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 ❤️

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! ❤️

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! ❤️

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 ❤️️

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!

Hello and welcome once again to WalkScape development blog!

This time, the dev blog is going to be fairly short, as there's not a lot of new stuff - but there's something that I am super excited of!

Delay with hotfixing, but multiple Portal fixes

Sadly I caught the good old seasonal flu last week, which took me out of office for the entire week. Original plan was to release hotfix patch before this development blog.

Although I didn't manage to make hotfixes to the game yet, myzozoz has released a bunch of improvements and fixes over WalkScape Portal and our server:

• It's now possible to login using username + password instead of email + password (works in the game as well)
• Patreon/BMAC status is now properly updated
• A ton of under the hood changes and stability + security improvements
• Error messages have been improved and made more clear
• The email verification is now redone, and it's possible to resend the verification email

We won! (And other stuff about conventions)

Both me and myzozoz have been busy this week at conventions. We're right now at W Love Games (which is the last convention this year, finally no more conventions!) and will be here tomorrow as well. W Love Games is a free gaming convention at Oodi library in Helsinki. Today we're here 10.00-15.00 and tomorrow 10.00-13.00. If you're in Helsinki, come say hi (we have salty liqorice!).

The last two days we've been at Pocket Gamer Connects, and we had a blast - and also we won both 3rd place in Very Big Indie Pitch (congrats to myzozoz, he was pitching this time!). Also people at the convention voted for the best game, and we won the Audience Award! I was really hoping to get that, and I'm so glad that we did.

It's been really awesome to visit gaming conventions, although quite exhausting as well. I really love meeting with our fans, and we've been able to connect with people in the industry. Hearing feedback of the game in real life and seeing people getting excited about the game is lovely.

Until next time

Alright, this time not much else to share! After W Love Games is over, we're back to office and I'm aiming to release the hotfix and start working on our next update ASAP!

Hello! It's been two development posts since I last wrote one, as maxchill and floursifter covered for me while I was busy visiting Gamescom and organizing some business matters.

The first year of Not a Cult (the company founded for WalkScape) has come to an end, generating quite a bit of paperwork and planning.

In this devblog, I'll cover our short-term plans for the rest of the year, review how the first year has gone, and preview what's coming!

Wave 3 is still on-going

Just as a reminder, Wave 3 is still ongoing, and you can gain immediate access to the game by supporting us on Patreon or Buy Me a Coffee! Alternatively, you can sign up on Portal and apply for the beta.

If you support us before October 6th or get accepted into the beta, you'll have access to the game for the entire Closed Beta period.

Roadmap

Alright, let's get to it!

Now that we have added a bunch of features that were missing (achievements, consumables, jobs, reputation, and more), we're going to start moving to the final missing pieces of what's needed until we can start Open Beta.

The "big three" missing features are:

• Trading: Enabling players to sell their items and gear to other players.
• Combat: A turn-based system playable while not walking, consuming "combat points" earned with each step taken.
• Quests: A comprehensive system to enhance the game's lore and story elements through in-game quests.

The "minor" missing features are:

• Smart watch & wearable support. We're currently held up by Health Connect's underdeveloped state, and we can't rely on Google Fit API for Android as it's shutting down next year. There's no issue for iOS & Apple Health, but we want to release wearable support simultaneously on both platforms.
• Party System. This feature will allow you to form a party with your friends. It's the first feature myzozoz will develop after finishing maintenance work on Portal and localization support.
• Proper tutorial. With the quest system, we can finally create an effective tutorial that'll greatly improve the onboarding process.
• And more. We're not sure what else we can fit in, but it could include features like Guilds if we have time for it!

And the "invisible," not immediately player-facing features that are needed:

• Improving Portal. It's always been a bit neglected, as usually our time is mostly spent on game features. Myzozoz is working on making it much more stable right now, and we've plans for an overall UI rework to make it much more intuitive.
• Game engine enhancements. Mainly improving the more demanding computations of the game, so there would be improved step loading time and no more lost steps if the loading of steps is interrupted.
• Reworked WalkScape development tools. As floursifter mentioned briefly in the last development blog, now that things have scaled from being just one developer to multiple, our game development tools are not as viable anymore and cause a lot of headaches. To make it easier and faster to do content updates, we need to rework how these function. I've been working on devtools for the last couple of weeks.
• Anti-cheat and moderation. Anti-cheat is already showing a lot of promise, but we need to keep improving it even further. We also don't have proper moderation tools for the game yet, and I usually need to do all of that directly by modifying the game database.
• Infrastructure & scaling. Our current server tech is looking quite good and up for the task right now, but we have some plans to improve it. Mainly, our database and game servers are located on different servers (and are geographically distant), which makes all of the server calls take way more time than they should. Bringing these closer together and making them much more scalable is something we'll need to do before Open Beta.

So that's the list of what's currently missing! I haven't included things like quality-of-life improvements or content updates here, as we'll continuously iterate and expand on those.

A rough timeline

We'll try to update this to the https://walkscape.app/roadmap soon to reflect this, but here's roughly how we're planning to move forward towards Open Beta:

• (In a week) Portal fixes. There have been issues where the Beta Access doesn't update, and sometimes the verification link to email isn't working. Both are pretty much fixed now along with some other improvements, and should be released soon.
• (In 2–3 weeks) Hotfixes to Syrenthia. There haven't been many critical issues, so I have prioritized some other things for now (mainly starting devtools rework). I'll be moving to hotfixing now, and we're hoping to release fixes to issues people have encountered.
• (In about a month) Localization support. Include the translations we have in the game, and add the ability to change translations. This is mostly done, but our previous localization library broke, which caused a slight setback.
• (In around 1–2 months) Party system. Going to be developed by myzozoz after localizations and Portal stuff are done.
• (In about 2 months) Quality of Life update. This might be released in multiple parts, where when we have some set of QoL features implemented and tested, we'll release them to have a constant feedback loop from players.
• (Before/around the end of the year) Combat work started. This feature will take multiple months for me to develop, which is why the reworked devtools are very important (so maxchill and floursifter can work and release content updates even when there's a longer time of no significant feature additions).
• (Before/around the end of the year) Trading at least in internal testing. This feature is mainly worked on by myzozoz, and we anticipate that it will spend a bit more time than usual features in testing due to the complexity and possibilities for exploits/abuse.
• (Before/around the end of the year) Reworked development tools. I'll likely spend part of my time throughout the rest of the year working on and improving these, so we can start using them for combat-related content and doing content updates more easily.
• (After combat) Quests. When we have the combat and trading ready, this among some other minor stuff is what we'll be working on until we have the game ready for Open Beta.
• (When Health Connect is fixed/improved by Google) Wearable & smart watch support.

So, that's the very rough and quite optimistic timeline — some of it might change over time, but for the most part this is the only viable way to work on the remaining features. We're aiming to have the game ready for Open Beta next year, and based on our rough estimates it would likely be possible to have all this ready somewhere in Q3/Q4 next year. If we managed to expand the team with one more developer, it would become a lot easier to hit this target.

First year of Not a Cult, two years of WalkScape development

The first year of Not a Cult operating as a company ended!

This has created some momentary bureaucracy overhead for me, as we need to finish all of the paperwork to pay out taxes and to have all of the accounting verified and sent to the tax office. It's now mostly done, so that's great!

WalkScape itself has now been developed for a little bit over two years in total. For the first year, the development was mostly done in my free time, and only for about a year now I've been working full-time.

Things are looking great — the last year has been intense, but we managed to ship the Closed Beta and we've kept it running for nine months while improving it and adding more features and scaling the team.

A lot has been learned in the last year. For the next year, our goal is to focus on finishing what's missing so we could start the Open Beta.

Also, a lot of stuff has happened behind the curtains. The game engine and how all of it works has been greatly improved over the year, making sure that the game stays stable while adding more features. We've hired another developer, myzozoz, who has been working on a lot of the infrastructure & server stuff, giving me time to work more on the features. Maxchill and Floursifter have been able to start utilizing the development tools and work on content updates, which have also warranted the need to improve that area to support that more smoothly in the future.

We've also been showing the game at a bunch of conventions, including:

• Pocket Gamer Connects Helsinki 2023
• W Love Games Helsinki 2023
• Pocket Gamer Connects London 2024
• Gamescom 2024
• Maagiset Messut Lahti 2024
• And next month, Pocket Gamer Connects 2024 Helsinki

These conventions have always been awesome, as even though we get a lot of valuable (and much appreciated!) feedback on online communities, seeing people in real life, telling how much they like the game and how it's been helping them is way different. Hopefully we can participate in more consumer-oriented conventions, as the B2B conventions aren't always that useful when we are not looking for investors or publishers, but we meet some of our fans every time anyhow.

I'm especially looking forward to joining PAX West or East next year, hopefully we can make it!

Helping out & feedback

As a few last things, we are currently posting a lot to our perhaps lesser-known social media accounts. If you feel like helping us out, you can check these out and drop a like & follow:

WalkScape TikTok

WalkScape Instagram

WalkScape YouTube

WalkScape X/Twitter

As a game dev, I have very little clue on how to run these, so we've been trying all kinds of posts to experiment on what people might like. Ideas & feedback are welcome!

I would also love to hear more feedback and impressions from both long-time players & new players, especially when it comes to the most recent Syrenthia update. Based on what we've seen so far, most people have enjoyed a lot of what we introduced in the update, but having more feedback helps us improve our planning for future content & feature updates. You can write a feedback comment here, or post to Portal/Discord/Reddit!

Until next time

Thanks once again for reading! Also, huge thanks for all of the feedback and support we've been receiving during the third wave; it's been truly awesome so far.

Keep walking, and stay hydrated! ❤️️

Wave 3 Reminder: WalkScape Invite Wave 3 is currently on-going. You can gain access instantly by supporting us on Patreon or Buy Me A Coffee. You can also apply for beta access on our portal, we will be inviting people from those applications over the invite wave period. Wave 3 will last until 6th October and everyone supporting us during this period will receive access to the WalkScape for whole Closed Beta time. More information on how to play WalkScape can be found on our website - https://walkscape.app/help

It’ll take about two hours for your invite to show up, and we know of a bug on some devices where you need to sign in and out of the portal for the invite to show up.

We’ve accepted many thousand applicants this wave and are doing all we can to make the beta as open as possible. We are super appreciative for supporters as you are helping us make some critical hardware improvements and expand the team. Code generation and compilation has been our #1 time sink on the code side to this point, and this month that should improve a lot due to better hardware. If we accepted your application, the best way you can help us is to spread the word if you are enjoying the game!

Syrenthia Patch Recap

August 20th marked the end of the team’s Syrenthia era. This update was a huge culmination of work that we announced at the end of March, and has been the team’s sole focus since May. We hope everyone is enjoying the achievements, PFP customization, consumables, faction reputation, 11 locations, job boards, friends system and other things that have been added in the past couple of months.

The Not a Cult team is pretty happy with the state of the update, and especially that nothing was so broken to allow some of the team could take a break for a week after the convention to rest and recuperate. I’m hoping to have a little break once we get further into wave 3! As a brief summary of current known issues, which will be fixed in the coming weeks:

• Walkpedia is not loading on some accounts, generally for players who played early on and did several types of activity cancelling that were incorrectly tracked back in the day. I highly recommend checking out the Wiki and Interactive Map to fill any needs caused by this outage.
• Some Android Devices have a setting that is causing the in-game popups showing what you received while you were gone to not appear. This is different by device, but try to not disable animations on your phone if this is happening to you and you want to see what you received. Functionally, this bug should not impact your gameplay.
• There’s some visual issues with consuming one consumable at a time. Also issues with consumables automatically turning back on when restarting an activity.
• Text search boxes are a bit weird. Manually backspace your searches for now instead of using the “x”.
• Faction reputation rounding strangely if you are doing activities that grant faction reputation as a reward from completion.
• Some minor localization errors. (read more below)

Mini-Roadmap

There were several development shortcomings that plagued us during August that are our #1 priority to address. To start, the localization library we were using for the game completely broke a week before the Syrenthia release. The memory issue we faced necessitated a move to a new localization library, and we lost the ability to hotload/OTA localization in the game in the process. We were hoping to have some languages available in the game on the release of this patch, but this temporary disaster made it so that we could barely have English available on the release date.

On top of this, WalkScape was originally designed to be developed by one person, and now that we have four people constantly working on the game there have been some serious lessons learned. Long story short, we are going to completely change how the content of the game is managed and developed. The end goal is to allow us to share art, text, and game content together as a team in near-real time.

This re-design will also let schamppu and myzozoz work on longer term feature projects while maxchill and myself release regular content updates, by allowing us to exclude larger features from being pushed as part of the beta app. With the internal tooling improved, maxchill and I will likely be able to add some small content here and there during the rest of the QoL period.

This is going to take some time to accomplish, and the first big thing we want to knock out besides the internal tooling rework is a pedometer rework to fix losing steps while losing connection to the game or swiping away too fast. Once we get past that, we will start on a broader activity rework, travel + 1 queue, gear sets, and other improvements that have been discussed.

The TLDR mini-roadmap is:

Code

• Internal tooling
• Pedometer rework
• Broader QoL features

Content

• Small updates to Syrenthia
• GDTE update

We aren’t quite sure how long the internal tooling and pedometer rework will take, so we will release another roadmap once we have a better estimation of the time those activities will be required. We’d also love to hear content suggestions for the GDTE update!

Balance Thoughts and State of The Game

Job Boards

I am fairly happy with how this featured turned out besides the normal quality tool tasks. Funnily enough, these tasks are way better for newer players who are progressing naturally through the content, but really difficult for late game players to complete.

Overall, job boards are meant to sink USEFUL materials from the game, and normal quality crafts are the opposite of useful. These can be sold for money, and the job boards will only ask for better quantities.

I built a balance tool for calculating the job board tasks and what it’s rewards should be before designing this feature. There’s a few that missed the mark due to poor assumptions like not being able to wear conservationist gear underwater. I was also always rounding up, which made a punishing breakpoints on fine material tasks at low quantities. I’ve adjusted this a bit and a few jobs will change (sweet kelp, etc.)

Consumables

I am also fairly happy with consumables during the early and mid game. However, they need communication in the tutorial at some point. There’s a lot of useful consumables in the early game like cooked shrimp and nettle tea that have gotten missed by most accounts in Wave 3, so when we rework the tutorial this is a priority for highlighting.

Consumables are an odd feature to balance between the multiplayer and single-player versions of the game. Some players have claimed that the consumables feel too weak to pursue, and here’s my counter-points:

• Players are getting the “full” experience rate from cooking fish and dishes, and the benefit for another skill from using the consumable.
• If the benefit for the other skill approaches the steps you took making the dish, cooking becomes a “free skill”, and consumables would be worth near nothing.
• If the experience rate was lower, hardly anyone would engage in the cooking system in the future single-player offline version of the game.
• The end goal is that fine materials for cooking and fine consumables are being used at a 100% rate in the game, and that players are generally buying consumables to have a high percentage consumable consumption uptime.

There’s been some minor side points that I haven’t seen a lot of discussion points on: chest finding is now connected to insanely strong consumables and direct experience gain through the chest-exclusive consumables and memospheres. I’m curious to see what strategies and tool loadouts this encourages once we get later into the game.

I do hope to continually connect Cooking with the rest of the game loops, similar to how it is a critical part of the Crafting process in Syrenthia. Having one of the best fishing and foraging tools locked behind a decent cooking level is good for the game!

Faction Reputation and Region Chests

This was by far the most undercooked feature of the update, as it was designed and implemented in the last few days before release. Expect some changes here to many of the region chests and faction reputation rewards going forward, but I’m happy with some of them! Thanks for the discussion and feedback on several of the rewards.

Syrenthia

I pushed Syrenthia to be 6 locations instead of 4 halfway through the design process and I think the area feels much more substantial now. Now, it also has plenty of room in the future for activities in the Hunter skill among other possible gathering skills, and the area opens up interesting possibilities for other Underwater areas around the map.

Random Thoughts

• There’s significantly more incentive to leave the KaFF triangle (Kallaheim - Frusenholm - Frostbite) area sooner on your account than before the Syrenthia patch, which I think is a positive
• Looking forward to what I can accomplish after the activity rework - this is going to be the basis for many more complex interactions and future skills in the game
• Making predictions about the player economy is fun, but I can’t wait to see it in-person and start gathering data to balance the open beta launch

Closing

Thanks for reading along. In two weeks, you can expect Schamppu back with a convention recap and hopefully some more insight on our progress on the mini-roadmap above. Stay hydrated, and stay moving!