Hello, and welcome again to another WalkScape devblog! This time, we have some amazing news about scaling development, along with information about our smaller update that will be going live before Syrenthia.

Here's a small sneak peek into new locations coming in the Syrenthia update.

Next up, I’ll let our newly hired developer, myzozoz, introduce himself!

Introducing new WalkScape developer, myzozoz!

Hi there!

I’m myzozoz, and since this Monday I’m Not a Cult’s first developer hire! Hooray! Like Schamppu, I’m from Finland and I first ran into him and WalkScape during PGC Helsinki last September. The project already caught my eye back then, and when I found out that they were looking for a developer, I was in.

As for my personal background, I’m a programmer by education and used to work as a consultant on the side. That work taught me the most valuable lesson of my life: I don’t want to be a consultant. So after graduating I decided to chase my long time dream of working in the video game industry and jumped onboard a small indie company called Latchback Games. There I worked as Lead Programmer on the company’s first title, Break The Beyond. The work was super fun and we had an awesome team, but we never managed to score funding (totally just the state of the market btw), so over time financial pressure started building up. I started looking for paid positions and, well, here I am!

And so far I’m absolutely loving it. Having crawled through conventions and sat through countless pitches, I can tell, that when it comes to indie games, WalkScape has something really special going for it. After the interview for the position I remember spending the next week thinking that if I don’t get the job, I’m going have to ask Schamppu if I could still get beta access without waiting for the next wave 🥲

But especially I’ve been impressed with you, the community, whose dedication to the project is truly remarkable. Schamppu’s been telling me how much you’ve helped him with testing, the wiki and all kinds of side hustles and I really feel humbled to get to take part in this community. So now it’s time to get into it and I hope to start contributing as fast as possible. Keep the feedback coming and don’t go too easy on me just because I’m new 😎

Myzozoz

What does this mean for WalkScape?

First off, I am very excited that we have now finished scaling up the company. Just as a retrospective, I had to:

• Find and rent an actual office space for the company, and now we have this small and cozy office room!
• I interviewed six people from a total of more than 400 applicants, and out of all these people, myzozoz was the best fit. He has both software and indie game development experience, lives nearby, speaks Finnish, and is awesome to work with.
• Handle all of the bureaucracy. Hiring someone from Finland isn’t very straightforward, and this was the first time I was doing it. Employees need to have their pension insurance and healthcare sorted out, and there was a lot of legal hassle to also figure out.

Needless to say, doing all of this in about three weeks took most of my time. But it’s now all sorted out, and I am really glad that it didn’t take longer as now I’ve been able to get back into the development.

Onboarding a new developer isn’t instant. myzozoz is right now starting with some easier but much-needed tasks to get up to speed while learning about the game and the community. He’s currently working on:

• Reworking the https://walkscape.app website. This website has been outdated for a long while, and isn’t doing its job at guiding players on how and when they can get access to the game well. The website will also have a fresh new look, so it’s going to be consistent with the look and feel of the game itself.
• Improving the https://portal.walkscape.app. Because my focus is always on the game and I haven’t found time to develop Portal further, it has been neglected for a long while. Improvements especially on how to apply for closed beta, registration (and fixing the problems that people have with it), and linking Patreon & BMAC are coming, while also improving the general user experience and adding some new features to help people use it as a more comprehensive community website are planned.

Both of these are something that is urgently needed, and a great way for myzozoz to get onboarded on the game before jumping to the actual game development itself.

Android pedometer update

Handling all of the business management tasks has delayed our initial estimate for the Android pedometer update, but it’s now pretty much finished and is already in the final phases of internal testing. I was hoping to release it before this development blog, but I’ve been busy this week handling everything else.

A lot regarding this update has been shared on Discord, but here’s a comprehensive list of changes that are coming (it’s not just the pedometer!):

Android pedometer fix and update

The Android pedometer is a tough one. Just to clarify, these are the main difficulties in having reliable pedometer data on Android:

• We intentionally don’t want to use Google Fit or HealthConnect as the default way of gaining pedometer data in WalkScape. Google is very pushy towards using these, and they would be rather easy to integrate on paper, but I don’t want WalkScape to be reliant on third-party services. Especially people who are concerned about their privacy might not want to download and enable these services. I don’t want the game to compromise our player’s privacy. By having the default method not use those, we allow people to play it without needing to share their data with third parties. Health data collected by WalkScape is kept encrypted on your device, so even if other apps tried to access it, they can’t read it.
• The Android pedometer resets every time your phone reboots or updates. This was why the first iteration of the Android pedometer needed a rework, as people lost their steps if their phone restarted.
• The only way of persisting the pedometer data is by having a background process that tracks it and is able to restart when your phone reboots. This has introduced a battery drain issue on the newest update for some devices, especially for Pixel phones.
• There are a lot of differences in how this all operates depending on the device manufacturer and your Android version. This has made it very difficult for me to develop something that works perfectly on every supported Android version out there.
• Android documentation for the pedometer is very inconsistent and contradicts itself.

As seen from all of that, it’s a challenge. But I am happy to say that our internal build is now showing some great promise in terms of fixing all of that - at least on the devices that our internal testers have.

Here’s a screenshot from one of our internal testers with a Pixel device, where you can clearly see that the new internal build is consuming around 5-10x less battery than the current production version while in the background.

A screenshot provided by one of our internal testers shows how much less battery WalkScape consumes on devices that had the battery drain problem.

Daily Steps Graph Improvements

One thing that has caused a lot of confusion for players is the inconsistency in the game's daily steps graph. Most of these issues are related to it updating/refreshing with delays, and that it represents when you loaded the steps into the game instead of when you actually walked.

I have now fixed it (hopefully for good), and while I was at it, I improved how it looks and also added options for showing hourly and monthly steps.

Bank Search QoL

One piece of feedback we keep hearing is how difficult it is to change between gear sets. While an actual solution (saving gear sets) is coming later as part of a larger QoL update, I have now improved the search functionality in the bank as a quick remedy.

The search is now smarter, and can actually find items based on more than just their name.

The search is now smarter, and can actually find items based on more than just their name.

It's still not perfect, but the search in the bank now also looks for item keywords, gear type, and tool type. For instance, every fish in the game has the "fish" keyword, so writing "fish" will display all of the fish. If you want to look for every item that goes into the "head" gear slot, you can write "head," and it'll show you those. And if you're looking for smithing-related tools, writing "smithing" will show you those as well.

This should slightly improve finding the right items before I have time to implement comprehensive QoL (being able to organize the bank into multiple tabs and saving gear sets to autoswap between them).

Balance Update

Floursifter has been working on balancing some of the existing content while also designing new content for the upcoming Syrenthia update. The balancing work is now pretty much complete and will be going live with the update.

When is the update going live?

As stated, the new update is currently in the final phase of internal testing, and it is complete except for a few issues that need fixing before I can release it.

My current estimate is that we will have it completed by next week.

IMPORTANT NOTE

The new update includes some significant changes in terms of how the pedometer and local data saving work to fix some of the issues people were experiencing.

This means that any steps you haven't claimed by opening the game will be lost when the update goes live. This applies to both iOS and Android.

When the update is ready, we'll provide at least 24 hours notice before it goes live, so you'll be able to open the game and claim your steps beforehand.

Until next time

That was quite a lot of stuff to unpack!

All in all, I must say that I am extremely pleased with how things are progressing. Having another developer and not needing to work from home have been significant improvements, already having a positive effect.

As always, a huge thanks to our Patreon and Buy Me a Coffee supporters. The development is entirely funded by our supporters, and we don't have any investors. I'm strict about maintaining independence, so we're focused on creating the best possible game for our community, not on generating the largest possible returns for investors.

If you aren't supporting the game yet but enjoy it, every bit helps us to advance further.

Stay hydrated, and keep walking! ❤️