Game award.

We had been at four conventions at this point — PGC Helsinki 2023, W Love Games 2023, PGC London 2024, Gamescom, and now PGC Helsinki 2024. We won the best indie game audience award from PGC Helsinki, which was a huge deal for me personally.

• 17.10.2024 — Hotfixing WalkScape, patching Syrenthia issues.

We released a series of minor patches to WalkScape and added translations to the game. Many of the issues here were mostly content-related, which were a result of our outdated internal development tools. When I started this project, I thought it would be enough that I create tooling that only scales for one person who is using them — me. With the project scaling up massively, both with the team size increasing and the game getting more complex, the engine and tooling started to show that they needed more work.

• 01.11.2024 — Work on reworking the game engine started.

With most of Syrenthia-related issues now fixed, I started to work on reworking the game engine. This process is now almost finished, with the reworked engine hopefully released very soon. Floursifter and maxchill started to work on our next content update, while myzozoz worked on Party system.

My thoughts

I'm super happy with the progress we've had in our year one. There are also a ton of things I didn't include here — we made a license agreement with Jagex, we started Wave 3.5, I overhauled the UI of the game, we released a merch store, we had an intern Sorgo joining our team for a few months, and a lot more. With a tiny team, and with just community funding, we've got a lot of things done in our first year of operation.

There were also a lot of lessons learned during the year. A lot of my time was also spent on company bureaucracy stuff, fixing the pedometer, and now the last 3 months have been spent on reworking the game engine. This engine work has been a massive time sink, but I'm very pleased that it was done. Now the game's code is finally properly organized, it uses multi-threading, we have new server technology to support multiple times the players we could before. Most of all, the technical debt has now been paid that was mainly caused by rapidly expanding things.

Also, the first year was unsurprisingly a year of many firsts. I've never run a company before, I've never sat at the other end of a job interview table (which was a local pub actually, we didn't have an office at that time), I've never needed to write privacy policies, pay salaries, do accounting, represent a company at game conventions, hold board meetings, and so forth. Working as a game startup requires you to really wear dozens of different hats. And I'm glad we've made it through without any major issues.

After the engine work is done, we're looking forward to getting back to releasing new features more rapidly. We also need to rework our internal development tools, as one of the biggest pain points for us during and after Syrenthia was how messy creating content for the game got when its complexity increased.

My wishes for 2025

For 2025, I'm definitely most excited about getting the game to Open Beta. That's our biggest priority.

Our largest bottleneck for getting things done more rapidly is that we still only have two developers. One of my greatest wishes would be hiring a third developer for the game, but our finances at the moment don't really allow it. Not a Cult had revenue of 62k euros during the first year, with 2k of profit. So there's little to no extra left after paying all of the costs that go towards the development.

I'm hoping that our revenue would increase so that hiring one more developer would become possible! The money we get from Patreon & BMaC goes directly into making the game better and speeding things up, and every bit of support helps. And thank you all who have been supporting us and helping us over the first year. It would've never been possible for me to quit my previous job, put my university studies on indefinite pause, and hire another full-time developer to the project without the support.

Numbers & testimonials

Let's dive into some numbers and some player testimonials we've had during the first year! We've asked these people who are included in the testimonials for permission to use their testimonials.

• Wave 1: 752 Closed Beta players, and 4,948 registered accounts.
• Wave 2: 4,718 Closed Beta players, and 10,447 registered accounts.
• Wave 2.5: 12,085 Closed Beta players, and 21,864 registered accounts.
• Wave 3: 19,811 Closed Beta players, and 30,115 registered accounts.
• Wave 3.5: 24,683 Closed Beta players, and 47,290 registered accounts.

During the first year, our player count increased by 3,282% and the number of registered players by 955%. For those who wonder why we have had the Wave system even for our supporters: with almost 50k registered people and just one person (me) reading and answering the customer support emails, it's been one of the reasons we've managed to make so much progress between the waves. During the waves, most of our time goes to customer support and marketing.

Our players together have now walked over 8.1 billion steps. And I must say, that one of the best things of our first year has been all of the feedback, testimonials, and community interactions we've had. It always makes my day to hear that the game has helped someone greatly — that's something much greater to me than just making a game. And I'm very thankful for everyone who has been cheering for us, translating the game, and providing invaluable feedback or helping in other ways throughout the year. So thank you, WalkScapers!

Here are some testimonials we’ve had:

Let’s make 2025 even better year for WalkScape

That's all for this development update! 2024 was a great year, and we learned a lot about how to make the game even better. Our goal is to use all we have learned and make 2025 the best year for walking and playing the game. It was also a huge change for me personally, going from an IT consultant and university student to full-time entrepreneur. We'll keep working as hard as we can to deliver the best possible fitness game there is. I'm hoping our community keeps being awesome and providing us with their feedback to guide us on this task. And most of all, we'll keep walking.

Thank you ❤️

Hello and happy new year! Our last development blog was in December, right before the team took their holiday break. Now we're back at work with some updates on our progress!

General progress towards next update

Let's start off with how things are currently looking with the next update! Before we went for the holidays, things were already looking quite good on the new update, but there are still some known issues we need to fix before the engine rework update alongside gear sets is ready for release. We're all hoping that the rest of this process will be rather quick. The main issue we have to solve has to do with older Android devices, which are having issues, but hopefully we'll get that fixed soon.

From our testing, we're also confident that the step-counting issues when having the game in the background or having poor connection (especially on Android) have been finally fixed. We haven't had any issues in that regard anymore, even while trying all kinds of things to encounter that issue.

We're aiming for the update to be released this month. While it's been the longest time probably in the game's development history without new updates, the improvements we've been making here mean that we've finally paid off most of the technical debt that has accumulated throughout the development, and that most of our systems are now way better prepared for bigger scale and the future features for the game.

When this update is done and we've released some more QoL updates and features, we really want to finish our work on the new development tools for the game. Our content-delivery bottleneck currently is that we can't deliver new content while we've been working on this engine rework, and with the increasing complexity of the game content, our previous development tools are quite outdated. When we have the new development tools ready for use, releasing content updates to the game will no longer be bottlenecked by our other updates and should enable us to have a much more stable release schedule for bringing new content to the game.

Anti-cheat improvements

While our main focus has been the engine rework and optimizing things, we've also started to scale most of our services to be more prepared for the eventual open beta release. One of the things that has seen serious improvement in the upcoming update is our anti-cheat systems. We'll stay tight-lipped about what kind of improvements have been made specifically, but the systems overall have been scaled significantly, making it easier for us to run more sophisticated and accurate anti-cheat, and the systems should easily scale to support even hundreds of thousands of players.

Our anti-cheat systems so far have already shown good promise, and this upgrade will definitely not be the last. We're committed to keep upgrading the anti-cheat systems continuously in order to make cheating in the game as hard as possible.

WalkScape Wiki & Weblate improvements

Our overall server infrastructure has now been scaled up significantly as well. With these changes, we've migrated the WalkScape Wiki from Miraheze-hosted service to our own server, which the Wiki Community team has access to. This has enabled them to start doing some changes which were previously impossible:

• WalkScape Wiki is now available as a PWA (Progressive Web App), so you can have it as its own web application on your phone.
• WalkScape Wiki has been prepared for the upcoming Gear Sets. If you check out Forest Foraging article, for instance, you now see a guide and Gear Loadouts. These gear loadouts are something you can copy and import as a gear set to WalkScape itself. If you feel like helping out creating guides & gear sets, please do!
• It should run significantly faster.

Weblate (or WalkScape Translate) has also been migrated to our own, beefier server. The previous server wasn't powerful enough to run it, but now it's blazing quick. If you'd like to help us translate the game to other languages, please join the Discord server and contact #bwuhbwuhbwuh and join the localization channels. We've also updated it to a newer version.

Comments from Wiki Team’s Bonez565

Hello everyone, Bonez565 from the Wiki Team here. With a note on the new Community Guides and Gear Sets. If you'd like to help to create a guide or gear set, you can get started by going to the wiki and creating an account with a verified email address. There are currently two places that are open to community edits in what Mediawiki calls "Namespaces". Those are any pages that start with the prefix Guide: or Gear:.

The Guide: namespace is, as the name suggests, the place for any kind of guide. All achievement pages have had their existing guides ported to a page at Guide:Acheivement_Name. If you visit an Achievement page, you'll see the contents of the Guide page with a button to edit it or a link to create a new page. The activity guide pages are set up to act as a directory of related guides and should use the sub-page structure.

For example, if you go to the "Butterfly Catching" page and want to make a guide to maximize wheat drops. You would click the link under the guide heading to go to the corresponding page at Guide:Butterfly Catching and follow the instructions in the preloaded comment to start the directory page. You can then create your new guide at the sub-page name you choose Guide:Butterfly Catching/Awesome Wheat Guide" and there you can format add images or text as you wish. We intend to be relatively hands off with the structure of the guides themself and allow for the formatting that works best for you.

This works the same for the Gear: namespace. You can go to any activity to find a link to make a directory and use the template in the comment to nicely display your gear set. You can add text or links to corresponding Guides as well. In the future we'll have the ability to click a button and get a code that can be imported into the game for easy in-game use.

For both namespaces you can also make a freeform guide for a specific goal or section of the game. These can be created at Guide:Guide Name or Gear: Gear Set Name If you create a larger or more general guide please link it to the main Community Guide Page or Community Gear Sets Page so people can discover it from the sidebar links to those pages. These pages also host an automated set of all pages that have been created in their namespace. It should go without saying that names need to be appropriate or the guide will be rejected.

As always feel free to message me or other Wiki team members if something is not working right or if you need some help creating your guides and gear. Link Here.

Happy editing!

The end of Wave 3.5

Wave 3.5 has ended on January 7th, and I want to thank everyone who supported and joined us on this wave! Thank you so much!

This wave, even though it happened during the holidays, was the smoothest one we've had so far. One of the main reasons why we have the wave system in place is that we usually get a lot of customer service emails during that, which takes a significant portion of our development time. This time, however, things were much smoother than before — finally our integrations, especially with Patreon, are working more smoothly.

Buy Me a Coffee still has some issues, some of which aren't really things we can easily fix from our end. BMAC's API is one of the worst I've ever seen — their API is rate-limited so that we can only fetch data on 10 supporters every five seconds. This is why it takes hours until your BMAC status updates.

We've also migrated our emails to our own email server two days ago. If you have sent us a customer support email but haven't heard back from us, please resend your email and tell us it wasn't delivered. During the migration, there were a few hours when mails didn't deliver.

Once again, thank you all for joining and being patient! With the engine & server upgrades, we’re able to support a lot more players after these changes go live - and we’re looking forward to having a lot more players join us on Wave 4!

Until next time

That's all for today!

In the next development blog, we're hoping to have the update ready to go, or at least very close to that. In the next couple of weeks, we'll focus on just finishing up things to finally get this released, so we can start working on more exciting updates.

Keep walking, and stay hydrated everyone!

Hello and welcome once again to the WalkScape dev blog! I have some exciting news about the engine rework and, as promised, a first look at the gear sets!

Wave 3.5 starts this week!

Wave 3.5 of WalkScape Closed Beta begins on December 15th! Players who have supported development on Patreon or Buy Me a Coffee will receive immediate access when the wave goes live. Those who support development before January 6th will also gain access during this wave, as mentioned in our previous dev blog.

More instructions about how to get access are available here: https://walkscape.app/help

Gear sets: introduction

Let's dive into the exciting new QoL feature that's launching alongside the engine optimization: gear sets!

According to our previous poll, gear sets (or presets) were the most requested QoL feature, making them our top priority. I'm happy to report that I've designed the system and completed its core functionality. I just need to add some finishing touches and polish the UI, and it should be ready.

Here's what this system aims to solve:

• Switching gear between skills is tedious. With presets for skills and activities, you'll be able to swap your entire loadout with just a few taps.
• Finding the optimal gear for activities and skills can be tricky. We're adding tools to help you pick the right equipment, especially when managing lots of items.
• Whether you're a min-maxer or casual player, these features will make your life easier.

Now, let me walk you through all the features coming with gear sets!

Gear sets: how do they work

When designing this system, we needed features that would work well for both casual players and min-maxers. I wanted to get it right so that managing gear builds would be much simpler for everyone in the future.

Here's a list of our features! We're also planning to integrate gear sets with the Travel + 1 Queue, which will make swapping sets even easier when switching activities.

Create set from current items

This is the most common way to create gear sets. Simply wear your optimal gear, create a new set, and click "copy currently equipped gear." That's it! After saving, you can easily re-equip your favorite set whenever needed.

Customize and prepare

When not walking, you can create gear sets to prepare for activities or update your existing ones.

I've created an advanced in-game tool called the "gear explorer" to help you find the right equipment for your sets.

When creating or editing a gear set, simply click any gear slot to open the gear explorer. You'll see a list of all items that fit that slot (from your WalkPedia discoveries), with several ways to find the perfect item:

• Sort by attribute: Choose any attribute, like Work Efficiency, to see items ranked from highest to lowest.
• Filter by activity: Select specific activities like "cut birch trees," "cut pine trees," or "cut oak trees." The list will show only items with relevant attributes, and sorting will be calculated for those selected activities to show which items provide the greatest benefits.
• Filter by skill (not done yet): For a broader view, filter by skill to see all related items.
• Compare items: If you already have an item equipped, you'll see a helpful comparison to make upgrading easier.
• Search: Find items quickly using the search function, just like in the bank.

Share or import gear sets

Don't want to figure out the best gear yourself? You can ask the community to share their gear sets! The game allows you to export your gear sets and import ones made by others.

When you import a gear set, your character gets a copy with the same configuration. For example, if someone has created an optimal set for the Search Team activity (a common question), they can share their gear set data for others to easily import and use.

If the gear set includes items your character hasn't discovered yet, they'll appear with a "?" sprite and no without stats or rarity, but their names will still be visible. Since players who share and import gear sets typically use the wiki anyway, showing item names makes it easier to look up how to obtain missing gear while not ruining the feeling of discovery for those who don’t want to use wiki.

Organize

Finally, let's talk about organizing your gear sets for easy access when you have multiple saved.

Each gear set has these customization options:

• Name: Give it a memorable, descriptive title!
• Icons: Add multiple icons that will appear before the set's name.
• Color: Use colors to categorize your sets - like green for woodcutting sets!
• Skills: Choose which skills the set appears for. For example, your fishing set won't clutter the menu while you're smithing.
• Activities: Specify activities where this set should appear. Like skills, this helps keep your gear list relevant to what you're doing.

Note: When your character is idle, all gear sets will be visible when you browse them regardless of skill or activity filters.

Smart with inventory space

Let's look at how gear sets handle inventory management.

When switching gear sets at a bank location, you'll be asked if you want to store your current gear in the bank. If not, the items will go to your inventory.

If you're at a bank and your desired gear set contains items stored there, those items will automatically be withdrawn. If you have them in your inventory, your inventory is always prioritized before the bank.

If some items in your gear set are unavailable (whether they're missing, you don't meet requirements, or you no longer own them), you'll see a list of these items and can decide whether to proceed with the switch.

Engine optimization

Last week, we completed the engine optimization with only a few minor features missing and released it to our internal testers.

This work took quite a while, but I'm very happy it's finished. If we had postponed it and allowed technical debt to accumulate, it would have taken much longer to complete in the future.

Initial testing has revealed bunch of small bugs in the optimized engine, but these should be rather quick to fix. After completing the gear sets (hopefully by next week), I'll focus on fixing these bugs and preparing everything for release. Due to the holiday break, this update will likely be ready for closed beta testers sometime in January - the timeline mainly depends on how quickly we can resolve the bugs!

Holiday break and until next time!

Lastly, the development team will be taking a holiday break from December 23rd to January 1st. While we may check Discord and [email protected] emails for any Wave 3.5 issues, we'll primarily be enjoying time with family.

Due to the break, there won't be a devblog on December 26th—the next one will be posted on January 9th.

That's all for today, folks! Thanks for reading, and happy holidays to everyone. Keep walking and stay hydrated ❤️

I'm regularly very organized, so actually having all of this stuff in the bank is causing me anxiety and I'm going to be very happy to clear it all out.

The GDTE swamp area has been visually overhauled

Hello, and welcome to WalkScape development blog once again! This time we have quite a few things to show, so without further ado, let’s get started!

Wave 3.5: December 15th to January 6th

Let's start with the most important news that many of our followers are looking forward to: our next wave, which we call Wave 3.5. The wave runs from December 15th, 00:00 UTC+0 to January 7th, 00:00 UTC+0.

Similar to Wave 2.5, this is an intermediate wave that's shorter and supporter only. This means we won't be accepting new applications during this period.

If you've supported us on Patreon or Buy Me a Coffee and linked your account to your WalkScape Portal Account, you're all set to start playing on December 15th. For those interested in joining this wave but haven't supported yet, access will be granted to anyone who becomes a supporter before or during the wave. You can visit the WalkScape Help Page for detailed instructions.

We also want to try out the new gifting feature that Patreon added, so the quickest fifty people can gain one month of free WalkScape Patreon membership by using this link: https://www.patreon.com/WalkScape/redeem/3B13B.

It should be also possible to gift memberships to other people by using the new gift page.

A lot of new items that have been designed in the last two weeks…

Improved in-game notifications

Reworked in-game notification bubbles

Now, let's talk about development progress and quality-of-life improvements!

In the last development blog, I mentioned I would cover Gear Sets. However, after completing extensive engine optimizations, I discovered that the in-game notification system (the XP and item bubbles that appear after completing activities) needed a complete rework to be compatible with these optimizations.

During this rework, I made the "in-game notification bubbles" much more versatile. Many of you have asked to see more information, so I added new bubbles for:

• Procs (double action, double rewards, etc.)
• Arrive in location
• Collectibles (sticky)
• Achievements (sticky)
• Both looted & crafted items will now clearly show their quality (or if they're fine)
• Saved steps
• Realm reputation

The sticky bubbles will remain on screen until you dismiss them. This addresses feedback from players who sometimes missed notifications about achievements or collectibles they'd earned!

Improved “While you were away” view

Like the in-game notification bubbles, the "While you were away" view needed updating to work with our optimized engine. I took this opportunity to completely rebuild it with some much-needed improvements.

Based on your feedback, this view is particularly important since it creates that rewarding dopamine rush when you see all your progress after a long walk. I wanted to make this feeling even more satisfying.

The new "While you were away" includes everything from the notification bubbles (your procs, reputation gains, saved steps, and more) plus several new features:

• World map. You'll see a portion of the world map and can watch your character's journey if you were traveling.
• XP bars & level ups. Instead of plain text, you'll now see your XP bars filling up and get better visual feedback for level ups.
• Emphasized "rare events". When you collect special items, craft eternal gear, find legendary/ethereal loot, or complete achievements, the step counter will pause briefly to showcase your rare finds with a cool animation.
• Always shown after significant walks. Now appears whenever you open the game after collecting many steps, not just after a full restart.
• Can be reopened. Want another look at what you earned? You can now reopen the summary whenever you'd like.

The system and UI are still being polished, but should be ready in the next few days. Here's an early preview of how it looks:

Here is also a video that showcases this in action.

Party system teasers

The party system has also made significant progress since our last update. Myzozoz has worked hard on this feature, and we've completed the core party management functionality. Before we can release the party system, we still need to implement "two week challenges" and the ability to see other party members on the world map.

Here's a preview of the UI (while it needs some polish, the main functionality is complete):

UIs are still WIP

Don’t forget to give your party a memorable catchphrase!

Overall view on progress

The engine optimizations are now complete. A few server-side additions are still needed before release, and extensive testing remains to ensure everything works as intended.

I plan to release the new update with the optimizations (and hopefully gear sets!) during Wave 3.5 or shortly after. I'm not setting a specific date yet, as it's difficult to estimate how long the testing phase will take.

Once the new notification systems are finished, I'll begin work on Gear Sets!

Until next time

Alright folks, that's all for today! I hope you found this development blog exciting. I'm thrilled that the engine work is now complete and performing beautifully - in my testing, the game processes even 3 million steps in about one second. This is a massive improvement over the previous system.

We're also excited to welcome new players to the game with Wave 3.5! If you need any help getting started, I encourage you to join our Discord community.

Stay hydrated, and keep walking everyone! ❤️

looks like they need an "s" on "appraiser" there. or an "a" before "true".

does not lessen my appreciatiom for this achievement.

fun.

worth it.

healthy.

Hello, and welcome back to the WalkScape devblog!

In the last development blog, I mentioned that I'm focusing on optimizing and improving the game engine itself. This work has been ongoing for the past two weeks. Today's devblog will be brief, as there's less to share than usual.

Optimizing load times

We've successfully completed our load time & game engine optimization, meeting the goal I set. Here's a video (using the Finnish localization for the game 😄) demonstrating the launch of WalkScape's development version which is using the remote server:

https://youtube.com/shorts/oERsdrMYYlE

The game now loads faster than it takes for the Not a Cult logo to fade away. While this may vary slightly depending on internet speed and availability, opening the game is now significantly quicker than before. It's a noticeable improvement, and should hopefully make it even quicker to check WalkScape during your day!

I've also implemented data compression for the heaviest server calls, which should result in about 75% data usage savings. Although I haven't received any complaints about the game using too much data (I've always tried to be very conservative in that regard) it should now be significantly more efficient than before.

Next up: optimizing loading steps & fixing the final step loading issues

With major changes to the engine and server technology complete, my next focus is improving step loading.

The primary goal is to address remaining issues where steps could be lost during loading, while simultaneously enhancing the speed of the process. As mentioned in the previous devblog, step loading problems occur when the internet connection drops or the game is closed/backgrounded while loading steps. Thanks to the recent engine optimizations, it should now be straightforward to implement a solution where, if step loading fails, your steps will be loaded normally on the next attempt without any loss. I'm aware this has been a source of frustration for some players (particularly on Android), and fixing it has been a long-standing priority. The engine optimization work provided an ideal opportunity to tackle this issue.

This improvement should be quicker to implement than the engine rework, and I anticipate completing it before the next devblog. Given the scope of these changes, we'll be doing thorough internal testing to ensure stability before release. During this testing phase, I hope to make significant progress on Gear Sets as well. Ideally, I'd like to release that feature alongside the optimizations and step loading fixes.

Character borders, CYOA, maxchill’s streams

Here are some minor updates on other fronts, in addition to the engine improvements:

Character Borders

maxchill has been working on Character Borders, a new feature we're planning to add with the upcoming Party System. These borders will allow you to stand out within your party. We're also considering using these unlockable borders in other areas of the game.

CYOA

Our "Choose Your Own Adventure" series on Discord is back on track! For those unfamiliar, it's our long-running series of stories where Discord members vote on how the narrative unfolds. We've already implemented some details from these stories into the game, and we use this format to test lore for upcoming in-game quests.

Link to Discord channel where the adventure takes place - ⁠CYOA channel

maxchill's Streams

maxchill's art streams have returned! These streams are typically scheduled for Fridays (with some exceptions, occurring at least biweekly) from 17:00 to 19:00 GMT+2. You can watch the streams at WalkScaper Twitch Channel

You can opt-in for notifications for streams and adventure posts on Discord here - ⁠WalkScape roles channel

More technical explanation of the optimizations

Also, some people said they'd be interested in an even more technical explanation of what was covered in the last development blog. I posted about this on r/FlutterDev, and if you were one of the people who were interested, check it out here:

r/FlutterDev post

Until next time

That’s all for today!

Thanks again for joining, and hopefully next devblog, we’ll have something to show about the Gear Sets. The engine optimizations don’t make too exciting devblogs, but these have been some very important changes to our tech, and I’m happy that we’re almost there with the upgrade.

Keep walking, and remember to stay hydrated! ❤️

I'm looting trying to find " fine trash" right now, and I enjoyed checking my loot every few minutes and seeing what I've picked up, I'm enjoying the game more and more with the increase in complexity and achievements and interconnected activities that come with every new release.

and I really like that I'm exercising.

Just a thumbs up post and I'm excited to keep playing.

and for the rest of the world to become accessible.

and like a thousand other things that are hinted at coming.

also, I really like panning for gold. haha

bonus question: has anyone else played a walking game they like anywhere near as much?

aside from a hybrid exercise podcast radio show called The Walk, I have a distant second I can't even remember the name of, but nothing else really comes close for me.

So there's literally no way to get access to this application? I was looking for information and couldn't find any

Hello! Welcome once again to the WalkScape dev blog.

For the past week or so, following our most recent update, I've been laying the groundwork for our Quality of Life (QoL) improvements. Before introducing any new QoL features or changes (with Gear Sets being the first on our list) I decided to start by optimizing and overhauling the game engine itself. This has been in the planning stages for quite some time and will likely take a couple more weeks to complete.

I know we have many programmers and game developers in our community, so this dev blog will feature some technical details especially geared towards you. I hope you'll find it interesting! But before we dive into the tech stuff, I've got some teasers and general info for those who prefer the less technical side of things!

Teasers and general info

Alright – let's start with the teasers! We have two new skills coming to the game, hopefully in the next major content update. Here's some art to help you figure out what they might be:

The design and art process for these new skills, related activities, and items is already underway. However, it will take at least a few months to complete, as much of the designed content depends on the Quality of Life (QoL) updates.

In general news, if you missed it, we released a minor update and hotfixes to the game last week:

Reddit post

Portal post

Lemmy post

These fixes addressed many of the remaining issues, though a few minor ones still persist. We'll tackle those in future updates.

Lastly, myzozoz has been hard at work creating and designing the "Party system." Progress on this front has been great!

Why the engine overhaul is needed?

There are four major reasons for this overhaul:

• To improve game performance, reducing loading times and eliminating UI lag.
• To enable processing the game loop for notifications, on the server and potential future companion apps (such as for smartwatches) more easily.
• To enhance stability and introduce elements that increase the game's scalability and flexibility for planned features and content.
• To address the issue of uncounted steps by implementing a game state rollback feature when step loading is interrupted (e.g., by closing the game or losing internet connection).

Currently, the main cause of lag (especially when loading a bunch of steps) is that the game processes all heavy calculations on the same CPU thread that renders the game (Flutter Isolates provides more information). This approach worked well for a long time, as the game loop's calculations were simple enough to avoid lag. However, as the game's complexity has grown, particularly when loading thousands of steps, it can now cause several seconds of "freezing."

The solution? Run the processing on a separate thread while optimizing the code as much as possible.

Game loading time

I've begun this overhaul by reworking how the game loads, which will likely be the most significant "visible change" for our players upon release.

By implementing multi-threading, I've reduced the game's loading time from a 5+ seconds to be around 500ms (excluding server calls, which I'll optimize soon). Previously, the game's data had to be processed synchronously (loading one file at a time). Now, using multi-threading, or "isolates" in Flutter, we can load all game data simultaneously. This approach doesn't compete with the UI thread for resources, making it even faster in practice. Our goal is to reduce the loading time so the game is ready before the Not a Cult logo fades away, as long as there's no update to download and you have solid connection.

The main limitation of using isolates in Flutter is that they don't share memory. This means the game needs to load in the isolate, which saves the data to its memory and then sends the necessary parts back to the UI thread for rendering. This brings us to our next point: decoupling!

Decoupling game logic from the application

What is decoupling?

Previously, the application and the game processing logic were tightly coupled. This is common in many games, as decoupling isn't always necessary, although it is a good practice. For WalkScape, several factors have necessitated decoupling the logic from the game into an entirely independent module.

The primary reason for decoupling is to enable notifications. We can then run the game loop quickly in the background to process steps and provide accurate information about your progress. This can also be used in things like home screen widgets, smartwatch companion apps, and whatnot. Additionally, we can move some game processing to the server side where necessary. Since WalkScape server also uses Dart (the programming language for Flutter), sharing the code is seamless. This approach allows us to process everything locally for the single-player version of WalkScape as well.

To achieve this, I've created a separate module (known as packages in Flutter development) for the game. This self-contained module includes all the game's classes, logic, and messaging between the main thread and the "game processing" isolate threads. We can add this package to any application, effectively sharing it between the game, development tools, server, and potential future companion apps.

The main challenge in creating such a module is ensuring that it remains agnostic to what's running it, thus achieving proper decoupling. Moreover, when the server processes game logic, it must be able to handle multiple players concurrently, necessitating a stateless design (for a detailed explanation, see this Stack Overflow comment). The concept that can tie it together is called an Event Queue, which you can read more about here.

While most games implement a similar structure, and WalkScape's engine already had a comparable system, it wasn't fully decoupled or stateless. So, our next challenge is: how do we achieve that?

Making a stateless Event Queue

I've been preparing the engine for this overhaul for months, as such a massive change couldn't be achieved quickly. Most components needed modification to become stateless.

To achieve statelessness, every Event in WalkScape (such as "complete action," "gain item," "arrive at location," "open treasure chest," or "gain XP") is its own, isolated function. These then receive a state (typically the Player Character) and return the updated state. Here's a simplified example:

• Player loads 1000 steps.
• This is sent to the Event Queue with the current Player Character as “Load Steps” Event.
• Event Queue processes the "Load Steps" Event with the received Player Character (currently doing the "Cut Birch Trees" activity for example) and 1000 steps as inputs.
• It processes "complete action" Events, forwarding the Player Character and returning updated versions as needed.
• After processing all steps or encountering an interruption (e.g., becoming overencumbered), the Event stops and returns the fully processed Player Character.
• The updated Player Character is then saved to the server, stored locally, and sent to the UI thread to render the new game state.

This approach pretty much guarantees that as long as a Player Character is given as input it'll work similarly anywhere and allows simultaneous processing of multiple Player Characters.

Other considerations and optimizations

That was a rather technical explanation, and I hope some of you find it interesting!

All of this comes with some considerations and caveats, as seasoned programmers might already know.

• For many game events, the order of processed events is crucial (avoiding race conditions). To address this, I've implemented two event queues: ordered and orderless. The ordered event queue maintains the sequence and links events to other events that they're dependent on. If an error occurs, all linked events are cancelled, and the system returns to the original state with an error.
• In WalkScape, events are completed asynchronously (on a separate thread or server), so the UI must account for this. If the response with an updated state takes a significant amount of time, the UI needs to reflect this. Some events, like loading steps, must also be able to block UI interactions during processing.

For players, this overhaul not only makes the game load and run faster but should also fix the remaining issues with step loading. Currently, if you interrupt step loading by closing the game, putting it in the background, or losing internet connection, the steps are often lost entirely. With the new system, if an interruption occurs during processing, the game state won't change or save, ensuring the steps will load correctly the next time you open the game.

I've also implemented some basic but effective optimizations. When I started working on WalkScape, I used many ordered lists as data structures. This was convenient and wasn't problematic when the game had less data to process. However, as the game's complexity increased, these lists began to contain hundreds of objects, causing performance issues when searching for items (which takes linear time, O(n)).

A simple fix for this is using key-value maps for data structures where we're not searching, but only getting or setting values. This reduces operations to constant time, O(1). For data structures that require searching, using ones that allow for logarithmic time operations—such as binary search trees, for which Dart's closest equivalent is SplayTreeSet—makes a huge difference in performance.

Until next time

Phew, that was a lot of technical stuff! I hope you found it interesting and useful. As always, I'm happy to answer any questions or address comments you might have. And even if the tech details aren't your cup of tea, I hope the teasers made it worthwhile!

Happy walking, everyone, and don't forget to stay hydrated! ❤️️

Hello!

As promised, one (and hopefully the last!) hotfix to Syrenthia. It was originally planned to release early this week, but we wanted to add a bit extra to this hotfix, as the next update will be at least a couple of weeks away and should include the first Quality of Life improvements.

Let's get started!

+342 changelogs

Added

• Added a new shop to the game.
• Added a new NPC to the game.
• Added a second way to unlock the Mysterious G achievement.
• Added couple of new recipes to the game and related items.
• Added some new achievements to the game.
• Added some new unlockable PFP options to the game.
• Added Portuguese, Turkish, Chinese (Simplified) and Swedish languages to the game. If you want to help translating to these languages, please check https://wiki.walkscape.app/wiki/Localization

Changed

• Changed how the Saved Steps cap is calculated. Now the Saved Steps cap is 10k between character levels 1-10, after which it will increase by 1k each character level.

Fixed

• A couple more hardcoded strings added to localisation files.
• Fixed the job reward collection error text, which always pointed to Kallaheim incorrectly.
• Multiple fixes and improvements to consumables.
• Fixed the text padding on Gear page.
• Fixed the extra padding on traveling activity when it was referenced to as a text tag.
• Fixed the missing rarity colors on WalkPedia and elsewhere.
• Multiple fixes to existing content in the game.
• Fixes crafting activity validation when requirements are not met.
• Fixes to how shops using special currencies work.

Poll results

We had 512 responses to the poll, and here are the results!

Plan based on the poll

Based on the poll, here's the rough plan on how we're going to be implementing the major QoL additions that we asked your opinion on. As an important note, the plan is not final and might change depending on what makes sense at which point, but for now the following plan follows both what were most wanted and what makes sense from a development standpoint.

• Gear sets were voted as the most important feature, with Travel + 1 coming as a close second. From a development effort standpoint, gear sets are one of the easiest, and that's why I'll start with that. Also, having it done is going to make it easier to integrate with Travel + 1 and Crafting Overhaul.
• Travel + 1 will be the second feature. It is the most "work-heavy" out of all of these, as it also requires a rework on how activities work in the game. While working on that, we'll make the necessary changes to be able to use the new system with Notifications and optimize the calculations and clear the way for some more diverse activities to add in future content updates.
• Travel + 1 will likely include some major improvements to the main navigation of the game.
• Crafting Queue & Crafting Overhaul and Banking & Inventory Overhaul will be after Travel + 1.
• Lastly, Notifications, Tracking & favoriting, and WalkPedia will be implemented along with adding some minor QoL tweaks around the game.

Thank you all for voicing your opinion, and it was great to hear which features meant the most to you! Happy walking ❤️️

Level and lifetime steps are approximately but not exactly exponentially related.

Edit: To clarify, this is not a problem. This is good and by design.

Hello and welcome once more to WalkScape devblog!

This time, we'll quickly cover the hotfixing/patching that's been going on for the past two weeks, and then we'll have a poll and information about the next update, which we call QoL.

Hotfixing and patching post-Syrenthia

We've released two patches in the last two weeks:

+335 Hotfix

+332 Hotfix

These patches fixed a bunch of things within the game that were found by all of you and our "alpha testing team". We also improved a few UIs which were found confusing in the feedback. As always, we're reading posts on Portal, Reddit, Discord, and Lemmy to gather what needs fixing, what players struggle with, and what areas to improve. Discord is the most active and probably the best place to submit feedback and bug reports, and if you haven't joined it, you can join through https://walkscape.app. Also, you can share your wholesome walking pictures there!

We also added translations to the game. If you want to help with translating the game, please join the Discord and ask Bwuh there to join the translation team. We're looking for more people who would be willing to help us get the game translated. We're especially interested in:

• German
• French
• Spanish
• South American Spanish languages
• Portuguese
• Brazilian Portuguese
• Polish
• Japanese
• Chinese (simplified)
• Italian
• Turkish
• Finnish, Swedish, Danish, Norwegian… and more!

Also, we now have the infrastructure to support UK English, etc. if there are people interested in doing that! Additionally, US English speakers can join the translation project and post suggestions when proofreading existing texts to help fix typos or improve the writing.

According to our statistics, at the moment Finnish is the most used language after English, followed by German, Polish, Spanish, Italian, and French.

You can check the wiki article here on translation and with more info on how to help: WalkScape Walkthrough - Localization. I've personally now translated Finnish to exceed 70% coverage, and would love some help with the rest!

There are still a few minor issues that I want to fix before moving on to working on our next update, which we call the Quality of Life update. I'm estimating that the next update will be released early next week. After that's released and if there are no more issues to fix, I'll start to work fully on the major QoL upgrades to the game.

Quality of Life update and poll

The Closed Beta has now been ongoing for 10 months, and one of the most important things has been perfecting and expanding the core gameplay loop. We've made a lot of progress in that regard, and we've also received a lot of feedback on what works and what doesn't. This is why our next update focus is Quality of Life, where we go over all of the current features and polish parts that have something important missing that, when implemented, would make the game even more enjoyable for our players.

The main goal of this update is to simply make the game even more enjoyable to play and fix anything that has been annoying to some.

The main planned features for this update are the following:

• WalkPedia. Finishing all of the missing pages, finishing the multi-tab navigation for it, adding buttons that link to WalkPedia throughout in-game content.
• Travel + 1 Queue. Ability to choose travel to a location, and then automatically start a selected activity at the chosen location. Also 1 + Travel: choosing to work on activity X until your inventory is full, or when you've completed a set number of actions, and then automatically starting travel to some other location.
• Crafting Queue and Crafting Overhaul. You can queue up multiple crafting recipes to work on after each other, and if the location you're crafting at has a bank, you can withdraw materials and deposit your creations there if you choose to. Reworked UI for crafting to make crafting easier to use and comprehend.
• Banking and Inventory overhaul. Adding customizable tabs and features to organize your bank, and also the ability to sort & drag items around in your inventory. Ability to lock items in your inventory, so they can't be accidentally dropped or deposited.
• Gear Sets. Ability to create saved gear sets for your character that you can swap for your character with ease. Automatically withdraws the saved equipment from bank if one is available at your location and the items are not in your inventory.
• Tracking & Favoriting content. You can, for instance, choose an achievement, skill level, leaderboard, or crafting recipe to track for your character. You'll be able to see your progress towards the chosen trackable thing with ease on the main view of the game. You can also choose certain locations, items, and more as "favorites," and browse your list of favorites for easier navigation.
• Notifications. You can opt-in to receive customizable notifications when certain things happen in the game, such as when your inventory is full, when step bank is full, when you've arrived at your destination, and more.

The update aims to fix & enhance minor things that have been suggested to us, but are not listed above, while we also work on the game engine to make it better and ready for the addition of Combat, Parties, Trading, and Quests that are also in the works.

The release plan for this update isn't to release it all in one go, but instead release features as they become finished, so we can maintain a constant back-and-forth between the implementation and feedback from you.

To help us prioritize which features to focus on the most during the following update cycle, please fill out the form here: Google Forms - WalkScape Quality of Life Poll

Until next time

That's all for today! While I'm focusing primarily on QoL improvements, myzozoz is simultaneously working on adding multiplayer features. The first of these will be the Party system, followed by Player Trading.

Thanks for reading through this development blog. Happy walking, and don't forget to stay hydrated!