Hello Lemmy!

It's been more than a year since I last posted here. A lot has happened since - most importantly, we just released player-to-player Trading to the game and we're looking for some new players to join the game!

We (Not a Cult, the company) have gone from just me as a solo dev to now having a team of five people in total and things are ramping up!

I've also been posting all development updates to (!walkscape@lemmy.world) for like couple years now if you're interested to follow us here on Lemmy!

Screenshots

Screenshot 1: Activity view

Screenshot 2: Gear view

Screenshot 3: Location view

Screenshot 4: World Map

How to start playing

You can start playing the game immediately if you support us through our Patreon page. We currently have 20% and 60% Discounts on Patreon for your first month/year as a way to celebrate the release of Trading. More on the Discounts here.

The game is entirely community funded with no investors or publishers behind it. This way we can ensure that our players are always our #1 priority and the creative vision for this game isn't compromised.

If you don't feel like supporting the game or want to try it first for free, you can apply to the Closed Beta. We let new players in who have applied fairly regularly.

Info on how to apply for free access.

Introduction

3 years ago I was wondering of ways how I could motivate myself to walk more. I have ADHD, and sometimes find it hard to motivate myself to exercise. Thought about combining RS as I've been addicted to it for more than 10 years and walking, and that's how the game got started.

WalkScape is a game inspired by RuneScape and other MMOs but with a twist - you progress in it by walking in the real world! It's designed to be non-intrusive, with no predatory monetization practices. By non-intrusive we mean that it will truly let you enjoy your time outside by not constantly requiring your attention. Everything that needs active involvement (like combat or quests) should be done when you get home.

The main goal of the game is to make people more interested in walking by giving them an amazing gaming experience to motivate them to keep walking. And you can play it while at work, or when you are walking with friends, and while walking your dog. You can truly focus on what you are doing and do more active playing later.

Features & content

- records your steps in the background when the game isn't even open

- no GPS, no microtransactions, no predatory practises

- smart watch integrations on both iOS and Android

- all of the art assets, writing, content and designs are created by real people. The game has also been translated to multiple different languages by our fans.

- 12 different skills to level up

- a huge world map with 50+ locations

- almost 1000 different items

- 10+ pets

- NPCs, shops, dozens of achievements

- job boards, factions and faction reputations

- leaderboards, Trading, friend system

- and much more!

Gen AI disclosure

Early in the development we used AI generated images as placeholders for some locations. All of those have since been removed and replaced with images created by a real artist.

There is no AI generated content, art or writing in the game and we intend to keep it that way.

Videos

WalkScape introduction video

WalkScape Ultimate Beginner Guide video

WalkScape Dev Interview on Trading video

What's been added since last post

I posted here last time more than a year ago and a ton has happened since. Our team has been busy especially putting together the servers & technical requirements to support real time & asynchronous player interactions. Trading is the first feature coming out that uses this.

In addition we've shipped several content updates, QoL, new game mechanics, reworked Bank system, pets, three new skills and a lot more to the game. You can find the full the full version log fron our Wiki.

Thanks for reading

Thank you so much for reading, and I really hope you'd consider joining the game! We have a lot of new stuff coming out and we're ramping up to get the game fully released as Open Beta.

Thanks again Lemmy for all the support we’ve gained from here. The feedback has also been awesome, and the encouragement we’ve had from your comments have meant a lot to all of us working on the game!

I’ll be answering all comments, feedback and questions here. Stay hydrated and keep walking everyone! <3

Welcome to DevBlog #93! We got some big news and announcements to make this time.

First, we'll go over the details about the Trading system and explain our current design reasons & plans how to go forward with it. And we have a release date for Trading, it's going live on next week!

Lastly, we'll be covering the update we dropped this week and give some insights into other plans.

It's going to be a lot to cover. We really recommend people to take a good read through this, as it'll aim to answer any questions you might have about the upcoming Trading. And I'll be answering any questions you might have in the comments too like always!

Trading Patreon discount & release date

Trading is releasing on next Wednesday (7th of October)!

Starting right now, there is a 20% Discount and 60% of your first month/year on our Patreon. This Discount will run until 22nd of October.

20% Discount is for the $4.50 (Walker) and $7.50 (Serious Walker) tiers. Discount code on checkout: FA8B6

60% Discount is for the $25.00 (Super Serious Walker) tier. Discount code on checkout: 148E2

You can join our Patreon from here. Remember to use the according discount code on checkout to benefit from the discount.

We also did a post on Patreon with the info if you're interested to read more about it there.

WalkScape is completely community funded with no investor or publishers backing the game which keeps us independent. This ensures that our players are always our highest priority and not the shareholders.

Every support helps. Even if you've had free access to the game or ended your membership supporting us really helps to keep things going.

Myzozoz: The Road to Trading

Hey guys! This feature has been a long time cooking, so I thought it fun to share a bit more insight on what the road to this point has looked like from my perspective.

Background

It's April 2024 and the game has been available for testers for three months. I'm sitting at a bar being interviewed for a developer position for a tiny game company called Not a Cult over a pint of Pepsi. I think it's going pretty well and the conversation moves to the topic of future visions for the project, and the CEO in front of me obviously starts getting more excited, as he tells me about all the cool features he wants to include in the game. Out of those, only a few are mentioned as obvious must-haves, but one of them is the ability for players to trade in-game items with each other.

The next Monday I'm starting my job at the company's new office space and the onboarding starts. Due to having previous background in web development, my introductory tasks included reworking the game's web page and Portal; something Schamppu had little time for amidst trying to solve some nasty issues with Android step tracking. From there I expanded to working on the servers and quickly they become my home turf inside the project's code base. The next thing I know, I'm responsible for the game's entire backend systems.

As a natural side effect, features that required significant effort on the backend side ended up on my task list. That's why, when the talk went to trading, it started to become more and more obvious that most of the feature would be my responsibility. And boy, was there talk about trading! Since the first closed beta release, the community had been asking for the feature and very quickly it became one of our "big three" (trading, quests and combat).

But like most things in life, working on trading was hard. There always seemed to be something pressing or urgent sneaking its way onto the top of the todo-list, pushing the feature further and further into the future. There were also many open questions about what the feature should look like and what we can expect to actually build with the limited amount of programming resources we had at hand. We spent many long days and long nights at the office, bashing away on other cool features and content for the players and time seemed to simply slip away.

But trading never fully went away. The topic kept getting brought up in team meetings and unofficial conversations about what we would build next. Additionally, I had a personal stake in the feature: After hundreds of opened chests, the Shovel axe had eluded me. Meanwhile, my fiancé had already gotten her second, which obviously put some strain on our relationship. If only we'd had trading back then...

Finally, just before our vacations started in July 2025, Schamppu and I headed out for an after-work beer in the same bar where we'd had the interview. On our walk, I told Schamppu, that it's time: When I come back from my time off, I should start working on trading.

He agreed.

We ended up walking in circles for an hour, and during that time we laid out the fundamental design philosophy of the feature and what the hard technical prerequisites were. I travelled to Italy, spent some time relaxing my brain and when I came back, the game was on.

The Grind

Turns out, the feature required a fairly substantial amount of architecture level changes to the game. Prior to that point, the server was more or less oblivious to what the player was doing in the game. The player did what they did and simply reported their findings onwards to the server. This works perfectly well as long as everyone plays in perfect isolation, but you might see the issue this presents for an MMO, especially when moving items from one player's inventory to another. Even more, the server had no idea what the player even could have. The in-game items (like all other assets) were published as configuration files embedded into the game client itself. The server was completely out of the loop. So before we got to building, we had to do some renovating.

So the most fundamental building block was bringing game awareness to the server. The simple option would have been to include the configuration files on the server, but that would have meant manually copying the files over and having to keep very close track on which version of the assets was on the client and server each. In addition to being prone to human errors, this would have meant that any time we want to make content updates, we had to update the game client and the server perfectly in tandem. To make matters worse, we actually have several servers, providing different types of services, which all needed to stay in the loop. Deployments would have become a nightmare! But worst of all, the simple solution just seemed... inelegant. So into the trash can it went, and instead we created the OTA.

Over-the-air asset delivery is a fairly standard architecture solution, found in many games and non-game software alike, and it more or less solved all of the issues I outlined above. With the push of a button, you could instantly publish content and translation changes to the player base, keeping servers and clients in sync and allowing us to remove the embedded assets from the executables, reducing bundle size. The only problem was, we weren't able to find a pre-existing solution that fit our exact use case. Which meant that somebody had to build it. And that somebody was me. But how hard could it be?

Turns out, it's not actually that difficult, but it is time consuming. The first MVP versions came together in a few months, but after that we kept running into various problems, which meant that I had to spend time coming back, over and over, until the feature was finally stable. This happened mostly during the fall and winter of 2025. Over Christmas we spent a lot of time on recruitment, and with Crushy starting in February, I had to use a not-insignificant amount of time on onboarding.

And while these were the big things, I simultaneously spent a lot of time on minor features, improvements, bugfixes and oh so many random tasks that just flew my way and required immediate attention. I'd say that out of all of my working hours during this period, around 40% was spent on my main task (if that), sprinkled throughout the week, heavily seasoned with context-switches and laced with interruptions. I've been told this can be quite mentally taxing, but what really annoyed me was that it was slowing me down. I had been working on trading for over half a year with little to show for it, except that players occasionally loaded into the game slower because they had to download OTAs.

But I kept grinding. Because I wanted that Shovel axe. Not because I needed it, I had long since outlevelled the item, but because of principle.

Getting there

Then came the time in late spring, when things started to click. The OTAs seemed to work stably enough. I had more or less ticked off every single item on the background-only checklist for the server's trading requirements. Content updates were rolling out and my fiancé was up to three shovel axes. I managed to offload some distracting tasks and we agreed to postpone some secondary features. That's when the mailbox system was created. After such a long time on background-only tasks, it felt great to finally work on something that was immediately visible to the player. Even if it was a niche system and Schamppu did most of the UI work, it felt like a home run compared to previous tasks. The mailbox was released on the 1st of July and I immediately hopped onto trading.

Before I left for vacation three weeks later, I had the first demo of trading working on my local build. Three weeks at that point felt like an insult. If it was so easy, why hadn't we just done it earlier? Obviously, the truth is that it was easy because I had done the struggling over the previous year. And the feature wasn't anywhere close to being done, but it did show that it was doable. The success filled me with excitement and confidence, which we in Finland express as mild enjoyment and cautious optimism.

After my time off, I have spent my time fleshing out the features, fixing bugs and overall doing my damn best to make sure I don't have work the next few weekends after release hotfixing the mess I've created. This feature is actually the first one where I've been solely responsible for the UI implementation since the friend system back in 2024, which has been a blast. I am very excited to get the feature into your hands and have the ability to use it myself.

While basically all of the code for the feature is written by me (in good or bad), everything we do is a team effort. The design has been influenced by every single member of the team, maxchill's obviously done the necessary art, and by taking other tasks off my hands, everybody in the team has allowed me to pour my concentration into this feature.

And now it's coming: WalkScape Trading™ (not actually a trademark). Prepare your coin purses and dust off your ethereals, because we are going to move some inventory. Finally, I will have my shovel axe.

Trading: the Design

Let's start off with the design of the Trading system! I'll format this into Q&A style so it'll be easier to read through.

How will the Trading work?

The upcoming trading system works through the Mailbox we already added and through a new UI where you can initiate trades with other players. The trades are one-on-one trades where both players can add items (up to 6 different ones) and money to a trade deal. Once both accept the items will be withdrawn from the bank automatically and mailed to the other player's Mailbox. This means that you can manage your trades even while not at a location that has a bank/mailbox as long as you have the items in your bank.

Why you settled on this type of Trading instead of something like Grand Exchange?

Firstly, we feel like there will always be demand for free form Trading outside of a controlled marketplace, so this felt like the safest way to start. Also, because this type of Trading system has a higher barrier to entry (you need to find someone willing to trade with you outside the game) we can start something more manageable first, get some feedback, and then take those into account when expanding the Trading system with smaller risk of having things going wrong at a larger scale.

Secondly, WalkScape is the first game of this type, and when we tried designing a Trading system we noticed that there's a lot of things we can theorize that might happen or be possible problems. But it's impossible to know for sure. So the plan we then ended up going for is that we start with a Trading system that is as free as possible at the beginning, and then with data & feedback start to add limitations, other trading forms and more to improve it. We felt that trying to solve issues pre-emptively that might not even be there would take way too much time for possibly no benefit, and also make Trading unnecesarrily overlimited that could lead into the system being less fun.

Are there any limitations to Trading?

The only limitation we have is that in a deal you can have up to 6 different items and money as your offer. But that's the only limitation.

As explained previously, we felt like designing and adding limitations would've been the wrong way to approach this and way too time consuming. Instead we decided we'll have as few limitations as possible, and then add them based on player feedback & trading data so we address issues as accurately as possible without compomising the fun aspect of Trading or spending time on something that might've been unnecessary.

Trading: the Future

So in a nutshell: the Trading system starts with very few limitations as possible, and our plan is to improve it based on data & feedback. In our release this Monday we already added a lot of item data & economy tracking to the game, so we can collect balancing data to fine tune the economy better and also see once we expand and improve trading what their economical effects will be. One way to put this is that we're having a scientific approach to developing Trading where we want to back things with proof and data to justify decisiond we make. Once we transition to open beta there'll be the one server reset (as we've dicussed in more detail on DevBlog #85: Update on our way to Open Beta), so this is our one shot opportunity to make most out of learning how different decisions & designs affect the game economy and Trading with limited risk involved.

But this Trading system is just the starting point. Like I mentioned, it's a system that probably always will have some kind of use. But we're expecting that with feedback and data, some of the following might happen:

1. Grand Exchange style marketplace

A Trading system like this one is a bit cumbersome to use, as you need to organize the Trades outside of the game. It works great for families, friend groups, etc. who want to do trades with people they already know. Or maybe for lending an item for a moment or whatever.

Based on the feedback we get from players, we're expecting there might be a demand for something like Grand Exchange style marketplace where it's very easy to find an item to buy or put things to be sold. We're prepared to make this happen, but if players don't like the idea of it in their feedback, we're also ready to scrap that idea and go whatever the community feels is the better options. Even if its keeping the trading as-is.

2. Limitations on one-on-one trades

Like mentioned, Trading will launch with very few limitations at first. But once we have data from how trades are conducted and of the economical impacts to players and we get get player feedback, it's rather likely we will be tightening down the system. Then with out historical trading data we will also be able to see how these changes impact the economy & how trades are done versus when there were very few limitations to the Trading.

3. UI, QoL, etc.

General improvements to the UI and other Quality-of-Life improvements are likely to come, like with all of our features.

Trading: the Ironfoot

One thing we did already add due to concerns from the community is Ironfoot status to the game.

When Trading launches, everyone currently in Closed Beta is going to be an Ironfoot. If you want to interact with other players through Trading and any future systems, the game will specifically ask if you're willing to give up your Ironfoot status and become a regular character.

You're able to see if other players are Ironfoot on their in-game Character sheets & in some other places like Leaderboards.

We decided that having this retroactive "relinquish Ironfoot" system works best in Closed Beta, as some people have already been playing the game for long and might want to keep playing as purely single player characters. In the Open Beta however we've been planning that this decision will be something players make during Character creation. But it's still not set in stone how we'll approach Ironfoot status in the Open Beta.

Ironfoot is similar as Ironman mode in similar games like RuneScape, but we decided to make it feet related due to... our fixations :D

Trading: organize trades on Discord & 3rd Party Tools

Initially we recommend you to trade with other players using our Discord server where we will create new channels to find and make trade offers with others! These will launch once the trading goes live.

We're also hoping to see 3rd party tool developers, which we have many, to jump on board and create some web tools for listing & finding trade offers. These kind of tools would help people to find and organize trades and us to see how 3rd party tool developers will approach trading.

This week's update & more!

We also released a new update this week with some bits of content, QoL and the Trading & economy data tracking.

Most noteworthy of these here is the data tracking side - we've now had a bunch of data already trickling in before the trading, and I'll have some fun bits thrown at the end of this devblog from our data side.

Crushy is now finished with the rollback fix and has moved onto working to fix the ANR issues. I'm currently busy between multiple different things, but the Job Board system is almost there already. It's still likely to take some time to be released, as pushing out the Trading is our next short term priority.

Maxchill and Weasel are already working on some new content as is usual!

Fun data stuff!

Overall

• The total value of players in the game is 2.55 billion, with 1.49 billion coins in circulation and 1.06 billion worth of items in their inventories and banks
• The most common items are Berries and Stones, with players owning a total of 24.3 million Berries and 87% of all players having at least one Stone
• The most equipped item is an Uncommon Shiny Ring, with over 22 thousand being worn
• There are 11 eternal crafted items, which are held by only one player each, like the Eternal Amulet of Cooling Ice, Eternal Pine Toolbox and Eternal Iron Chef's Hat
• 11.3K players have been granted access through the Noiseless Pass, almost 10K players have access to the Winter Waves Glacier and Black Eye Peak, 5.56K have been bogged down in a swamp and over 2K Have been granted passage through the barrier

Since the update

• Players have crafted 437 thousand items using artisan skills, with the top crafted items being Ectoplasm (85.7K), Linen Cloth (41.3K) and Basic Leather (17.2K)
• Players have received over 2.7 million items from various activities
• Players have consumed 2.5K bottles of Wine and 1.5K Sweet Carrot Pies (now that sounds like a party)
• Players have crafted, found or received 38 ethereal or eternal items
• Players have found almost 500 collectible items
• Players have dropped 120K items (they really don't have use for that much Stone, Wooden Sticks or Maple logs, I guess)
• And players have sold over 732K items, keeping the stores well stocked on Oak logs, Berries and Willow logs

Until next time

That's everything for today! It's a big update and going to be a big week for us next week. After Trading is released we only have one more feature missing from Open Beta - the Quests system.

I hope you enjoyed the DevBlog and we're waiting for as much feedback as possible with the Trading system once it's released. Best places to give us feedback is on Reddit, Discord or if you don't use either then just e-mailing us (support@walkscape.app) also works.

Happy walking and stay hydrated everyone!

Hello, and welcome to DevBlog #92!

In our last DevBlog, we had just returned from the vacation. This time we've got the ball rolling at full speed again!

In this DevBlog I'll be covering the upcoming rework and partial redesign of Job Boards. We also have some content teasers here, and I'm happy to say that this content is releasing next week.

We also have some QoL for the in game world map that'll be releasing soon, fixes to the rollback issue, and ANR (application not responding) news.

It's a lot to cover, so let's dive in!

World Map QoL, content update & more

Crushy has also been working on adding some nice icons to show up on the World Map. We intend to release this next week alongside some new content that's been worked on by Weasel & maxchill! Crushy has also worked on a fix to the rollback issues, and we've released an update today that should already fix that for the most part.

We don't have a distinct release date for when this update is going out (but we're quite confident it'll be released next week) and it'll contain both new content & world map QoL. The Job Board rework & redesign is going to be released later.

Myzozoz has been hard at work with trading. But more on that in another dev blog!

Job Board rework & redesign

This is something I've been working on since I got back from the vacation, and I'm estimating it'll take a couple weeks more until it's ready for release!

This rework and redesign includes a lot of things:

• Jobs will be rerolled once a week instead of every day
• Job boards will offer 20 jobs per board (might still change a bit, and special boards like Herbert's can differ in this regard)
• Jobs will be rolled on the server and will be same for all players in the game
• Jobs UI & in-game logic will be reworked quite a bit, which should help with some ANRs (application-not-responding)
• You will be able to accept jobs even if you're not at the job board's location
• When it comes to crafted items, you can return items of higher quality than what the job requires
• And a bunch of other improvements!

We've been internally talking about reworking the Job Boards for quite some time now. There's been a lot of feedback on this system and it had created some annoying gameplay loops. All of these designs are aiming to address those issues.

Other goals with this rework is to make it much more easy for our content designers to update existing job boards and when making new ones. The current job board system needed a lot of manual work. The new system addresses this, making it much faster for our content designers to focus on other things. And the other thing this addresses is ANRs, as job boards have been causing those (especially on Pixel devices, more on this later).

ANRs

Application-not-responding (ANRs for short) have been an issue especially on Pixel devices for a long time now. While I've tried to alleviate this issue (and Job Board rework should help it as well once released), we've now decided that once Crushy is finished up with this update and fixing the rollback issue, he'll dedicate the time that's necessary to finally fix the ANR issue for good.

Previously I've done my best to apply small fixes to it, but properly fixing it takes at least 2 or 3 weeks of development time, which I've never found time for as I'm often busy with feature development. To everyone who has been patiently waiting for this issue to get fixed: that will be the next thing Crushy is going to work on and it'll be fixed for good. It'll take some time, but you can rest assured that there's going to be an update that is coming soon-ish that fixes it. The rollback fix that was already released should also alleviate the issue a bit, but it's not a comprehensive fix to the issue.

Until next time

That's all for this DevBlog!

For everyone who've had the ANR issue, I also want to say I'm sorry it's taken so long. Now with an extra developer we finally have the luxury of having someone who can tackle these kind of issues we haven't had the proper time to tackle without it delaying feature development efforts too much.

Happy walking and stay hydrated everyone!

Hello!

As stated on the previous DevBlog #91, we had a pause in DevBlogs until today as our team was having the Summer vacation. This time around we had staggered the vacations people took a bit meaning that there was still development happening!

I've just recently come back to Finland from my hiking & traveling trip that went around the Europe, so as promised in the previous DevBlog, the content on this DevBlog is going to be light and vacation related. In our next DevBlog on 17th you can expect some stuff on the content that's been worked on and more on that's coming next!

Okay, let's dive into what we did to recharge during the vacations.

What we did during the vacations to recharge

Schamppu

I traveled for multiple weeks around the Europe. I started off by meeting up with maxchill in Latvia, and spent a good while at his summer cabin just relaxing and looking at all the stuff he's been building during his vacations. Also tried out the sauna he built last year, and it was amazing (coming from a Finn, we know all about saunas).

Then I continued towards Poland where I visited Warsaw, Katowice, Wroclaw and Wisla. I did hiking in both Wroclaw and Wisla, and actually went on one mountain hike with a WalkScape player from Poland! I also visited Bratislava in Slovakia.

During the summer trip, I carried my new drone with me and did something very nerdy in all of the cities: I took videos of trams and the cities I visited. I made a small video of all the places I went to for this DevBlog (link below). If you want to see more of the videos I took, I have a tiny Instagram account called @onlytramz where I posted more of those during my trip. It's just a weird hobby I had for this Summer :D

Video of my trip, not the greatest edit I've done but to highlight some of the places I went to!

Myzozoz

I had much simpler goals for my vacation. At the beginning of August I attended my first ever ultramarathon in Latvia. The weeks before it I spent recovering and preparing for the trip, and afterwards I was too busy recovering to do much else. Latvia was awesome, the weather was great and running felt good!

Since I wasn't able to do sports for most of my vacation, I instead played a lot of disc golf and video games. Oh, and of course I walked a bunch

Maxchill

I spent his vacation enjoying time with his family in their countryside home. Alongside mushroom foraging, cow gazing, and schamppu hosting, I managed to fulfil one of his New Year's resolutions of making at least one oil painting this year!

Crushy

I usually schedule my holidays to skip the worst of Finnish Winter but that doesn’t mean I didn’t get some downtime to enjoy the near-total eclipse (hey 83% is nothing to laugh at) on the 12th at an event organised by the The Ursa Astronomical Association. They were there with telescopes, lots of different types of eclipse glasses/filters and a lot of very knowledgeable people filling in the crowd on what was happening.

Unfortunately it went below the horizon just as it was getting nice and dark!

Weasel

Weasel has been powering up our e-mail servers as usual.

Other news & updates while the vacation was going

One important thing that happened but shouldn't to our knowledge affect any players is that Flutter (which we use as the underlying tech for the game) updated and bumped their minimum iOS version to 15.

During the vacation there was also a problem with the character history rolling back, but this has already been resolved while I was away. Good job on that Crushy and myzozoz!

Also just before going to the vacation we deployed the Bank Rework update, which had two different changelogs posted in DevUpdates: DevUpdate #34 and DevUpdate #35.

With the staggered vacations, both myzozoz and Crushy has been already working on trading & some general improvements to the game. Weasel and maxchill have also been cooking some new content, but more on these in the next DevBlog on 17th of September.

Until next time

That's all for today, I hope you liked it even though this was mostly just about how we spent our vacations. But now we're back to work again with our minds (hopefully) fully recharged for everything that's coming next.

Keep walking and stay hydrated!

Last time we dived into some of the stuff about the new bank. Now I'm happy to say that it's already in testing, and hopefully ready to go soon along with the new update. Let's take a look & I'll be sharing a few other news here as well!

Reworked bank

The reworked bank is now in our internal testing, and while feature-wise it's almost completed, there are still some issues and polishing that needs to be added. I was originally planning to have it released this week, but currently it's looking like we have it ready for release some time next week.

The list of features that the new bank has right now:

• Tabs & categories. You can organize your items into tabs, and further subdivide them into categories.
• Automatic filters for both tabs & categories. You can setup tabs and categories to have automatic filters, meaning that new items will get automatically placed to those when deposited.
• Default layout & three layout slots. For most people, we recommend to just use the default layout. But for those who want to tinker with their own layouts you can create up to three bank layouts and switch between them. You can also export & import layouts, meaning that if you got a good one made you can share it with the community.
• Filters, sorting. You can add sorting or filter items in your bank. For example you can only show items that grant you work efficiency and so on.
• List & grid views. You can switch between a condensed grid view and a list view (that has buttons to quickly withdraw items from the bank with just one tap).
• Bank settings. You can customize the behavior and how the bank renders stuff a bit from the bank settings.
• Much improved search functionality.
• Placeholder system. Even if you withdraw an item entirely from your bank, the bank will remember where you had your item when you deposit it. You can also while dragging items around also see where the placeholders are or move them around too. You can also disable seeing the placeholders if you don't want to see them.
• And a lot more that I probably forget here - and I'm still trying to add some more.

Right now, apart from some of the missing minor things I still want to add, I think the new bank is a massive improvement over the old system. However, in testing we noticed that for long-time players with a lot of items it might feel a bit hard to find some items at first. The new bank migrates your old bank and organizes everything to the default layout, so at first you might get a bit lost there if you have a ton of items. But I recommend to drag them around a bit & organize them yourself, so it's easier to remember where everything is.

For new players, the new bank starts practically empty or with very few items, and it fills up "incrementally", making it much easier to remember where your items are and to organize it further when new items are being added there.

Release timeline for reworked bank

We're currently aiming to release the reworked bank next week. Content update might get ready for release around the same time, but we can't yet promise if we're able to release both at the same time. But stay reassured, I'm not going to my vacation before we have all that we planned released!

YLE article

For those who were interested in the news coverage that WalkScape and I managed to get in the national Finnish news, here's the full article:

Nearly one-third of game industry funding went to two large companies — game developer claims the industry's funding system is broken (YLE)

You can use the translate to English browser feature to read it. We also got coverage in the TV news and radio news, which was quite intense start to the week (the stuff got released on Monday).

No DevBlogs until 3rd of September

As said in the previous DevBlog, I'll be heading off to Summer vacation (and myzozoz is already enjoying his!). This means that there won't be DevBlogs on 6th and 20th of August and the next one will be on 3rd of September. Because we're back from the vacation don't expect anything massive on this DevBlog - it'll likely be a bunch of vacation photos and what we'll be doing next as the vacations are over!

However, as the update is going live before I'm heading to my vacation, there is very likely going to be a DevUpdate that covers changelogs & more on the bank once the update is going live.

Until next time

That's all for today! I hope you all enjoyed it and you're enjoying the Summer. I'm already itching to start my Summer vacation, as I've planned to once again do a massive multi-week hiking trip around the Europe to get some serious steps in.

Keep walking and stay hydrated! It's been very hot lately, so don't forget to drink water :D

Hello, and welcome to DevBlog #89!

As many of you might remember from last Summer in Finland we have the annual summer vacations. We've now locked in those plans, and will be covering the details of when (and how) we'll be on our vacations and how it affects update schedule.

We also have a bunch of progress in the reworked bank that I'll be showing and we got some content teasers. Let's dive in!

Reworked bank

Please keep in mind that a lot of the things, especially UI, might still change quite a bit. A lot of things you see here are still work-in-progress.

One of the things I wanted to improve before fully committing to the quest system development was reworking the bank. I've tried to combine as many of the ideas, suggestions and feedback we've received on the old bank.

Key goals were:

• No more reliance on search. You can find the items you're looking for intuitively.
• Give you the control of setting it up the way you want. But for starting players and casuals, providing a default layout they'll be fully happy with.
• Improve the performance a lot to avoid ANRs on bank.
• Make it look better. Add a bunch of nice QoL to top it off.

After designing this for a while, the system I ended up going for practically divides the bank into two layers: tabs and categories. Getting this UI to fit on a mobile screen was quite a struggle, as there's very limited space.

On the left side of screen you have your tabs. Currently these are Materials, Gear, Tools, Consumables and Misc.

Under each tab, the items are further separated into categories. For instance in Gear they're categorized by the different slots, in tools by the different skills, and in materials to logs, planks, bars, etc.

You're also able to move things around as much as you like, create your own tabs or categories, and you can even share your layout to other players just like with Gear Sets. You're not locked into the "default layout" that the game comes with - you can remove these tabs and categories and do whatever kind of layout you want.

In addition to these, there are several QoL additions, such as:

• Filters. You can for instance filter so that items with certain attributes only show up.
• Sorting. In addition to the order you've put the items in, you can switch to alphabetical, quantity, value (in coins), most recent, and so on.
• The bank remembers the order you've organized the items to. Even if you withdraw all of the items, the bank creates placeholders so that when you put items back the order stays the same inside categories.
• You can switch to special tabs for Favorites and Most recent.
• You can switch between the grid and list modes. List mode is handy if you want to quickly withdraw a bunch of stuff, whereas Grid is good for organizing and finding items.
• The bank remembers all of your settings, which tabs you had open, etc. throughout your sessions.
• Automatic filters in categories for new items. For instance if you gain a new fish and have a category that has automatic filter for raw fish, it'll automatically go there instead of going to uncategorized category.

Many of these are still not done, but WIP. Some might not make it in time, but I'll be trying my best to get as many of them ready for the release of this new reworked bank.

With these improvements I think the bank will be something people will find much more usable especially towards the late game.

We're aiming to release the reworked bank before heading off to Summer vacations!

Summer vacations

Alright, then to the very happy topic of Summer vacations!

Unlike last year, now with our added workforce we won't have any disruptions to the support email. So customer support will be available even during the vacations.

I'll be on vacation from 3th of August until 21st of August. Myzozoz is having some overlap with me during this with vacations, but starts his a bit early. Crushy is having his vacation later during this year.

During the period while I'm on vacation, there won't be updates to the game (unless there's something very critical). DevBlogs will also be paused, so the one going live on 23th of July will be the last before there's going to be a break. In other words: there won't be a DevBlog on 6th of August and 20th of August.

But before we take a break and recharge our mental batteries, we'll be doing an update that's going to add the reworked bank and new content to the game.

But the good thing here is, that the work doesn't stop. Although development will slow down while some of us are on vacations, most of the time there will be some progress!

Other news

Also I'd like to share some smaller news!

YLE article: The journalist called me twice this week. The article is still coming, but as it's going to be a big article it has taken much more time than I thought. Hopefully it gets released next week! I'll be sharing a link to it while it goes live on Discord and on a DevBlog for anyone who was interested reading it.

Trading: The actual trading mechanic worked for the first time this week, and the first trade ever happened on 8th of July 14:24 Helsinki time.

While the mechanic itself is now getting closer to being ready, there's still one big thing left: we need to add a lot of things for data collection on the trades and in-game stuff. These will be used for the trading and to balance in-game economy more effectively. We expect that this part of the work is going to quite some time, but it's hard to estimate how long exactly. The good side is that while that one is in development, we'll already begin testing the trading in our development server with our testers and means that the trading mecanic will be tested while data development is on-going.

Portal threads & comments: This has been removed from Portal as we stated in a previous DevBlog.

Until next time

Alright, that's all for today! I hope you all have an amazing Thursday, and see you once more in the DevBlog #90 before we head to our Summer vacations on 23rd!

Hello! A quick post about the new update we're releasing today. I'll go through some of the major additions here and you can find the full changelogs below.

New Feature: Mailbox

As explained in the previous devblogs, Mailbox has now been added. There is no trading yet or sending other people items/mail. You can find more info about this feature on the previous devblogs. But practically it allows us to send players mail, and we've added a few fun surprises here to test the feature out.

Trading is being worked on right now, and testing out the Mailbox is a crucial part of its development.

New Item Type: Lore items

We've also added a new item type: lore items. You can find these from the same place where you can browse your Collectibles.

Lore items are mainly used as fun things that expand on the game's lore and they'll be relevant for some quests. Who knows, you might be receiving some lore items in your mailbox...

Achievement Points reward track expanded

With this update the AP rewards track has also been expanded. We've added new items. It's still not fully filled out all the way to 300 points, but you'll find a few new additions and changes to it!

Changelogs

Added

• Added a new feature: Mailbox
• Added a new service type: Mailbox. Mailboxes are available in each location with a bank (as long as you have the bank unlocked)
• Added a Mail button to inventory so you can open the mailbox from there as well
• Now if processing a button takes a while, it will turn into a loading spinner
• Added while away and bubble notifications for gaining PFP options
• Added a button to location routes to make it easier to navigate to routes from existing locations (including unknowns)
• Smooth slider applied to everywhere.
• Sliders now have divisions when the max count is less than 10
• Pets are now reorderable
• Pet eggs are now reorderable
• Active pet or egg is now shown on the bottom sheet for choosing eggs/pets. You can also press it to open up the Pet/Egg page.
• Can't sell locked items from inventory to Mysterious Merchant. You're shown a warning if you're selling Favorited items.
• Added Lore items type
• Added Lore items page (found next to where you open the Collectibles listing)
• Collectibles and Lore Items pages now use the new title style
• (Items) 6 new items
• (Items) 2 new lore items
• (PFP Options) 1 new back accessory
• (PFP Options) 1 new headwear
• (PFP Options) 1 new outfit
• (PFP Options) 1 new headwear with 2 additional variants
• (Shops) 1 new pfp option added to Not A Shop
• (Reward Progress) 6 new Achievement Point Requirement Rewards
• (Reward Progress) A Hunting chest is now given as a reward for lvl 2 of Herbert's Guiding Grounds
• (Reward Progress) A Tailoring chest is now given as a reward for lvl 3 of Herbert's Guiding Grounds
• (Pets) 1 new pet
• (Abilities) 1 new ability
• (Cooldowns) 1 new cooldown
• (PFP Options) 1 new hairstyle with 7 variants
• (PFP Options) 1 new outfit with 2 variants
• (Reward Progress) 1 new 45 Achievement point requirement with a reward
• (Locations) ISO art added for Everhaven

Changed

• (Pets) Mummy work efficiency attributes increased for all levels
• (Abilities) That's A Wrap changed to a passive ability, removing it from its cooldown and manual activation, replaced with new attribute to roll the find linens table 2 times globally at a 7% chance
• (Loot Tables) Bear hunting table now guarantees 3 Animal fur per roll
• (Loot Tables) Swamp foraging table now gives 2-3 Roots
• (Loot Tables) Bird watching table now guarantees 2 Roots
• (Reward Progress) Previous rewards requiring 45 to 130 Achievement points now require the next tier of points to unlock (ex: old 45 now requires 50, old 130 requires 140)
• (Job Boards) Removed extra job of 5 Great Tarsilium pickaxes from Azurazera job board
• (Reward Progress) Achievement Point 150 Requirement Reward has new cosmetics added to it

Fixed

• Fixed player's own character being visible in friends list
• Fixed friend characters not showing usernames
• Fixed an issue where while importing gear sets with missing gear types/tool slots, those would not get populated as empty slots
• Fixed the issue where equpping gearset would change to another quality if one was available
• Fixed the rollbacks that you could cause while opening chests and navigating back out of it and doing some other stuff while the chest was still opening
• Fixed the issue with two similar rings where sometimes game would withdraw extra rings
• Fixed the weirdness happening if you had same item in different tool slots on gear sets when you had multiple qualities of the same item and it had to be unequipped
• Fixed the issue with gear sets withdrawing duplicate gear
• Pressing the continue button in treasury during the opening animation now skips to the results
• Materials are now shown first in chest drops, then consumables, then gear based on rarity

Hello and welcome to DevBlog #88! This time, we'll focus on the Mailbox that's going to be released (hopefully) very soon. Let's dive in!

Mailbox is finished!

Like mentioned on the last DevBlog, we've been testing out the new Mailbox feature and now we're finished with the testing and the feature feels like it's ready to ship.

We're currently aiming for the Mailbox to ship during next week. There should be no maintenance on this update. There are a few QoL things, bug fixes and content we're still adding, which is why we're not entirely sure on what day the update will release.

And just to clarify here: trading is not going to ship as a feature with the Mailbox. Trading is still being developed, and we need to try out the Mailbox feature in production, which is why it's being shipped as a standalone feature. It'll be used on some fun stuff even without the trading, which I'll cover in next section!

What is the Mailbox feature?

Mailbox in practise is a new type of Service in the game that you can find in every location that has a bank. You can check your Mailbox from any location just like you can do with your Bank but you can only claim stuff in your Mailbox while you're in a location that has one.

As we've covered in DevBlog #87 and DevBlog #85, Mailbox is a prerequisite for the trading mechanic and it's what we've consider as the second phase of building the trading system. Basically whatever you receive through trading goes to your Mailbox after the trade has completed.

But the Mailbox isn't just that! We've also planned to use this for Events and more in the future. Through Mailbox whatever rewards you gain from the Events will be sent to your Mailbox.

The Mailbox feature will also be shipping with some fun stuff but we want to keep these as a surprise for the release ;)

Other news

Mailbox isn't the only feature we're currently working on! I've been working on quite a lot of stuff, but there's now been progress on the Bank UI rework. I'm estimating that the Bank UI rework is still going to take at least few weeks, as it's quite a massive change to how it functions. Once there's more to show on that, we'll be sharing the details in the DevBlogs.

Myzozoz has already been working on the Trading system itself and progress on that is looking very solid. It's still too early to share any concrete estimates on when trading is going to be finished, but we'll share those as soon as we know.

Content team has also been busy, and there's going to be some light content additions in the next update, which we estimate is shipping next week!

Until next time

That's everything for this week! I hope you enjoyed the DevBlog and you're ready to receive some mail once the update drop. I've been itching to send you all something nice...

Keep walking and stay hydrated everyone!

Welcome to DevBlog #87! This time we'll be covering how the progress is going on with Trading, what's been going on with the patch and changes that we'll be doing to Portal very soon.

Mailbox for Trading in testing

Alright, let's kick off (feels really cool to use this phrase now with the Fifa world cup going on :D) by looking into how the Trading system is progressing!

Myzozoz has just now wrapped up work with the Mailbox feature. We've now started testing this internally, and there is still some UI polish left to do so that the whole system feels and looks nice, but these shouldn't take much time. But the work overall on this has actually been quite a lot faster than we imagined. We're currently thinking that testing this feature thoroughly is going to take a week or two. But the feature is likely ready to ship to production in a few weeks.

This also wraps up the second phase of Trading work, and Myzozoz has already begun the work on the last (third) phase of implementing Trading. It's too early still to give any rough estimates on when that's ready to ship, but right now things are looking really good in this regard. We'll keep giving updates on how all of that work goes and sharing some screenshots once we have things to show!

Upcoming patch & why fixes has taken more time

The past two weeks have been really busy for me in personal life. Probably the biggest thing was that I moved to a new apartment last week, and the moving is still a bit work-in-progress as I haven't had time to unpack & clean up the old place yet. This has taken me time from work. I've already fixed a lot of the issues that people found from Gear Sets, and we're working to release these ASAP. If I wasn't busy with the moving, we would've likely been able to release these last week. But a lot of cool stuff also happened: we were interviewed by the Finnish Public Broadcast company (YLE), and they're working on a story about me. From what I've heard, this article might be released next week. The article is going to be in Finnish, but I think a lot of our Finnish players here might find it very interesting. And for non-Finnish speakers I think using browser translate feature might do a decent job so you'll be able to read it as well!

All of the moving related stuff should be done this week, and then I'll be able to return to the regular work schedule. I know a lot of people have been waiting us to patch these problems and I'd just like everyone to know that on normal circumstances I would've been able to ship them a lot quicker like we normally do. But sometimes life comes in the way, and this is why it's taken longer.

The patch also introduces some tweaks by Crushy to improve camera controls on the world map. We're aiming to release this patch ASAP!

Changes to Portal

One more announcement: we'll be doing some changes to WalkScape Portal very soon!

We're already stretched quite thin as a small team in terms of providing quick & good customer support. A lot of issues, feedback etc. gets posted on our Portal, but as we already have our hands full with the Discord, Reddit & our support email (support@walkscape.app), the stuff posted on Portal have often been neglected.

This is why we've decided that we'll consolidate our customer support a bit by removing the ability to post & comment from Portal. And instead we'll add a new button there that directs people to use the channels that we're able to monitor effectively.

The absolute best way to get any of your issues resolved quickly is to contact us via the support email (support@walkscape.app). When it comes to feedback, bug reports, or just getting help with the game our community is often the quickest way to get some help. Our Discord server is very active and we have dedicated channels there for feedback, bug reports and more! Another great place to report bugs, have community discussions and to provide feedback is our WalkScape subreddit.

I'm a bit sad that we have to close down the messaging capabilities of Portal, but as we had discussions about this it seemed the only option. We don't want people to end up posting there and expecting us to help through that, so it's just better for everyone that we direct people more effectively towards our support email and active social media channels so they can get better support a lot quicker.

Until next time

Alright, that's all for today!

I'm very excited with all of the progress we've had on Trading, and it's been awesome to get things moving very quickly with it now that our OTA systems are mostly completed. And in personal life, I'm really happy to finally have a new apartment for myself. My last place was just 26 square meters and the new place is whopping 43 square meters! :D I can finally fit a couch in my place, which is going to be awesome.

Keep walking and stay hydrated everyone!

Welcome to DevBlog #86!

Today we're releasing a new update to the game that includes various bug fixes and introduces some new Quality of Life features to the game. This devblog mainly will include changelogs for that and also a shoutout to our community member J who is doing a fiendly wager for the so-called "Small Step Big Cape Club". Let's dive in!

Changelogs for update +657

Important: The update is releasing today, as soon as the App Store reviews are done!

Added

• Removed all of the remaining AI assets from the game, reducing the application size by 31mb
• Collectibles now show up as the first items under action completed and have special styling
• You can now deposit only some items from a selected inventory slot
• Added a loading spinner to WalkPedia and made it open the page faster
• (World Map) Added more realms
• (Keywords) 2 new keywords and 2 new search keywords (one is "weight medium" keyword which stacks at 100)
• (Locations) ISO art added for Halfling Campgrounds, Halfmaw Hideout, Bog Bottom, Bog Top, Old Arena Ruins, Red Coast and Bilgemont Port

Changed

• (World Map) Re-enabled location search (we fixed it :D)
• (World Map) Made location icons visible from further away
• Double action no longer uses consumables on the extra action
• Gear set equipping behavior changed - empty slots are now not unequipped. Instead the character keeps whatever is already equipped in a slot if you are equipping a set with empty slots
• When withdrawing gear sets from bank, the withdraw option no longer withdraws items that you already have in your inventory
• Withdrawing gear sets also checks for items you have equipped and does not withdraw items that you have already equipped
• Import & equip button now also closes the gear set page
• Ordering of gear changed in gear sets to follow the same order as gear view uses
• (Locations) Blackspell Port renamed to Blackspell Harbour and icon updated
• (Keywords) "Light" and "Ultra Light" keywords changed to stack at 1000 and 10 000
• (Locations) Noiseless Pass has been taken over by Trellin for the GDTE - rejoice
• (Locations) "Snowy" location keyword applied to Disenchanted Forest, Azurazera, Kallaheim, Frusenholm, Barbantok, Centaham, Port Skildar, Coldington, Sanguine Hills, Nomad Woods, Casbrant Fields, Norsack Plains, Frostbite Mountain, Noiseless Pass, Fort Of Permafrost, Beach Of Woes, Winter Waves Glacier, Horn Of Respite, Black Eye Peak, Winter's End, Nurturing Nook Springs, and Pit Of Pittance
• (Items) Birch skis keywords for regional and Jarvonia search removed in place of snowy search
• (Items) Birch skis attributes for while in Jarvonia realm changed to while in a snowy location
• (Items) Pine skis keywords for regional and Jarvonia search removed in place of snowy search
• (Items) Pine skis attributes for while in Jarvonia realm changed to while in a snowy location
• (Items) Oak skis keywords for regional and Jarvonia search removed in place of snowy search
• (Items) Oak skis attributes for while in Jarvonia realm changed to while in a snowy location
• (Items) Bert's super skis keywords for regional and Jarvonia search removed in place of snowy search
• (Items) Bert's super skis attributes for while in Jarvonia realm changed to while in a snowy location
• (Items) Ectoplasm scraps now have hide and medium weight keywords
• (Pets) Changed camel to use location keywords for "desert" for XP/attribute requirements in place of "Wrentmark"
• (Pets) Changed reindeer to use location keywords for "snowy" for XP/attribute requirements in place of "Jarvonia"

Fixed

• (World Map) Moving camera to locations/player no longer overshoots if triggered while inertia is present
• (World Map) Realm borders (last zoom level) were redone to work on all devices
• (World Map) All realms now have icons
• (World Map) Improved Bottom Sheet behaviour
• Fixed overflow issues with tags inside text
• Fixed being able to do bank deposits from any location
• Deposit button is now only shown when at a bank location & the item can be banked
• Fixed that using abilities from item view closed the bottom sheet
• Fixed the this gear set no longer exists error when equipping imported set
• Withdrawing geat sets now takes quality into account. It withdraws if a higher quality than current in inventory is found, but does not if same quality or lower is found
• Fixed using phone navigation not dismissing the world map when you have a bottom sheet opened
• Fixed that GDTE was not wrapping to 2 lines on location info view
• Fixed the validation error when doing travel + 1 with a summoned pet change
• Fixed that you could only do one transaction when buying PFP options and needed to re-enter the shop to buy more
• Player Icon not being centered in away screen
• Fixed the problem with pet summons when traveling to Kildome cross
• Now instead of showing 1 000 M steps when not being able to travel, steps until arrival shows N/A
• Import & Equip now checks if the item is already equipped, and skips if that is the case
• Fixed getting the same error message twice on incorrect travel pathing
• Fixed that changing to correct requirement when seeing queued action having invalid requirement now updates the validation
• Fixed that having incorrect requirements for an traveling activity did not cancel the action
• Fixed the stack overflow issue happening when summoning pets to queue
• Fixed the incorrect locale link for WalkPedia loading
• (PFP Options) Fix mummy outfit not hiding headwear

Small Step Big Cape challenge

First, to quote @J's original post on our Discord server:

Hey everyone, we're having a closed beta friendly wager in #small step big cape club (Discord thread) - anyone who makes CoHA in 1.1m steps or CoFA in 4.5m steps gets to pick a pet and we will name our pet in your honor. (@MixHagelslag @barosepha @squigglyruth and me, @J).

For the last few months we've been discussing various strategies for achieving minimal step capes so even if you don't participate the discussion might be interesting!

Notable runs so far:

• @MixHagelslag CoHA at 750k steps prior to hunting/tailoring update and again at 830k after the update, and CoFA at 5.53m steps
• @barosepha CoHA at 1.31M steps past hunting/tailoring
• @galrock0 coming up on CoFA once a rare pet drops, around ~5.5m steps
• @squigglyruth currently on a CoHA challenge run via rushing tortoise, which just reached adulthood at 467k steps

To make it interesting, I'll be gifting a 1mo culitist sub for the first person to hit 4.5m step CoFA. (If the goalposts move due to new achievements getting added, I'll adjust it to a new reasonable threshold)

If you want to join the challenge, you can join the very active discussion on our Discord server! The discussion on this is under Challenges -> small-step-big-cape channel.

For a long time, we've also been thinking of hosting a similar challenge officially, but having one done by the community is even more fun for us to follow! For any runner ups in this challenge, we'll also throw in as rewards to whoever becomes the 2nd and 3rd place runner ups a reward of 1 month Cult Supporter (including all of its rewards) Patreon subscriptions.

We're hoping you'll have a lot of fun trying to overcome this challenge!

Until next time

That's all for today! We're currently working on the upcoming big stuff (as mentioned in the previous devblog), so this update is mostly just some new QoL and a bunch of bug fixes. I hope you all enjoy it!

Keep walking and stay hydrated everyone!

Pssst: it's also Ice Hockey World Championship (IIHF) going on right now. Finland will be playing against Czechia in less than an hour. Let's hope Finland wins gold this year...

Hello and welcome to DevBlog #85!

In this devblog, we'll give an update on the two big features that we are working on now and explain why we've been quiet about their development. This is going to be a lengthier DevBlog, so be prepared! This can be considered as a response to the Reddit post that was posted.

Last week we released the refreshed World Map. It's the first feature our new developer Crushy has been working on, and we'll probably be updating it with few more things and doing some polish in the next couple weeks.

Also today is the Ascension Day which is another public holiday, so happy Ascension Day everyone! Feels like during this time of the year there are public holidays every other week in Finland :D

Why there haven't been updates on the big three features

Last year we noticed that when we talked about certain features or other additions that we were working at that time, some people misunderstood those as promises that those things would be released very soon. This is why we felt that for our own sanity we should only publicly announce new stuff when they're very close to being released. We have internal deadlines when it comes to aimed release of a feature/update and we adjust those weekly based on how the situation develops.

A lot of the time when we're in the early phase or mid-development of something new our priorities change over time. Then we might need to delay the thing or work on something else and then jump back to the thing that was the primary focus. Also being committed to something being released at a fixed and publicly announced deadline (especially if the thing was still in mid-development when we announced it) often lead to situations where we were too optimistic on when a thing would be ready and then we had to do overtime for multiple weeks. This wasn't very good for our health or especially for me as I was sometimes working 24/7 for couple of weeks straight.

We decided that we would change from that to only announcing release dates when we're very close to release so we can stick to those and we won't end up needing to overwork ourselves when eventually something doesn't go as planned.

This has especially been the case for what we've been working now for a long time: trading. Trading is being worked in three phases and the first phase was already completed (OTA, over-the-air content updates). Also, we have completed the work on OTA being able to also send art assets and other types of media but there's some client-side work that needs to be done until it's fully ready for production.

What we are working on right now

Right now, we're working on two of the so-called "Big Three Features" (which has also changed a bit as will be discussed in the next chapter of this post). As explained in detail in the previous chapter: don't take these as promises that they'll be released in couple of weeks from now. The big features take months to develop and it's very hard for us with a very limited development team to give any exact timelines on how long any of these take to release.

Myzozoz is currently working on the Phase 2 of trading, which is adding a Mailbox feature to the game. This is a new service type in the game where you can receive items from the server. Prior to trading, we are planning to use it a bit to for example send some complimentary items during server downtime. And maybe small birthday presents for you character whenever it's their birthday (which is the day you created the character).

But the main thing about the Mailbox feature is that it's the second foundational piece for enabling transactions, as with that you'll be able to receive items when trading with other players. In our current trading plan, Mailbox is also used as a bank-like storage where you'll put your items that you might want to trade with other people, and if a trade deal goes through, the items will be sent from your mailbox to another player. This also enables that you can do trading regardless of your character's current location in the world.

When it comes to me (schamppu), I'm currently primarily working on Bank rework. The aim with this is to massively improve the performance and UI of the banking interface. But as is often with me, I constantly get dragged to some small bugfixes and other stuff, so it's hard to say exactly when this will be ready.

Once the Bank rework is completed and released, I'm moving to work on the Quest system. Our initial goal with this is that I make the system fully work, and we'll ship it with one quest that will work as the new tutorial. After that, we'll be adding more quests to the game. All initial quests will be aimed to work as something that gives a good direction for players that struggle with how open-ended WalkScape is at the moment.

Crushy is currently working on doing post-release support for the new World Map, after which he'll be doing some trials in order to make the location maps more interactable. We're not sure yet if we'll be doing it right away as the time commitment or technology needs might be too big, which is why he'll start by doing some trials from which we can gather information about how much work there would be to actually making the location maps work like we've imagined.

Changes to the Open Beta plan

Finally, a big update on the Open Beta plan: we're considering adding in Combat after the Open Beta has launched. For those that are not aware, we've always considered that to release Open Beta we need to have the big three features completed (Trading, Quests, Combat).

We're already going to be stretched quite thin with the work on Quests and Trading, and both of these features will still take several months to be released. If after both of those are completed we'd still need to work on Combat, which is definitely at least going to take as long as Trading did to complete, we would still be very far away from Open Beta release.

This is why some months ago we internally started considering that:

• Quests are absolutely necessary in order to have direction and a good tutorial. It has to be there for Open Beta.
• We only have one server reset planned, which happens when we launch Open Beta. This is why Trading must be released in Closed Beta and be fully tested so we can fine tune the economy with this one chance that we have.

Combat is a massive thing to work on and we can launch Open Beta without it. If Open Beta release is successful and the company could grow that would allow us to have more people working on it. Our biggest bottleneck (in addition to there being just three developers) for Combat is that we have only one artist (maxchill), and the planned Combat will require a lot of art assets. For this reason it would also make more sense that Combat is going to happen after Open Beta is released.

But we do recognize that without Combat in Open Beta WalkScape would be missing the "couch content" that we consider essential for having the full experience of the game. We're considering options such as including a Farming skill that would provide something you can manage while not walking or something else instead. So there would be at least something for the Open Beta that isn't Combat but scratches the same itch and is more realistic for us to complete in a reasonable time frame.

We would like to hear people's thoughts on this topic! After Open Beta we have planned our current development server with its rapid updates to become more accessible to larger amount of people. We would be using that to test Combat and any new massive features thoroughly before they're released to production. This would make it so that even if Combat is going to be worked on after the Open Beta launches we will have the opportunity to make sure it's not going to introduce exploits or critical bugs.

Clarification on server reset and Closed Beta progress

Another thing that we want to clarify here now is that there will be some cosmetic rewards for everyone who has participated in WalkScape Closed Beta. We've talked about these quite often, but I think it's good to have them clarified here publicly.

Also to note: Quests and Trading will take some time to be released, so don't take this as "they'll be released in couple of weeks" as we explained in the first chapter. Once they are released there will still be some time until we do the server reset and move to Open Beta. Mainly this is to do the following:

• Final polishing, optimization, Quality of Life additions to make the game run and feel better.
• Minor feature additions to support the core gameplay loop.
• Setting up much more scalable server infrastructure, so we're prepared for rapidly growing player count.
• Content additions to fill in any blank spots and doing as much balancing as required for the economy to work as intended and that content balancing in general is great.
• All kinds of other preparations that go into moving to Open Beta, which take some time.

The rewards & other things that we promise to deliver for all Closed Beta testers

• We will do a copy of the entire Closed Beta server. Once we add the Offline mode of the game, you will be able to play with your Closed Beta characters on Offline mode. This will take some time to happen after the Open Beta. It's too early to give any estimates how soon after the Open Beta we'll be releasing the Offline mode for the game.
• Your in-game profile will be showing your total steps across all of your characters that you gained during Closed Beta.
• Your title based on what tier of Patreon/BMAC you used to support the Closed Beta development if you've supported us.
• We might publish a copy of the Closed Beta leaderboard and have it available on our website. You can at any time go back and see how well you did during the Closed Beta.

These are the main rewards we are committed to do for everyone who has participated in the Closed Beta. We might add more down the line but we're committed that the rewards include nothing that affects the gameplay. They'll be cosmetic or like with characters carrying over to Offline mode being restricted to not affect the online server.

We'll publish a more complete list of all rewards with more details once we're closer to the actual release of Open Beta.

3rd party API is now available

Link to the API documentation: https://tools-api.dev.walkscape.app/docs/

A message from falarikae, who has been an incredible help to us by creating an API for people interested in making 3rd party tools for WalkScape. Here's the message from falarikae:

Walkscape Data API - now open to community developers

The Walkscape Gear Tool has always been running on top of an API that directly reads Walkscape's assets and localizations and serves them as a JSON API. Starting today, it's open to anyone in the community who wants to build something on top of it - so you can finally stop scraping the wiki.

What's in it: items, skills, recipes, locations, achievements, activities, shops, loot tables, pets, rewards, and a bunch more. Basically all the static game content, queryable by id, searchable by field, and available in every locale the game is shipped in. Some data is still missing (things the gear tool doesn't use), but I can work on adding more in the future.

What it's good for: planners, calculators, Discord bots, anything that needs to know what's in the game. It's read-only and exposes no player data. Unreleased content is filtered out, so you won't accidentally spoil upcoming features.

How to get in: Send a message in the Walkscape Data API-thread on the main Walkscape Discord server. There's a dedicated thread there with full instructions, examples, and a place to ask questions or request endpoints.

Fair use: free for community tools. Please credit Walkscape/Not A Cult, and reach out before doing anything commercial with it.

Happy building.

-fala

Until next time

Alright, that's all for today! It's a lengthy post, and there's a lot to consider here. We would love to hear your thoughts on the mentioned topics and have an active discussion about these with the community. With that, we think we can do the best final decision on where to go from here.

Thank you so much, and I hope you enjoyed the devblog! See you again in two weeks.

Keep walking and stay hydrated everyone!