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

A look into how a trade looks like in the game

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!

The new pet we released on our last update!

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!