from schamppu@lemmy.zip to games@lemmy.world on 30 Dec 16:16
https://lemmy.zip/post/29032452
Hello again, Lemmy!
It’s been a while since I last posted here, and the reception for the post was really awesome - thank you all for that! I also created a community in Lemmy for the game: !walkscape@lemmy.world where I’m posting every development blog post.
We have a new Closed Beta wave right now, so if you’d like to try out the game, you can follow the instructions available at walkscape.app/help. The wave is running until January 7th.
Since the last post, we’ve now started to add some Quality of Life updates to the game and we’re nearly finished with the lengthy optimization process of the game engine and servers. We’re expecting to release the next update next month!
If you haven’t heard about the game before, I started this project as a personal hobby project to help myself walk more. I tried most of the games available, but I wanted to have something that didn’t need attention while walking and wouldn’t have predatory monetization like most mobile games tend to have these days.
The game is inspired by RuneScape, and you level up skills, craft gear, find loot and so on by walking IRL. We have a short introduction video to the game where I explain and show how the game works in more detail.
Once again, thanks Lemmy for all the awesome feedback we’ve got and for the countless encouraging messages that you’ve sent us. And I’m hoping to see more of you in the game & community!
I’ll answer any questions or feedback here in the comments and in our own community. Happy new year, and happy walking <3
threaded - newest
Loved the game when I first started, now I’m feeling stuck. I need to watch the tutorial videos!
Eric from the community (and a bunch of others) have been making some videos on how to get started. One I’d recommend for beginners is the Ultimate Beginners Guide video.
Also, if you feel stuck you can try wiki.walkscape.app and map.walkscape.app
Thank you so much! When we get the quest system into the game, giving some direction to the players will be much easier.
What a coincidence, I’m a QA tester that was illegally fired and therefore no longer bound by my moonlighting clause. I’ll have to give it a try!
You had a moonlighting clause as a QA tester? The fuck?
whats a moonlight clause?
It seems that a moonlight clause is what someone has in their employment contract that tells them what they can and can’t do on their free time.
If true, the QA above could not do QA work for anyone else while in employment.
Something like that, I guess. 🤔
hey! I am in the beta and love this game. just wanted to let you know 🙂
That’s really awesome to hear <3 Thank you so much, and there’ll be a lot of more awesome stuff coming to the game next year.
Hey! I almost forgot about this when I left Reddit. I was so excited to see it come to fruition some day. I’d love to beta test but I’ve moved to an office job since then so I probably won’t be able to help much.
Is biking also implemented? Unrelated: Standard kommt nicht von Standarte ;)
<img alt="" src="https://discuss.tchncs.de/pictrs/image/21e540e0-c85f-4db1-a470-e450a5940829.png">
It’s kinda supported - if you have your phone in your pocket you do get some steps, but it’s not as efficient as walking.
I’m Finnish myself and my German skills aren’t that great :D The translations for the game are made by the community, you can help correcting errors at translate.walkscape.app
(the tool is currently hosted on a very underspecced server so it’s laggy, we’ll be moving it to a beefier one soon)Edit: Well this was sooner than I thought, I’ve moved it to another server and should be very usable now.
+1 for biking. I track my bike rides with Apple Health and it’s pretty solid, I don’t know if it would be hard to make those importable to the game.
When it comes to tracking, smart watch support is the most frequently asked addition and biking is the second. We will definitely add biking after smart watch support, as long as we find a viable way to do that. Biking relies quite heavily on GPS data which we don’t want to deal with, so we would likely be using Apple Health and on Android some specific apps to pull that data from.
The game is a lot of fun and good motivation for walking.
But at a point the inventory management becomes a pain to manage and annoyance to switch gear sets around.
Hope you come up with gear sets to help ease these burdens and give some qol. Bank filter would help but still would be a pain to switch sets.
Keep up the good work.
Gear sets are in the next update. Check out the dev blog.
Hello! Gear sets are actually coming in the very next update to the game, that feature is already pretty much finished. Most recent devblog covers this more! We held a poll about what are the most frequently asked QOL, and gear sets were #1 so we started with that.
You can check how the system works here: lemmy.zip/post/27883811
Woot fantastic!
Gear sets are coming in the next update
Just chiming in to say that I enjoy this game. I just noticed accidentally that I can search in the inventory/bank for things other than the names of items, like searching for “carpentry” returns all of the gear and tools that have carpentry bonuses! That’s a really big deal for me because the bank is so full I was keeping notes outside the game on which tools and gear I need for each skill.
Yup, the search helps but we do have plans to introduce better bank & inventory management. Next update will include gear sets, so you can easily save some presets to equip.
And thank you so much, I love to hear that people are having fun with the game!
Maybe it gets to be more scummy than you want, but how about notifications when you have no activity going? Like when you finish traveling or your inventory fills up.
This is planned as part of the QoL updates! Notifications that are opt-in for certain things happening in the game.
Hot dog! Thank you very much.
Looks great! Just applied and will get my family to do the same.
can you link to your privacy policy and/or data collection practices?
Not OP but here is the link
Sure: walkscape.app/privacy-policy.html
We’re based in Finland, so we follow GDPR.
I have been beta testing for a while and love this game! Definitely motivates me to walk just a little bit more to do that one more thing in the game.
Awesome, and I’m happy to hear you’ve been enjoying it <3
Sounds amazing! Already applied, let’see if my wife and I are lucky ^_^
This is an awesome game. I love it and works fine in beta. Thank you!
Hey there! Absolutely love the idea for this game. I applied for the last Beta wave but didn’t get through, am I able to apply again for the new wave?
One application is enough! And thank you! <3
Thank you, fingers crossed for this time :)
I’ve been playing for a few months now. I love the concept, the art and the atmosphere of it. And I feel it’s been making me walk more. However, I can’t seem to make any substantial progress in the game. I’m still stuck on the starting landmass (Jarvonia), and while doing activities gets me raw materials and the occasional rare item, I can’t seem to do anything with them as transforming those requires skills I don’t have and don’t know how to obtain.
Am I missing something ? Am I just not walking enough ?
Thank you so much! <3
If you feel a bit stuck, I recommend to check out wiki.walkscape.app and map.walkscape.app
In order to process higher level materials, you need to level up your craftings skills: Carpentry, Crafting, Smithing. You need to start with low end materials, which you have levels for. Then you can move onto higher level recipes.
When you craft yourself some good gear, progress in the game is a lot faster and you’ll find yourself progressing to further areas.
Hi, much appreciated ! Thanks for the links. Hopefully it’ll click soon
How are you planning to monetize this?
The FAQ states it. Looks like some combination of subscription for multiplayer elements / ongoing events or a one time fee for Single-Player. Tho, tbd. He hasn't really asked for feedback on that so far.
For the online version it’ll be affordable subscription. For single player a one time purchase.
Looked over your privacy policy and it seems pretty reasonable. I was curious about how location is used though - could you give me the gist of what kind of in-game features I might miss out on by denying location permissions?
... It doesn't use location? To my knowledge. It just tracks steps. That doesn't use GPS.
From the Privacy Policy:
I was asking for clarification about the last line.
Not sure - but I just looked in my version and the only permissions I have enabled are notifications and physical activity and everything works.
Maybe that's a holdover they need to delete?
Yup, mention of GPS is a holdover as I’ve used some privacy policy templates to create the policy. Legal writing isn’t really something I’ve done as an indie game dev before :D
See lead devs response below.
The game doesn’t use location permission and doesn’t ask for it, and it will never require GPS data. We have that clause because we might at some point want to do rough location estimates using IP addresses, for instance to see how many players we have from specific countries.
I suck at writing legal stuff and English isn’t my native language, so I wrote the policy using different templates. We should probably remove the mention of GPS entirely as it’s quite misleading.
Thank you for the details!
I definitely wouldn't recommend tweaking a legal document without the advice of a lawyer, especially when it's not in your native language, but hopefully the project will raise enough funds that you'll be able to hire someone to do that soon though! Fitness games are good ideas, and the art here looks real cute.
Thank you! Definitely our plan to get these documents through a lawyer when we can afford one. One of the surprises to me has been how many things there are these days that indie devs like myself need to deal with that are completely non-related (legal especially), and how expensive those can be. As we want to stay independent, we don’t have legal help from publishers, stakeholders etc. to deal with such.
Looks cool, and I'll check it out on release. If you want beta testers though, make it easier to sign up. I'm not going to write an essay just to maybe get beta access.
Well missed the posts a few times, but applied just now! Looks very cool
I’m intrigued, but have two questions:
Running counts! Also treadmills or walking pads, as long as you have your phone in your pocket.
Smart watches are not supported yet, but coming. Smart watch support would already work great on iOS, but we’re held up by Google with it as they introduced Health Connect for smart watch integrations and it’s a buggy mess at the moment. Google Fit APIs (that would’ve worked nicely) are deprecated.
Just applied, looks fun!
Thank you, and happy walking! ❤️
When you say “android” does it depend on any google services? Or will it run on lineageOS with no(minimal) google stuff?
The game requires Google Play Services for the pedometer to work (the game uses the new Recording API to count your steps while the game is closed). On GrapheneOS I’ve heard it works if you run it in a sandbox. You don’t need a Google account for the Recording API to work, and according to the developer documentation data is stored locally.
If you can run sandboxed apps woth Google Play Services, it should work, but I’ve not heard from LineageOS users any experiences.
Thanks.
I’ll have a look if I can sandbox in lineage first, then maybe apply for the beta test if it looks possible.
If you apply, make sure to mention that! Would appreciate hearing if it works or not.
I thought I’d mention as it hasn’t been mentioned yet: the only way to install the game on Android is through Google Play. You also need to join a Google Group to get access on Google Play.
Osrs member from before EOC. Love this game. When busy and can’t invo manage or bank dump I farm ice sickles. Got 4 and want more lol.
Keep up the great work.
Thank you so much! ❤️
Looks amazing! I’m excited to try it in the future :)
However I did encounter an issue trying to apply for beta access:
On the application page where you type in all the words using Firefox on Mobile I was able to switch the tab to a different one, but was unable to switch it back without force closing and reopening the browser. I’ve never had this issue with any other website so I doubt it’s an issue with the browser itself (however is still definitely possible).
It did work on my 2nd attempt, but I figured I should let you know incase there’s anything you could do about it for the extremely small percentage of Firefox mobile users lol
Well that’s definitely weird - Android or iOS? We’ll need to try this ourselves to see if there’s something going on with that form.
Thanks for the report and happy walking! ❤️
I’m using the Android that came with my device using a Pixel 8, thanks for the reply and if there’s any information that would help let me know :)
You reminded me to check out the portal again when I signed up months ago! I’ll be testing the beta a lot in the next week since I now have to go into the office 5 days a week. Can’t wait to give the next beta a full try!
The game is great, eagerly looking forward to smartwatch support as someone who doesn’t bring their phone on runs but otherwise having a good time with the game
Same! Without smart watch support, it’s a great game. With it, it will be incredible.
Signed up! Keen to try it out.
Hiya, walkscape user here!
Been loving the game, I’m just wondering if you could add a section to the website/game that explicitly goes over what data is collected and what it’s used for?
We do have the privacy policy on there, which lists what sensitive information we collect. It’s a bit vague, and we could later on edit it to be more specific, but I don’t have the required skills to edit those kinda texts and we can’t afford a lawyer at the moment. The sensitive information we collect are your email, username and step data, and the step data includes device information (phone model & operating system).
Non-sensitive information includes all kinds of gameplay data, like items you got and how many things you’ve crafted etc. which we use for game balancing and when designing new content.
Does step data just mean the number of steps (and timestamp, I assume), or do you actually track the routes walked, which would mean gps coords/ tracks.
Cause the first is much less invasive and problematic than the latter option.
The game doesn’t access your GPS, it won’t even ask the permission. It’s all steps only.
It’s just steps and the timestamp, no location data. We don’t ask for location permission, and it’s not accessible through OS APIs either.
Thanks bro, a game with privacy in mind when it comes to data collection is a godsend these days
And thank you! I know it’s hard to also trust game devs these days, but we’re doing all we can to protect our users privacy. That’s why there are already privacy settings in the game too - you can hide your steps from other players if you don’t want to share those. And you can also hide your entire user profile so it’s not visible to other players. These settings also protect you if 3rd parties scrape the leaderboards etc.
I wish you the best of luck! Glad I saw your post again on my feed :)
I applied!
Thank you so much ❤️
Do you promise to never add season pass, premium currencies, lootboxes or anything of the sort?
If yes, count me in!
The feels when what you grind in game is lootboxes :x
(can’t buy them with money though don’t worry)
We have lootboxes that are (and always will be) obtainable through gameplay. You can get chests from any activity while you’re playing the game. Same applies for cosmetics, which are also something you obtain through gameplay.
The very first devblog I wrote I already promised that we will never do predatory monetisation. Affordable subscription should be all we need to keep the game running. And no ads either!
I’m using GrapheneOS and struggling to get the game to count steps when it’s not actively open. Anyone else using GrapheneOS and have any tips?
I haven’t used GrapheneOS myself, but I’ve heard from others that running it in sandbox works. The game requires Google Play Services in order to count the steps in background, so sandbox with Google Play Services should fix that. The API the game specifically uses is the Recording API.