Welcome, future residents of Arenum! It’s me, floursifter. We’ve reached the critical crunch time in the game’s development, and to give schamppu maximum time to work on the code for WalkScape, I’ll be posting articles every Monday until the launch. As a bonus, you get double the content in these last weeks!

These deep dives will cover the mechanics of the game as they will be presented during the Closed Beta Test (CBT) - starting January 18th. Some things have changed over the course of development since very early blogs - so these articles will attempt to give a current view of what to expect when you create a character and load into the game for the first time. As a disclaimer, the content presented in these deep dives can still change at any moment.

Highlighted words in the text below are critical keywords to understand before my next posts, and I am willing to answer any questions about them in the comments.

WalkScape 100 - Common Misconceptions

I wanted to start with a quick list of common misconceptions the team has seen on various platforms to get everyone on the same page.

• WalkScape is a game powered by your movement. ALL game mechanics are tied to walking.
• WalkScape is a standalone app, you do NOT need any pedometer or health apps to play the game, just a phone that has a pedometer (built from raw sensors) on it. Google Fit, Apple Health, and Samsung Health are NOT required but can give you a good idea of how many steps you would be getting in game in the meantime.
• WalkScape requires you to have your phone on your person to get progress in the game. It will NOT work with smartwatches on CBT launch. It’s recommended to be in your hand, in a pocket, or in a backpack/fannypack that stays on you as you go throughout your day.
• WalkScape does NOT use location data. Play it anywhere: Treadmill, walking around your house, at a nearby shopping mall, or out in nature!
• WalkScape does NOT take distance into account. Stepping in place in front of your TV works just as well as going for a walk to the store. We just want you to be moving those legs!
• WalkScape is an RPG that revolves around you telling your character what to do. There is no action queuing. We’ve tried to balance it so that quickly checking your phone every 1k-10k steps is optimal for most activities.
• WalkScape works fine in the background or entirely closed. Steps that you take while the game is in these states will be loaded and applied to your current activity when you foreground or open the game.

These are accurate for the CBT launch, but some of these points are not set in stone. We will consult the community before any key system changes that go against the above.

With that covered - let’s dive into the UI!

WalkScape UI

There are two menus on WalkScape - a horizontal menu at the bottom of the screen (blue) and a vertical menu (green) which you can expand via a “+” button that changes to a “-” button that can minimize it.

The two menus of WalkScape

Horizontal Menu:

• Character: Current levels, the steps you’ve loaded into the game over the past 7 days, and a share button to share your profile via any method supported by your phone.

Top of the Character UI - displays your current levels

Scroll down to see an early UI of your recent walking statistics

• Location: Current location, and the activities, buildings, and NPCs that are available at the location.

Top of the location UI - shows the location art

Scroll down to find the description, activities, and buildings at the current location

• Activity: Current activity details that your character is working towards. Generally shows how many steps are required to finish your current action, how many steps to level up, and an estimate of how many steps remaining until you finish your possible actions (when traveling or crafting).

Top of the Activity UI - shows your selected activity and progress towards your current action

IF you have saved steps, they will be located just below

• Journal: Currently does nothing, but is planned to include a log of milestones when you achieve level ups, complete quests etc.
• Feed: Currently does nothing, but is planned to include achievements of your in-game friends and content that they share.

Navigating these menus is as easy as swiping left and right on your screen. Alternatively, you can tap the icons on the menu itself to easily jump to the other end and avoid several swipes. As seen in the pictures, these menus are also vertically scrollable.

Vertical Menu:

• Dev Tools: This won’t be in the build that CBT participants receive. However, this is where all of the awesome tools that schamppu has built for the game exist. Some of these have been shown off on the discord and in various streams, but it’s incredibly easy to add and edit content in real time from within the game.
• Settings: Currently does nothing but CBT might ship with some general account settings options.
• Leaderboards: Loads the live player leaderboard.
• Crafting: Opens up the Crafting UI, where you can sort by skill or material in your inventory to see what recipes exist. The ones you can make will be highlighted green, and the ones that you are missing a material or requirement for red.
• Travel: Opens up the world map interface.
• Inventory: Opens up the Inventory UI where you can see your current inventory, equipped gear, and toolbelt.

I will deep dive these vertical UI options in a later post.

In general, clicking one of these elements brings you away from the main horizontal menu of the game. To get back to the main view from a vertical menu UI, Android users can click the hardware “back button” on their device, and all users can long swipe from the left edge of their screen to the right. The long swipe is a little tricky the first time you do it if you are unfamiliar with this gesture, but feels natural very quickly.

With the basics of the UI covered - let’s quickly dive into the gameplay!

World Map + Locations

Northern Jarvonia in a partially explored state

The core of WalkScape gameplay revolves around the world map of Arenum. On the map you will find the 10 regions of the world, which are filled with many locations. The locations are represented by an icon to give you an idea of what they are and what you can do there. In Northern Jarvonia, pictured above, there is a coast, forest, plain, mountain, city, town, and village location. New locations that you have never visited will appear as question marks on the map. Clicking on an unexplored location will show you the directions you can travel from that location once arriving, but you will know nothing else about the location location until you visit it for the first time.

Players will spawn in the Disenchanted Forest location (the forest icon), just northwest of the great city of Kallaheim.

There are no hard rules on what can exist in different locations on the map, but the locations generally fall under two broad categories: Urban and Rural locations.

Urban Locations

These locations are usually represented by the city, town or village icons on the map. In general, urban locations generally host buildings (NPC Shops, Banks) and crafting services. For example, in Kallaheim there is one activity, three services, and three buildings available. Once you have been to a location, you will be able to see this information, even from a different location on the “travel” menu.

Before covering activities, a brief overview on services and buildings:

Services are generally required for crafting any items which are more complex than survival tools. The services line up with crafting skills as follows:

• Forge - Smithing
• Kitchen - Cooking
• Sawmill - Carpentry
• Workshop - Crafting

Services will also have a modifier attached to the front that tells you how good it is. A Basic Forge can only handle smelting bars up to a certain tier, so if you are looking to work with higher grade ores you may need to find a better Forge! The Services in Kallaheim - a forge, kitchen, and sawmill Buildings function as places to interact with NPCs for buying, selling, and banking. In Kallaheim you can find a tavern (The Icy Goblet), a general store (Kallaheim’s Frosty Finds) and a bank (Frozen Capital Bank). Clicking on the building will expand the information and show which NPC can be interacted with at that particular building. The Buildings of Kallaheim - a tavern, general store, and bank

Rural Locations

In general, rural locations are generally home to activities. At the Beach of Woes, you can see that three activities exist, one for fishing, one for carpentry, and one for foraging. Clicking any of the icons in rural or urban locations will show you more information about what the service, building, or activity provides and requires. As an example, fishing at the Beach of Woes requires a fishing net - and players will need to discover how to obtain one in game before engaging in this particular activity.

The Beach of Woes - a fishing, carpentry and foraging activity

Activities and Actions

When you select an activity, you begin completing actions of that activity until it no longer becomes possible to continue completing actions, or you select to do another activity. Actions are one completion of an activity, and reward things like experience, a chance at a chest, and create or transform materials.

There are roughly two categories of activities in the game:

• Near-infinitely repeatable - Many gathering activities will produce an action every set number of steps until you tell your character to do something else. For example, if you select cutting a pine tree as your activity, your character will continue chopping pine logs until you tell them to do otherwise. You will continue doing this activity at maximum efficiency until hitting the inventory soft-cap, whose mechanics will be discussed in a later blog.
• Finitely repeatable - Crafting and traveling activities generally produce a finite amount of possible actions. When selecting an activity such as “Cut a pine plank”, you can select how many actions you want to perform up to the maximum available based on the materials you have available to you, and the game will predict how many steps this will take you to complete. When traveling is your activity, your character will travel until reaching their destination.

Crafting actions like cutting pine planks will produce actions until you run out of the materials you selected to use

Steps that you take while the game is active on your screen (foreground) are applied in real time to your current activity. If you close or background the game, the steps that you take will be immediately applied upon foregrounding the app or loading into the game.

Saved Steps

If you complete all the possible actions in a finite activity, your character will become idle. If your character ever becomes idle or wastes steps in another way, the game will accumulate Saved Steps for you for every step that is wasted. While you have Saved Steps, one step will be drained and applied towards your current action for every step that you take.

One recent change to this system was to bank Saved Steps when you cancel an unfinished action, refunding the steps spent you spent towards it. This was a key change made recently in the game, and will really help you never feel like you are wasting a step when switching your current activity.

I have 57 Saved Steps. My next 57 steps in real life will consume these 57 Saved Steps, producing 114 steps of progress towards my selected activity.

Assorted Notes

You can cancel your character’s current activity at any time, choosing to travel or do another eligible activity in the area. Steps that were “wasted” towards the previous activity go to the step bank.

As a mirror to services, most gathering activities require a specific tool equipped to your toolbelt to initiate. Early foraging activities are the exception here - they usually do not require a specific tool to engage in the associated activity.

• Woodcutting - Axe
• Mining - Pickaxe
• Fishing - Net or Rod

Closing

That’s all for now. Tune in next week for WalkScape 102 covering mechanics such as item statistics, inventory mechanics, and more!