Two new skills are coming to WalkScape in the next update!

Hello and welcome to WalkScape DevBlog #79!

It's been a long time since we originally teased Hunting and Tailoring skills, and due to circumstances we had to put those into the back burner for a lengthy period of time (this is covered a bit more in the Designs and more section of the devblog). But finally, after a lot of design work done by Weasel and maxchill, plus many of the required game mechanics falling into place these two skills are getting ready for the release!

In this DevBlog, we'll cover what these skills are and some of their designs and related mechanics. So let's dive into it!

Hunting

One of the hunting activities in the game!

Let's start with Hunting skill!

Hunting is a new Gathering Skill that is used mainly to gain materials that are needed for turning them into equipment through Tailoring. It also has uses in Cooking.

Hunting skill uses Hunting bows as their main tool, but it's also quite different from any of the other gathering skills. You won't be able to hunt anything (but there are naturally some fun exceptions to this!) with a bow if you don't have arrows. You can craft arrows by using Carpentry skill and there are multiple different tiers of arrows. High level hunting activities might require you to use better arrows, but overall better arrows are very useful as they give you work efficiency while you're using them for a Hunting activity.

Arrows require bars, logs and feathers to craft them. You can see this from the screenshot below. And just as a general note here: a lot of things might still be changing from what you're seeing in these screenshots while we go around and balance things.

Crafting arrows creates five of them at once!

Crafting and using fine arrows will also grant you a significant buff when used on a Hunting activity, like seen on the screenshot above. Also, you can see here that using Bronze Arrows grants a bonus to your Work Efficiency while hunting. Getting your hands on some fine arrows will make your Hunting much much more efficient.

Tailoring

An example of Tailored gear here! The attributes might still change a bit

Tailoring is a new Artisan Skill and it's mainly used to craft yourself gear that is useful for skilling purposes (and later down the road, probably quite useful for certain combat gear as well!). Many of the tailoring recipes use stuff from Hunting, so these skills go well together. You often also require materials from Foraging. Each set of tailored gear have items for your Head, Chest and Legs slots. There might be some exceptions to this though!

There are multiple tiers of gear made through Tailoring and the main thing Tailoring aims to accomplish is to make players less reliant on gear drops that are coming from Chests. Tailoring gear also grants buff to an entire group of skills, like to all of Gathering or Artisan skills at once, so if you're using these items you will find yourself needing to switch gear much less frequently.

This update will add a lot of recipes to the game. Just for tailoring, we have around 40 recipes for all of the different tiers of gear you can now make! Tailoring also introduces a new Loom service to the game.

Some of the starting recipes for Tailoring!

Designs and more

Hunting and Tailoring has required quite a lot of design work and iteration. We originally teased this way back and we did have some designs for these skills, but most of those were early drafts and didn't include things such as different tiers of arrows being used, content for two new skill chests, consumables for the new skills etc. It's been on our back burner for a long time, and now as we've completed a lot of what we internally call "content debt" we've finally been able to jump to it.

Mechanically, Hunting was also dependent on reworking how activities work in the game. That was already added while doing the Travel + 1 update last year and in December's content update we added the required systems to use items as inputs for activities (like the bank repair in Wraithwater does). Now this update takes things further by allowing any item from certain keyword to be used as an input. Higher level activities can introduce requirements to these, such as use at least level 50 arrows and so forth.

We also decided that doing the content all the way to the new "content level ceiling" of 70 would've been too much at once, so at first the content for Hunting and Tailoring will cap at around level 50+. Depending on how much more we can get done before release, we could go higher than this. We will be adding more recipes, items and activities in the following updates for these two skills like we've done to every other skill.

Few important points about the general designs for these two skills:

• Arrows being crafted through Carpentry is aimed to make Carpentry feel much more useful. Currently it's been very lacking, but this greatly increases its usefulness in the game.
• Bows are crafted with Carpentry, so that also makes Carpentry more useful.
• Tailored gear are versatile (granting bonuses to an entire group of skills at once), and are designed to be the main way for players to improve their skilling gear. Gear drops from Chests are still useful in some situations, but you'll definitely want to get yourself some tailored gear ASAP. This also reduces reliancy on RNG somewhat, as you can craft yourself decent gear.
• Hunting is designed to feel quite different and not as easy skill as you need to get arrows and you'll be spending them while doing the activities. This also creates a natural "burn" for materials, as they're being consumed through Hunting.

Other additions, fixes and QoL

Keywords will now also be visible in WalkPedia!

And that's not all! We've also worked to introduce a few new QoL additions that will be launching with this update. Main ones include a significant improvement on performance and memory use of the game. There are also a plethora of bug fixes, new WalkPedia page for Keywords (so you can for instance easily see all the items that count as Light Sources in the game now!). Full changelogs for these will be released once we release the update, as a lot is still being worked on.

We also have two bigger QoL/feature additions being worked on at the moment, and we're estimating that these will be ready to ship few weeks after the Hunting and Tailoring update. So stay tuned for those!

This update also includes small QoL additions, like being able to lock chests you don't want to open by accident

Release timeline

We're currently estimating that Hunting & Tailoring will ship out in early March (as long as no one in the team gets sick, sickness has been pestering us quite a bit this year). We still have a few things missing and some balancing to do, and right now we are transitioning our Over-The-Air (OTA) updates to work through another server. We'd like this to ship only after that is ready. Our recently introduced OTA update system currently introduces too much demand for our servers, and we've been building another one that's just dedicated for downloading game updates. This should make it so that updates don't crash our servers momentarily when updates go live.

Once we have everything ready, I'll do a short DevUpdate with the changelogs and exact release date & time!

Until next time

Okay, that's everything for this devblog! I hope you enjoyed it. We're really excited to release two new skills to the game simultaneously. And I'm also very excited for the things that will be shipped out after this update! We'll be sharing more about those things in the next devblog. I can say that a lot of people have been asking for these things quite some time now!

Have an amazing Thursdsay! Stay hydrated and keep walking! ❤️