A new location art piece from maxchill!

Hello and welcome to DevBlog #96! Today we're doing an update that reworks the Job Boards system.

We talked in previous DevBlogs that Job Boards are being reworked and they'll accommodate some of the changes that our players have been asking for.

Let's dive in to what is changing today!

Job Board rework

Reworking Job Boards turned out to be a bigger task than we initially realized. Even though it took longer than we thought, I think you'll be happy with these changes and the refinement we put into this.

Let's start off with the big changes:

• Jobs are now posted to the boards weekly, not daily.
• Each job board except Herbert's now has 20 jobs per week at maximum. At level 0 with a faction, you're limited to 10. The amount of jobs available increases based on your faction level, revealing more demanding jobs at higher levels.
• Jobs are same for every player. Jobs are now generated server-side and this means that everyone should have equal feeting when it comes to what jobs are being posted.
• You can have 5 jobs accepted at a time compared to old 3. Jobs that you've accepted are retained for you even if it takes more than a week for you to complete them. You can still hand in other jobs if you have the materials ready even if you have 5 jobs already in progress.
• You can accept jobs from anywhere as long as you've visited the board. You only need to go to the job board location when you want to turn the items in.
• UIs have been redesigned and a new style of "guide" page added to the Job Board view.
• You immediately see the jobs you can hand in at your current location if there are some in Journal page with a handy button to hand them all in at once.
• You can often substitute the exact quality job is asking for with higher quality items.

The jobs for the most part should be similar to the previous jobs, but they're not exactly 1:1 compared to those. In order to make managing job boards & their rewards easier for our content team, we've made a system here that generates the jobs weekly based on multiple different parameters.

The job board rework should also address ANRs and game performance issues that some of you've still had. The ANR rate at this point is only at a few instances per day and we're hoping this finally brings it down to zero.

What's coming next

Alright, let's talk a little bit about what we're working next!

Naturally for the next few days we'll probably be hotfixing any issues these new changes might've created as is usual. But after that we have one things coming up, and we're expecting that to take few weeks to be completed. More news on that once it's ready to be showcased!

After that feature is completed, we've got two big ones ahead of us: Quests and continued development of the Trading feature, polishing it based on all the feedback we've got so far. Both of these are probably going to take a couple of months before they're ready for release.

These features will keep me and myzozoz busy, but we've also reserved some time to make some small stuff every now and then. We know that tackling the big ones will be taking some time but we'll try our best to have some small features trickling in to the game even during that. And our content team is always working on something new and there's going to be some new content coming in to the game.

Crushy will also be working on some performance & general game stability related issues for the time being while also working on some smaller features that improve the game further.

Public APIs for 3rd parties

If you're a 3rd party developer we have new APIs for you that are optimized for 3rd party use. These will likely be developed further later on and your feedback & suggestions are highly appreciated. If you were scraping Portal APIs (such as leaderboards) this is much better for you to use. Also, these new APIs contain new stuff for you to pull the Job Board data.

Link: https://api.web.walkscape.app/public/v1

Full changelogs

Added

• Job boards reworked, including all of the related UI
• Jobs are now weekly and same for all players
• Added a guide page to Job Boards

Changed

• New Jobs will be very slightly different from what you're used to
• Hard cap of up to 5 Accepted Jobs at the same time
• Map icons now glide out of each other's way instead overlapping
• Herbert's job board offers 12 jobs a week, others offer 20 per week
• Harder jobs will become available at higher faction levels: Medium at 1, Hard at 3 and Extreme at 5
• You can now accept jobs from anywhere but still need to be at the Job Board location to fulfill them
• Upgraded Flutter version

Fixed

• Fixed loot from chests not counting towards wealth earned
• Fixed job hand-ins not counting towards wealth spent
• Multiple issues with inaccurate journey cost estimation (both in Map and Activity screens)
• World Map - Tapping friend icons is less fiddly
• World Map - Icons now move out of eachothers way
• World Map - Should start up faster and use less battery while idling
• Reworked a bunch of the step uploading code to be more consistent and performant
• Issues with the friend list after backgrounding the game
• Fixed opening chests sometimes getting stuck
• Blocking screens (ie, Waiting on Server) will no longer allow using navigation gestures on Android
• Hidden buildings no longer show up in WalkPedia or leave an empty Buildings section on locations
• Location names on the world map better match their text size (no more overflow in Japanese, Russian and German)
• Fixed anonymous walkers not being visible on the refreshed leaderboards
• Fixed WalkPedia opening behind the job boards
• Fixed ANRs with job boards
• Sprinkled in a tinge more ANR mitigation

Until next time

That's everything for today's DevBlog! I hope you enjoyed it and we hope that the reworked Job Boards address a lot of the issues that people brought up over time to us.

Happy walking and stay hydrated everyone!