Some new items coming to the game in the content update!

Hello and welcome to DevBlog #74!

Today we'll be releasing a new update that will be introducing a plethora of QoL additions, performance improvements, bug fixes and polish to the game. Also, the update has a few new features: OTA updates for localizations and game content, Ability rework, Skill categorization, and a few other things.

Let's dive in to things that are new since the last devblog!

Maintenance

We have a maintenance scheduled for today, and we're expecting it to take around one hour. The maintenance begins around 13.00 UTC+0 today (27th of November). All steps gained during the maintenance should load normally after getting back in, so keep walking and stay hydrated!

Skill Categorization

Skills are now categorized into Gathering, Artisan and Utility

Skills in the game are now categorized into Gathering, Artisan and Utility. This change is visible in both the Character view and WalkPedia.

This new categorization will be used for doing items that grant you, for instance, Work Efficiency to all of your Gathering skills.

The upcoming content update will not introduce new skills to the game. The scope of the upcoming content update is already very large, and it's better to focus on new skills and all that goes into those later to keep the scope of this content update manageable. We're aiming to release the content update before holidays, and at its current scale the content update is already very ambitious.

Ability Rework

This was a slightly larger rework done to make the ability system more flexible for future content, and to fix some annoyances and confusion people had with abilities. Let's go over all that has changed with abilities!

Abilities can now have multiple charges

You can now charge your abilities

Items such as Axe of Destruction and Shoes of Escape were a bit annoying to manage, as they could only hold one charge at a time. With this, if you wanted to get the maximum benefit out of them, you needed to open the game at an optimal time - which is something we want to avoid as much as possible.

These Abilities now can hold up to three charges at a time. You can use multiple charges at once too if you want to. We might adjust the amount charges if necessary to higher or lower amounts for these items based on feedback.

Abilities UI reworked

The UIs for abilities have been reworked from scratch. They now take less space, and provide the information about the abilities in much clearer way.

Activity abilities are now visible

Activity abilities are now shown in the activity details and your ability page

Activities that have abilities, such as Emergency Escapes or Teleports in general, now display their abilities while viewing the activity.

There were cases where people got confused by the teleporting activities, and this should help to clarify that the activity does something special.

You can also see Activity Abilities now in your Ability page, and start the activity straight from there.

Emergency Activity UI has also been replaced with a cleaner looking system that shows the ability in Location page.

Full Changelogs for the update

Main activity view has been cleaned up by making the Saved Steps, Inventory Full and Consumables more condensed

Here are the full changelogs for this QoL update!

Added

• OTA system added for game data and localizations
• Ability rework, including: new UIs, Ability charges, Activity abilities, and more
• While you were away displays your used saved steps
• You can now select the amount of actions you want to complete an activity for
• Skills are now categorized into Gathering, Artisan and Utility
• Updated to Flutter 3.38.3, which should improve stability & performance
• Updated to new Health Connect client v. 1.1.0, which should fix issues with Garmin and others
• Added reordering to Gear Sets
• Added sorting button to Inventory
• Added deposit all button to Inventory
• Added quick ways to rename gearsets in Gear Set manager
• Added a Work Efficiency breakdown to Activity page
• Consumable cards have been reworked to be more clean looking and dense, same with Inventory Full and Saved Steps
• Gear Set management and selection pages have been combined together
• Tab bars (inventory, crafting, leaderboards, achievements/profile page) have been reworked to be more clean looking and performant
• WalkPedia quick button (the skill icon right of your profile picture) now takes you to the output item page in WalkPedia while crafting
• Toggle to disable Agility XP added as a temporary way for people to do challenge characters
• You can now withdraw a gear set from bank without equipping it
• Item abilities can now be used straight from inventory view
• Added a button to hide the overlays in the world map, so you can admire the world map better
• Game version added to the character data exports for 3rd party developers
• New translations from community translators
• You can now browse Tips of the Day
• Activity sprite visible in Activity View
• Tooltip widget added, and some tooltips added where text isn't necessary to show all the time under these tooltips
• A restart game button added once your client has downloaded an OTA update during a gameplay session

Changed

• All in-game fonts have been changed to support Slavic languages and more
• AI generated art assets removed from the game where isometric art pieces have already replaced them, bringing down the application size significantly
• Crafting Outcome has been renamed to Quality Outcome
• Basic tools have been split from Copper by making Copper tools require level 2
• Changed "Level up XYZ times" to "Have a total level of XYZ"
• WalkPedia max work efficiency now uses the same kind of display style as the new activity view WE breakdown

Fixed

• Optimizations to Bank
• Optimizations to Gear Sets
• General optimizations across the application to improve performance
• Optimizations to Traveling
• Locations unlocked from rumors are now correctly displayed in WalkPedia (until you've visited them)
• Fixed the small "bubble" notifications in game, they shouldn't get stuck anymore and should work smoother
• Content that is only meant for development versions of the game are now removed from production builds. WalkPedia totals should now be possible to complete fully
• WalkPedia remembers your opened categories so they stay opened when you go back to previous views
• WalkPedia lists are ordered alphabetically
• Pressing the minus button on sliders when at minimum value now flips it to the max value
• Fixed the Turkish i-character when capitalized
• Fixed Gear Sets page not updating properly when doing changes to Gear Sets
• UI fixes to overflowing texts, spacings and font sizes
• Fixes to deleting characters
• Fixes to updating the PFP image
• Eye accessory toggle now works in the character creation UI
• Fixed searching for PFP options in shops
• Faction reputation numbers now round down on the X/Z counter widgets
• Fixes to PFP rendering where layers were wrongly ordered for image exports/server side PFPs
• Fix to iOS and Android crash issue when using smart watch activity recording
• A lot of small bug fixes across the game!

Until next time

Another new building that's coming in the content update

Alright, that's all for today!

I hope you enjoyed this DevBlog, and the accompanying update once that goes live. As usual, we'll probably be releasing a few hotfixes fixing any issues encountered by this update. The OTA system and Ability rework probably have some quirks left in them, especially as we haven't been able to test the OTA system at this scale.

We're also cooking a lot of other things at the moment, like mentioned in previous DevBlogs, so this QoL update doesn't cover all that's been worked on behind the scenes. We're hoping to finish work on those soon, and bring some really exciting updates to the game.

Stay hydrated and keep walking everyone! ❤️