Vastalume art created by maxchill

Welcome to DevBlog #78! Our hiring process has now been completed and we're back to regular work (with onboarding going on as well). Also, we have a statement here about the bad luck mitigation system that was a big conversation in our community Discord last week.

Greetings from Crushy

This Monday, our freshly hired developer has started at our office here in Helsinki! Please welcome Crushy, our new developer addition to the team. Here's an introduction from him!

Hi guys, I’m Crushy, the newest Not a Cultist to join Not a Cult! I’m a code cruncher by trade and I’ve been around the block in the game industry for what feels like (and actually is) a decade working mostly as a freelancer for companies big and small and games ranging from bad to not bad.

Someone could say I was brought on board to synergise the monetisation team, enable our shareholders to maximise profitability and start conceptual work on the first wave of cosmetic DLC. Said someone would be lying as I’m actually helping the rest of the team create more stuff you enjoy!

I first heard of Walkscape around three years ago in that mythical Reddit post. At the time it felt like a cool app to get me out of the house more often. But then I saw some glimpses of their progress: a slowly growing team of people that seemed like they knew what they had, where they were going, how to get there without selling their souls (how not-very-Culty of them) and listening to their community. I was kinda envious to be honest!

Well here I am now, writing this (how the turns have tabled). While I’m fairly new I hope to become a more household name for you all - perhaps as a scapegoat for when things go wrong.

Needless to say, we're really excited that our development team has increased from just me and myzozoz to having one more person here helping us to develop new features quicker. It's awesome, and the office feels much more alive now that it's not just us two here!

Statement on bad luck mitigation system

On our community Discord, there was quite a lot of talk on having bad luck mitigation system introduced to the game.

Bad luck mitigation systems are quite divisive, like we saw with the conversation that happened on our Discord. I was first considering doing a survey on this issue to see where the community stands on it, but we decided it's not as useful to survey it before the actual bad luck mitigation we've had in mind this entire time is introduced to the game. So we want to release trading first, and only after that start considering if there's still need for more bad luck mitigation (or see that the trading system solved it). I think at that point the answers this survey might provide us will be more relevant, as it would be quite difficult to answer it now with full picture on this issue before the feature is out.

We've already introduced bad luck mitigation to the chests in the game, and we'll keep considering these sort of systems for some of the hard to get things where they would make most sense. But for now, we'll not add any bad luck mitigation to the RNG itself, as trading will provide an alternative way for people to get most things in the game that might otherwise be very RNG dependent to achieve.

I hope this clears things out on where we stand on introducing changes to the RNG. So just as a conclusion: no changes for the time being, and this issue will be revisited once trading is out. When it comes to the single player version of the game that won't have trading, we probably will be providing and option to enable bad luck mitigation for those that want it. But on the multiplayer side, we want to see what kind of effects the trading will have and if that itself solves the friction this issue causes.

Current progress on the next update

Alright, next up an update on our next update. We've made quite a big leap forward in the past two weeks towards our next big update. With the hiring process now done and onboarding starting to require less involvement from me and myzozoz, we've made progress on the feature side too. Weasel and maxchill has done an incredible work on creating and designing new content.

Still, we consider it a bit too early to fully announce and reveal what's going to be included in the next update, but I'd say there is a very decent chance that next devblog on 19th of February will have a lot more to say about it.

Until next time

Alright, that's everything for this DevBlog! I hope you enjoyed it, it's very exciting for us here to have a new pair of hands working on the game. And in the next DevBlog, I'm quite certain we'll have more to show on what's coming next.

Stay hydrated and keep walking everyone! ❤️