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!

Important information: 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 sparingly 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

---

Hello everyone, hope you’re all enjoying the new Syrenthia update, running around doing jobs, earning faction reputations, and finally consuming those wines and beers. This time, it’s me, maxchill, writing this because schamppu and myzozoz are busy promoting WalkScape at the largest gaming convention in Europe – Gamescom 2024.

WalkScape has now been in development for almost two years, and it's starting to shape into a more full and immersive experience. For the past few weeks, the team has been working hard to achieve this, and while there's still a long road ahead with many steps to take, I wanted to praise the work of schampu, myzozoz, and floursifter, as well as everyone on the alpha tester team who have helped immensely to find all the funny, annoying, and critical bugs!

When I was given the task of writing this, I wanted to reflect over what WalkScape has become and why I have such passion for both working on the game and also playing it. I hope this serves as an intriguing guide to the undecided reader, and provide an insight for already existing player. To better express myself I came up with a list of 5 reasons to play WalkScape:

1. Improve your daily walking habits
2. Progress your character in classic MMORPG style
3. Explore the vast world of Arenum
4. Play and compete with friends and others
5. Enjoy non-predatory, non-intrusive gameplay

Improve your daily walking habits

Alright, let’s dive into the first reason, because we now actually have some data to back the claim that playing WalkScape has positive effect on your daily walking habits. Just this week we ran a quick survey on our discord where we asked players to compare their daily average steps before playing the WalkScape and after. To me the results were quite shocking, because I of course hoped that our game provides positive effect on players daily walking habits, but I didn’t expect it to be to such high extent. Let’s look at the data down below.

Here we can see that the daily step count of survey respondents has increased by ~80%, from 6,331 daily average steps to 11,413. You can also notice how with each subsequent wave we get more casual daily steppers (lower daily average) and that they actually have the most increase at 97%.

Of course, not everyone will see such a high increase, but those for whom the game clicks can expect a very impressive daily step increase. Also, don't be discouraged if you don't observe a staggering increase in your daily stepping amounts, because even if you stay at your current activity level, WalkScape still adds a bit of fun to your daily life. Over the closed beta period, we have received a lot of feedback, most of it being positive, so I also want to share some of the testimonials we have gathered since the game has been available to players.

Progress your character in classic MMORPG style

It's no secret that WalkScape draws inspiration from one of, if not the most well-known, MMORPG called RuneScape. I personally have played OSRS for only a few hours, as World of Warcraft was my MMO of choice, but from my observation of similarities, it's mainly the skill system where you can level up all skills without being locked into a specific class. Also, a big part of the game is non-combat activities like woodcutting, mining, crafting, etc.

As you can see from my character screenshot, currently there are 9 skills, but many more are to come later in development. Increasing the skill levels is the main part of the game, but there are also many more things to chase — like achievements, special profile picture unlocks, legendary items, and so forth. The game is enjoyable to both min-maxers and casual players alike.

It's also important to remember that you're not only progressing in the game, you're also progressing in real life, improving your health by walking and moving. I often forget while being happy about my WalkScape character progress, that I should also be happy about my own body and its healthy improvements. The best players in WalkScape are not the ones who have the privilege to sit at a computer/console all day, but the ones that move their legs the most.

Explore the vast world of Arenum

The world and lore of Arenum has been crafted by our loremaster schamppu. He's always been very much into crafting the grand scheme of things, which is great, because I'm myself more of a zoomed-in storyteller. Currently, only part of the world is fleshed out and it doesn't have quests or stories just yet, but we can't wait until we can start working on those.

Still, the map itself is exciting to explore. You can visit many different locations where you can enter buildings and meet NPCs, making the world feel quite alive even in its current state.

The world is divided into multiple continents which are ruled by different factions. Players can gain various benefits from doing jobs and quests for these factions. There are also locations that are accessed only by completing prerequisites, making them exciting to unlock and explore.

Although only part of the world is currently filled with content, it still provides players with enough gameplay for millions of steps. Everyone is free to pursue the aspects of the game that excite them most.

Play and compete with friends and others

I always find it exciting to share the journey and accomplishments with others, both the ones I make in games and those that are related to fitness. In WalkScape, you can do both at the same time. The game has online leaderboards for various things like skills, achievement points, and total steps.

It also has a friend system with its own separate leaderboard, so you can gather your friend group and compete with each other. Doing friendly challenges always motivates me to walk more (I did a 50k step day just to beat schamppu in a race), but in the future, you'll not only be able to compete with others but also cooperate by trading, doing dungeons, or bosses together.

WalkScape is currently in its most basic MMO shape, but that will greatly be improved upon, so you'll never feel alone in the huge world. Cooperative PvE, PvP, trading, and many more multiplayer features are coming in the future. And if you prefer to play on your own, don't be discouraged, because WalkScape upon full release will also include a single-player version.

Enjoy non-predatory, non-intrusive gameplay

It's easy to not notice an important aspect of WalkScape — there are no ads, and there never will be any ads. I only realized this because I recently tried out a few other mobile games and was hit by many ads, predatory daily offers, buyable currencies, and all the other stuff that "game makers" do to squeeze money out of players.

WalkScape doesn't steal your time by making you watch time-wasting ads or clutter free space with banners. We're very adamant about keeping the game this way. I personally feel like just because a game is on mobile, it doesn't have to follow the "industry standard" practices.

The game is also respectful of players' time. We don't have the intention of making a game that requires players to spend all of their time on it. The opposite, actually — we want people to be able to enjoy their walks without the need to look at a phone screen. There are no daily mechanics that play on people's FOMO. WalkScape lets you be as engaged with it as you want.

Parting words

Thanks for bearing with me through the DevBlog, I enjoyed the chance to reflect on what WalkScape truly is - an MMORPG that can make your life healthier while providing entertainment through the daily life.

I also want to thank everyone for supporting us through the development, without you we likely wouldn’t be able to maintain full creative freedom which is very important to us.

Happy walking, and until next time!

Hello and welcome back to the WalkScape devblog! We’ve skipped one development blog from the usual schedule due to my summer vacation, but now we’re back, and we’ve been cooking up a lot of new stuff!

Let’s get started!

WalkScape at Gamescom

We got accepted to promote WalkScape for free at Gamescom, as part of the Creative Media Stands EU initiative. This means that on the 20th-25th, me and myzozoz will be presenting WalkScape at Gamescom business side. Sadly, this free booth we got is on the business side only, so if you’re attending with a regular ticket you’ll not be able to visit our booth.

If there’s interest to meet with us outside Gamescom in Cologne, please add me as a friend on Discord (schamppu) or send an email to [email protected]. I’d love to meet some of our fans while there!

Gamescom provides us a huge opportunity to get the word out about the game I’ve now been working on for two years. This is why we’ve sped up our efforts to get both the next content update and Wave 3 out well before the original schedule.

Wave 3 and Syrenthia release date

In order to have a good shot at Gamescom attracting interest from gaming media, we need to have an ongoing wave. This is why the Wave 3 and Syrenthia update are planned for release between the 19th and 21st. We still have some work to do before it’s ready, which is why I can't say for sure which of these dates the actual release will happen, but it should be at the latest on the 21st when the convention starts. The wave will end 30th of September.

As a reminder, if you’d like to gain access to the game immediately when the Wave goes live, you can support us over Patreon or Buy Me a Coffee. If you’ve done so before 30th of September, you’ll gain instant access to the Closed Beta. Also, you can sign up for the Closed Beta on Portal, and we’ll be accepting new players who’ve applied during the wave.

We haven’t had much time between my summer vacation (before which we already released a massive update) and this one. Even though our plan is that we’ll get everything ready on the release date, due to the time constraints this might mean we’ll need to leave certain things out. And while our testing team is working as hard as they can, there’s a higher chance of some bugs slipping through as we don’t have as much time for testing as usual.

When I get back from Germany, I’ll start releasing hotfixes (or if something needed to be cut out, adding them in) and working on the much-anticipated QoL update.

Consumables

Syrenthia update contains few major new feature additions: consumables, faction reputation, and job boards.

Let’s start off with consumables! These have been covered quite many times in past development blogs, but finally they're implemented.

There are two kinds of consumables you can have active at the same time: foods and potions. There are no potions in the game initially, as those will be created with the upcoming Alchemy skill.

The consumables give you attributes while they’re in use, and their duration is step based. This means that you can gather a large stack of consumables, put them to one of the slots and then they’ll be used by your character for thousands of steps.

In addition to these consumables that are used by your character passively while doing activities, there will be some that have instant effects. We’ve already added Memospheres, which practically work similarly to XP lamps in RuneScape, meaning that you’ll gain a small amount of experience for consuming those. Teleportation scrolls are something we’re also planning to be one kind of “immediate effect” consumable along with healing items and more.

And just to make it clear, there will be no consumables that you need to pay real money for. All of the consumables are gained in-game without any kind of MTX.

Job boards

Job boards are the first quest-like feature, although more like repeatable mini-quests than actual in-game stories like we’ve planned for Quests that are coming later.

You can find Job Boards around Arenum, and each job board has three randomized jobs each day that you can accept. You can have 3 jobs accepted at one time, and there is no time limit for the completion of the jobs.

Initially, the offering of varied jobs is very limited, but our intention is to add a few different types of jobs. Mainly, the objectives will be to gather items or give items. As a reward for your efforts and depending on how difficult the job was, you can receive the following:

• Special consumables or items
• Faction reputation
• Coins
• Skill experience
• Chests

The idea behind Job Boards is for them to work as one kind of item sink in preparation for player trading. Additionally, they give you objectives and work as a way to grind faction reputation points.

Faction reputation

The final new major feature addition is Faction Reputation. These are tightly linked to the Jobs and Job Boards, and provide a lot of rewards for your hard work in the different realms, guilds, and factions in WalkScape!

This update includes four factions with their Faction Reputation systems: Jarvonia, Syrenthia, Trellin, and Erdwise. In addition to geographical realms, Guilds will also be using this system in the future.

The Faction Reputation system enables you to level up your reputation in the different in-game realms, currently only granting you some item and cosmetic rewards for doing so. This system was planned mainly as a way to pace the Main Quest progression, as it doesn’t really make sense that you could immediately walk into a castle and start some epic quest when your character basically starts off as a nobody.

Other things that the Faction Reputation is planned to unlock for you are special shops and services, shop discounts, new routes and buildings, and cosmetic things such as titles.

Check out the Faction Reputation track here:

Other features and more!

We also have several more minor but equally useful features and a crazy amount of content in the new update. Let’s cover some of them here!

Friends in game

You’re now able to add other players as your friends, see your friends in-game and manage your friendships. This has been the last step before moving to implementing the Party system.

Privacy settings

We’ve added some privacy settings to manage what you want other players to see about you. You can hide your steps so others can’t see your step data, and also make yourself anonymous on the leaderboards. Both of these are opt-out, so privacy settings will be toggled on by default for everyone, including existing players.

Content

Some numbers of our current amount of new content:

• 100+ new items
• 10+ new activities
• 7+ new locations
• 50+ new crafting recipes

Here are some content showcases:

Until next time

Alright, that was a lot to unpack for this development blog! I hope you enjoyed reading through.

Just a little bit more than a week until the next wave and update should go live! Until then, stay hydrated and keep walking!