DevBlog #40: Friends system released, major balancing changes, shop rework, WalkPedia and more!
Welcome to our 40th development blog!
I want to start with a positive note: this development blog is our biggest one yet, and there's a lot to unpack here. I hope you'll enjoy it!
Without further ado, let's dive in!
Hereâs a TL;DR for those who feel like this blog is too long:
- Achievement update is planned to release before the next development blog, so in less than two weeks.
- The Friends system has been released in the Portal, allowing players to add others to their friends list and compete on friend-specific leaderboards.
- Major balancing changes have been made, including a revamp of the primary and secondary slot items, a rework of Smithing, and the introduction of a new 'scrap' system for certain crafting activities.
- The NPC shop system has been reworked to support more trading options and improve user interface.
- Progress has been made on the âWalkPediaâ feature, which will serve as an in-game guide and collection log for players.
Friends system released
As stated in the previous development blog, our second developer, myzozoz, is working on the Friends system in three phases. The first phase has now been completed and is already live.
Just as a reminder, the phases for releasing this system are:
- Phase 1: Friends system on Portal
- Phase 2: Friends system in game
- Phase 3: Party system
If you're not reading this on WalkScape Portal, you can head over there to start adding other players as your friends.
You can access your friends list by clicking your profile picture.
Adding Friends
If you want to add other players as your friends, the easiest way to do this is by searching for their username on the new Users page. When you find your friend, you can either press the three dots button which shows an option to send a friend invite, or you can go to their profile page and press "Send Friend Invite" there.
You can also search for your own user in the Users page, open your profile from there, and copy the link to your profile to share with people youâd like to send you friend invites.
Weâll be working to make sharing your profile and your characters easier in the coming days, and also adding the possibility to check on other characters and see their stats on Portal.
Friend Leaderboards
The first fun feature myzozoz managed to bake into this update is the Friends Leaderboards. You can access this by going to the leaderboards and changing "All" to "Friends", or by clicking this handy link.
These leaderboards only show you and your friends, making it much easier to compete with people close to you! Friends leaderboards will also be included in the Achievements Update, so youâll be able to access this in the game as well.
Feedback and Issues
This was quite a lot to implement in just two weeks. If you find issues or have feedback on the system, please comment here or send it to us on the Discord server. You can ping myzozoz with Friends system related feedback and issues.
If the issue is something very serious, DM our moderators on Discord or send an email to contact@walkscape.app.
Major balancing changes
Iâll let floursifter handle this, as he has been most busy with game balancing for the last couple weeks!
Hello, itâs floursifter! Itâs been nearly 6 months since I wrote a post of my own, and since then Iâve officially joined the WalkScape team as our Swiss Army Knife. Since joining in April, the main departments Iâve been performing work in are community management, content development, content balancing, anti-cheat and many other data related efforts. Recently, itâs been much easier for me to directly build and edit content in the game, and Iâve taken advantage of that to do a lot of work that has been planned for a long time. Without further delay, Iâll dive straight into the changes and some longer term philosophy on the subjects below.
Arrows Slot â Back
The simplest change shipping with this patch, the arrows slot is becoming a more general back slot. Arrows are very specific in the game, and weâd prefer this slot to be more useful for skilling, and other forms of combat besides shooting arrows.
The cape slot will continue to be a cape slot, we like capes. Now, you can wear a cape and a grappling hook, a cape and a backpack, and many other combinations in the future. Be on the lookout for a new fun/meme craftable item for the back slot that is a rather unique training method in the early game.
Crafted Tool Attribute Rebalancing
As stated in the last devblog, this was the main rebalance I was hoping to ship with this patch. Normal quality tools have been brought down a ton in terms of Gear Score Index (GSI). GSI is an algorithm that Iâve created for internal balancing which takes all of the attributes an item gives, and gives a quantitative score for how much more âstuffâ you are getting by wielding the item. The main goals of this rebalance were to:
- Ensure higher quality crafts lasts longer through the early game experience
- Make tools provide more materials instead of more experience, slightly lengthening the early game but providing more autonomy on what to do with materials
- Push players away from basic tools faster by providing more immediate incentives for interacting with the crafting loop
- Indirectly nerf rush strategies like buying the steel hatchet in Nomad Woods to escape Jarvonia in a fewer amount of steps than intended
As seen on the chart below, thereâs theoretically a large amount of overlap between the tiers and qualities of crafted tools. By my estimation, a perfect copper hatchet and great bronze hatchet will be a very interesting decision. As we move higher up, a perfect steel will be much better than a great Tarsilium craft. Again, this is my view, and Iâm interested to see what the testing community thinks.
A graph showing the GSI values of different tool rarities
Primary/Secondary Slot Items Move to Tools + Rebalancing
In the long term, primary and secondary items are meant to be combat focused. There will be some random encounters in the future that will be combat based, and having a weapon on your person might be a good idea!
This was a change that we have been theoretically considering for a while and havenât done a lot of numerical analysis on, so itâs the one we need the most feedback on. Things are about to get wild! The goals here are:
- Make it feel valuable to unlock new tool belt slots
- Provide a lot of choice when it comes to your tool loadout
As part of this change, there has been some rebalancing on new existing tools in the game. Some tools now give small global bonuses that you will want to consider for activities outside of their main application. In all, most skills now have 7-15 items that you will want to consider using on particular activities within that skill.
You will be able to craft some combat gear. They don'tprovide any utility for now
Smithing Rework
With a large void created by moving all existing primary and secondary skills to tools, we need items for the primary and secondary slot! As mentioned previously, the point of these slots is more combat focused, and although that system is still far out weâve reworked smithing to fill this need for now.
The details are:
- Bars are 60% faster to create, but give 50% the amount of experience as before (example: Copper bars 80â50 steps, 24â 12 exp)
- Players can now transform bars into swords and shields of the corresponding metal
- Players will need to choose how many bars to turn into these combat focused items (producing more smithing experience), versus saving to turn into tools. If you save all your crafted bars for tools, how else will you generate smithing experience?
- Swords and shields wonât have stats for now, but Iâm looking forward to the first person who flexes their Eternal Tarsilium Sword.
Carpentry will receive some attention like this when we have systems that consume planks.
Some services will now have requirements and attributes attached to them
Service Attributes
A last quick pilot we are working on is testing out attributes that services can provide. We intend these to mostly be at unique locations that are away from banks. What we want to measure is player choice around:
- using a co-located service with bank (Kallaheim, Salsfirth) and transform materials with less game interaction
- traveling to a special service for some free bonuses and have to deal with finding compromises between travel gear + transformation gear and supplies to bring
- skilling in an area with a special service, and transform at the service, keeping certain types of outputs or selling what you make for increased exp rates
Be on the lookout in-game for a service that may change up the Woodcutting/Carpentry meta.
Scraps allow you to refine them into crafting materials
Scrap System Pilot
Tinkering, Wood carving, Ship repair, and Horseshoe making have all been reworked in a âscrapâ system that we are piloting. It never made sense for these activities to be a direct source of transformed materials, and made them very awkward to balance.
When participating in these activities, players will now generate âmetal scrapâ and âwood scrapâ depending on the activity. These can be transformed into bars/planks at increased ratios of scrap per tier of transformed material. This gives players some choices on what tier of outputs to receive from these activities, while still having to put in steps to transform the scrap back into materials. You can also get fine scrap as drops to transform into fine bars/planks of your choice.
Depending on the success of this system, we are considering a number of future systems that can interact with the concept of scrap. Maybe you have 50 normal crafted iron pickaxes sitting in the bank that you donât have a reason to sell, but you would consider putting in some work to scrap these items and transform them back into usable materials. Thereâs a lot of ways we could go with this system, and would love feedback.
Agility
Agility experience from activities has been nerfed across the board, glacier foraging being a huge outlier. You shouldnât get level 60-70 agility for free when committing to farming the blue ice sickle. Other dual-skill activities that reward agility experience have been slightly nerfed.
To compensate, we are providing some progression mechanics to some agility activities in the game. Invest some time using bad skis on the beginner cross country activity, and learn to use a better pair of skis that can help you zoom around the map faster than before! Spend some time frisbee golfing to unlock the golden frisbee for some nice global bonuses when itâs wielded in a tool slot. We are also introducing some new agility gear on the achievements reward track to look forward to.
Other Changes
Non-skill based requirements for wearing tools and gear are coming. We are shipping a few tests, such as requiring a certain amount of completions of firewood making in order to wield a log splitter.
If you are wearing items that you are ineligible to wear when these changes land, the items will be unequipped into your inventory. Please report any problems related to this.
Closing
Thanks for reading along, and as always Iâm happy to take questions in the Discord. I try my best to watch the other platforms, but the Discord is where I usually am!
The shop UI has been reworked from scratch
Shop rework
Due to upcoming elements in Syrenthia and the Achievements update, I had to significantly rework the current NPC shop system in the game. This process is likely to occur in future updates as well: to incorporate feedback from all of you and to make our existing systems more scalable, I need to revise some of the existing systems.
The main reason for reworking the shops now was that they only really supported one type of trade: coins for items. With the Achievements update and Syrenthia, there will be other types of items you can use as currency with certain NPC shops. Additionally, I wanted to make it possible for us to have NPCs that trade items in the future - for example, an NPC that exchanges your fishing lines for fine fishing lines for a fee.
The reworked shops allow you to sell back and buy back items
Since the shop logic was really only designed to support coins, I scrapped most of it, rewrote it, and incorporated a lot of player feedback to improve the shops! Here's the list of changes:
- Shops can accept currencies other than just coins.
- Currencies accepted by the shop are displayed at the top of the shop UI, and the numbers are now shown in full instead of being shortened.
- Both items offered by the shop and items in your inventory are separated into categories that you can collapse or expand. This makes it much easier to find the items you're looking for.
- Shops now include a new, vastly improved search function. This will be added to other places that have search in the coming updates. This search allows for typos and is much more context-aware based on tags and keywords.
- The shop UI has been made taller and when entering an NPC building, the animations have been significantly sped up.
- Item buyback. If you mistakenly purchase or sell an item you didn't want to, you can now reverse this with the buyback option.
- The search bar now includes a button to clear it.
- When typing the quantity into an input field, the previous number is automatically erased.
I'll be revising some of the other existing UI's (especially banking!), especially in the QoL update, which is listed on our Roadmap.
WalkPedia functions as your character's knowledge bank and collection log
WalkPedia
This has been mentioned a few times in previous development blogs - but now we've made some actual progress on this! I'm hoping to include a so-called "WalkPedia Lite" in the Achievements Update, or at least in Syrenthia if it doesn't make it here.
Why is WalkPedia so important? A lot of the time we get suggestions and feedback, and our answer is almost universally, "this will be included in WalkPedia". That's why I feel like I want to include it before its planned release (QoL update), at least partially.
Finding content, planning what to do, and setting meaningful goals in WalkScape is quite difficult right now without using the awesome WalkScape Wiki, and especially new players can feel quite frustrated by how difficult it might be to find which activities to do in order to achieve certain goals they might have. WalkScape is a lot more complex than most mobile games, even in its current form, and we're limited by the small screen size to include all of the necessary information in a nice way to the current UIs. Even before the Closed Beta release, WalkPedia was already planned to tackle these issues.
How does it work? WalkPedia in itself isn't a direct "Wiki replacement". Instead, it combines a helpful tool with fun. WalkPedia works as a sort of collection log, meaning that you'll not be able to see content that you haven't encountered or interacted with. This makes it fun: you'll be able to see all kinds of statistics, including your total completion progress of WalkScape.
WalkPedia lists all the content you've encountered in the game and the related statistics, while also showing you how much more you need to complete it all.
Here are some examples:
You'll unlock an Activity entry when you've completed an activity for one action. Activity entries showcase:
- How many actions you've completed in total for that activity (and in which locations).
- The locations where you can find the activity, with a handy travel button to instantly start traveling there. Locations you don't have entries for will be shown as ???.
- The Work Efficiency cap.
- The loot tables for the activity, and how many items you've gained and your drop % for each item. Items that haven't yet dropped for you from the activity will be shown as ???.
You'll unlock an Item entry when you've either purchased an item from a shop or received it as loot. Item entries showcase
- How many copies of this item you've gained in total, and which rarities.
- Where you can get this item from (activities, shops, and recipes). Sources that you haven't unlocked entries for will be shown as ???.
- Attributes and other helpful information (how many you have in inventory and bank, etc.)
You'll unlock a Location entry when you've traveled to a location. Location entries showcase:
- All of the information about the location, like services, activities, shops.
- Some interesting statistics about the location, like how many actions you've completed there and how many steps you've walked there.
- Connecting routes from the location, their requirements, and more.
Skill pages. These are unlocked by default, and they'll showcase the modifiers the skill level grants you, while also showing you both past unlocks and at which levels you'll be unlocking new content. They'll also list the Activities that you have entries for that grant XP to the skill.
And so on!
Navigating WalkPedia should be as easy as possible, supporting some powerful navigation tools. The initial version is likely not going to include many of these, but it works more or less as a âbrowserâ. To support this, I had to build my own router for it, which was quite a task to complete. The browser-like features include being able to open multiple tabs, adding certain âpagesâ as bookmarks, and a global search that you can use to search for any type of content in the game. Building my own router for it also enabled the game to persist whatever you had opened in WalkPedia even if you restart the game or switch to a different device.
Although WalkPedia itself isnât really a tutorial for new players, I feel it will help with a lot of the early game confusion and frustration before we have an actual tutorial quest in the game. While itâs helpful for new people, it also really adds a lot for long-time players as well: youâll be able to find what to do much easier, while also having a new goal in the game to try to complete as much of your WalkPedia as possible!
The main design issue that weâve had with this feature is that we donât want it to ruin the exploration feel for players who really appreciate being able to explore WalkScape without a wiki. This is why I think the perfect balance is that it only shows you content that youâve already explored on your own. WalkPedia also makes finding content much easier, like for example, youâll be able to see if youâre missing a drop from an activity.
As said, a barebones version of WalkPedia might launch during the Achievements update, or at the very latest during the Syrenthia update!
Achievements update release and Syrenthia
The update for achievements, both feature and content-wise, is now approximately 95% complete. We're transitioning to more intensive testing and preparation for release. We'll announce the actual release date once we have approval from both Google Play and the AppStore to avoid any potential delays. Our estimate is that it will go live before the next development blog, provided there are no critical flaws discovered during testing.
This update contains numerous engine improvements, reworks, and additions, so there's likely a lot of issues to be found! As usual with the Closed Beta, anticipate that there will be problems. One known and intentional aspect of the Achievements update is that it will strip your character naked. I had to rework the way gear slots operate in the game while changing the arrow slot to a back slot, which causes your character to unequip everything when you first load the updated game. We'll provide the exact time when the server goes into maintenance mode, so you'll be able to prepare for this as it might make your character overencumbered and affect efficiency in activities.
Regarding the next update, Syrenthia, we've actually completed most of the labor-intensive features that were planned for it already in this update. Only consumables and job boards remain, both of which are relatively light in terms of the amount of work they'll require. The Friends system has also already been released to the Portal, which should make it very easy to incorporate it into the game before Syrenthia.
I'm hopeful that by completing most of the labor-intensive tasks here, we could release Syrenthia sooner than what's stated on the Roadmap.
There are multiple Adventurer's Guild outposts in Arenum
Adventurerâs Guild
We're also introducing yet another pilot in the new update: the first NPC guild, the Adventurer's Guild.
Many features are planned for NPC guilds, but we wanted to at least partially add the first one. The Adventurer's Guild is a bit unique in Arenum, as it operates in multiple locations instead of having just a single main hub. These places of operation are called Adventurer's Guild Outposts, and one will be included in the Achievement Update.
We have a lot planned for the future of the Adventurer's Guild, but it will already include some new mechanics. They have their own currency, called Adventurer's Guild Tokens. You can obtain these tokens by completing their activities that provide some special items. Their outpost will buy these items from you and give you tokens for your efforts. These tokens can be used in their Outposts to buy some special things, and we have other uses planned for them as well.
These new activities and some items have also necessitated the need for some special stack sizes. For instance, Adventurer's Guild Tokens will stack up to 9999. And some of the things you'll be retrieving from them will grant you loot that is considered "heavy", meaning they'll stack up to just one.
We're very interested to hear what you guys think about the first guild in the update! This is a basic implementation of what we have planned for these, but something we managed to put together in such a short time.
Until next time
That was a lot - and I hope you enjoyed the development blog! The Achievement update has an amazing amount of new content and features for players to interact with, and some new goals for long-time players. Itâs been a lot of work in the past weeks, and I hope youâll enjoy it.
And as always, huge thanks to our Patreon and Buy Me a Coffee supporters! Your support helps us to scale the company and speed up our development efforts to bring more updates to all of you. Now with the pedometer issues mostly fixed and by hiring a second developer, our speed to add new features and content should be a lot faster.
Thatâs all for today! Iâll answer any questions and feedback in the comments. Stay hydrated, and keep walking everyone!
Amazing update!
Too long? I'm gonna read it again. Immense update and some great changes and additions.
Great stuff as always guys! Looking forward to this update.
All of this looks AMAZING. Great job!
Keep up the good work!
Let's freaking go!! đ Awesome update, can't wait for all of this
Absolutely fantastic stuff in here, love to see it!