Mildly interested. Concerned about monetization. I don’t do subscriptions or microtransactions, and “pay once and you’re good” is pretty rare, probably in part because there’s ongoing costs to running a server and in part because lol most people will charge as much as possible. But that’s why the only MMO I play is guild wars 2. You buy the game and you’re good. They sell expansions every couple of years.
Also you should mention lemmy on your site where you mention discord and reddit.
We don’t have an official community here (at least, not yet). And I’m quite hesitant to add one, as we already have our hands full with Discord, Reddit and WalkScape Portal communities.
When it comes to monetisation, the model we’ve planned is what seems both the fairest and most sustainable when compared to any other alternative, which is why I chose it as our plan. You can either buy it once to gain access to the offline “ironman” mode, or pay an affordable monthly subscription to play the online mode - both of which will be free to try out, so you’ll know if it’s worth your money before paying anything.
Going with single purchases only isn’t as sustainable for an online game. It’s much harder to keep it supported and expanding it long-term (and pay for servers) if we’re relying on single purchases, and it would tie us into needing to plan expansions that bring extra revenue to keep things running. By having an affordible subscription, we can keep content coming rapidly without needing to consider what kind of expansion pack and price tag do we need to put these new features behind, which I feel is much better from both game design and player perspective.
Microtransactions and ads are something I’ve clearly stated we’ll never be doing, as those also compromise game design and are predatory or come with privacy concerns.
I really like the thoughts put into the game. However, I personally think, that micro transactions aren’t necessarily a bad thing, if you do them right. As an example for this I would call Helldiver’s. You can pay to get faster progress, but it isn’t necessary by any means. You can unlock everything with a reasonable amount of grinding.
But this game is tied to fitness and also has competitive elements to it. Imagine you can buy yourself faster progress here, when it’s all tied to physical activity. It would completely ruin the game and any competitive aspects in it, and devalue the feeling of achieving things in it, if players with bigger wallets gain advantage. When there’s only an affordable subscription, there’s a ceiling to spending and no one can gain unfair advantage by paying more than others.
Microtransactions overall pretty much always compromise game design. Games usually make the grind or progress much slower than what would be actually good to drive the purchases of MTX.
I’m also personally very against MTX and ads, I think they’re the worst invention in gaming and I hate when game design is now revolving around what kind of mechanics can make people open their wallets as often as possible instead of what’s fun and cool.
I’m really glad to have found a fitness app made by someone with the exact same opinion as me on app monetization. I’ve been using the app since March and will happily pay for the subscription. I’m really happy to see this openness, and the fact that you still repeat this promise.
Thank you! The very first post I ever posted to r/WalkScape covers this and I promised that there will be no ads and no MTX, and we’re going to keep what we’ve promised. That’s also why I’ve turned down every investor and publisher, as those could compromise this by having a stake at the company.
I agree with your ideas on micro transactions here. They create a lot of temptations to make the base game worse. “Your inventory holds 12 items but for a very reasonable price you can hold 6 more!” may seem harmless but it also sucks. The game is objectively and arbitrarily worse without that transaction.
Purely cosmetic skins are a little better, but you end up taking advantage of people who buy more than they should.
Exactly my thoughts! I was just approached at Gamescom by somebody who was pitching me to put limits to the inventory in order to sell expanded inventory space. He said it’s cool, as it’s just selling “utility” to the player. I think it’s designing your game to be annoying so people would pay more for it, and I like to put game design over anything else. As a game developer, I’m proud of designing things well and would feel disgusted by intentionally designing crap just to make more money.
Also I think the best cosmetics in games are those you earn through gameplay, which is why all of the cosmetics (which there are a lot in WalkScape) are earned by putting hard work inside the game. And also the players are proud to put the rare cosmetics on their characters to flex that they’ve achieved something. I think that’s a lot more cool than just being able to pay real money for it.
Not to even talk about what you just mentioned here. All kinds of MTX, be it cosmetics only, really take advantage of people who can’t limit their spending. They’ll pay a lot more than they should and it encourages unhealthy spending habits.
But this game is tied to fitness and also has competitive elements to it. Imagine you can buy yourself faster progress here, when it’s all tied to physical activity. It would completely ruin the game and any competitive aspects in it
Okay, you got a point there. Can’t argue against this.
We’re planning that it’ll receive the same updates as the main game itself and all of the features (that work offline). Expansions to the game world might come at a small price so you can enter those, but other than those my current plan isn’t to restrict features, new skills or content additions to existing regions in any way in the offline version.
Also, offline version will include cloud saving so there’s no risk of losing your progress if the device is lost. It’ll cloud save when it has connection periodically while mostly keeping everything on a local save.
For Civ 6, I'd say winning each victory once. Try to do it with different civs each time too. You can set your goal as winning a game on the highest difficulty if you want, but personally I don't find that to be as interesting as the shift in gameplay necessary to win the different victories without just militarily crushing everyone else.
Civilization is like a board game. It’s over when you hit the turn limit.
Fighting games usually do have campaigns, of a sort. It’s each character’s story line. It can be over when you beat every character or if you go through every character’s story (ie run through the main mode all the way through with each character you can play as).
Racing games also have campaigns usually, and some even have progression systems. But the campaign is just going through progressively more difficult races. They’re complete when you’ve gotten the best rank on every track and/or collected every part.
They’re all meant to be played over and over again though; often against other humans. These are also the types of games that come with a lot of options, settings and modes to facilitate playing the same game slightly differently and keep things fun. So I guess the real answer is: whenever you want. If you’re playing then because they’re fun they never have to end. If you’re playing as a completionist, it’s over when you’ve gotten all the achievements/experienced every piece of content you can access.
This is really cool! I just applied. I live in a moderate sized city, so I do walk a bit. I hope to help you out on the iOS side of things since lemmy is very android heavy.
I really think this will motivate me to walk more, as I really only walk to work and the store when necessary.
Right before I left my last job, we were looking at using Flutter to dual deploy our app so I’m excited to see it in use by an indie dev!
Thank you! And Flutter especially when it comes to game development is still in its infancy, but hopefully more devs would pick it up. It’s great for interface-heavy games, and with Flame and upcoming Flutter-GPU also viable for more art-heavy games.
One of the things I hated about Pokemon Go was how taxing it was on the battery. It burned through my phone’s ability to hold a charge in less than a year. If your game is constantly tracking steps, I expect it’s constantly running. How does it manage power draw?
Been playing this for a couple of months and I can say that the battery drain is next to nothing in my experience. No need to keep the app open to track steps.
It gets the step count from the device itself so it does not need to be running at all times to track it. I think it just keeps track of what the number was the last time you opened it and what the number is the next time you open it and it awards you the difference.
The sensors (accelerometer, gyroscope, etc.) are anyways already running on the majority of devices, so WalkScape doesn’t really add to that. The only times it does draw power is when you boot it up and use it. But even that draws very little power - I’ve developed my own game engine on top of Flutter, which is an SDK to build apps and is very battery friendly out of the box!
Just checked ok my android (stock android running on an old One Plus Nord) and it’s about 25th on the batter usage list and only used 0.34% of batter, which is less then the app i only need to sign in to my work accounts a few times a day. So atleast in my use it’s so tiny i never even noticed it.
Battery drain is almost nothing. The game doesn’t need to be opened when you walk, and you can kill it entirely. The pedometer is anyways running on most phones regardless if you have WalkScape installed or not, so this doesn’t add battery consumption in that sense either.
For me when I just checked, it’s used less than 0.3% today which is less than most other apps I have installed. I’ve tried my best to keep this as low as possible, and we’ll probably be optimizing this even further in the future if necessary.
I love this game. Made the walks with my kid more fun and longer. The fact that I only have to check the game once or twice a day depending on what I am doing is perfect.
Just signed up for the beta. I also have adhd and I was overweight for the majority of my life, and then in 2018-early2020, I went from 300ish to 160ish, and I felt great. Then the pandemic hit and I could no longer go on walks and runs and then I got depressed and then injured my leg permanently and now I’m back up to 235 and I fucking hate it but I can’t seem to get the will to walk again. So this game sounds like it would be really fun.
It would be neat if it could pull step count logs from fitness devices and watches so it didn’t even necessarily need to be running while you’re doing your walk.
We would’ve likely implemented it already, but Google is in the process of killing Google Fit API and replacing it with Health Connect. Health Connect, as of now, is kinda terrible. So we’re waiting for Google to fix their APIs.
I’ve tried my best as indie developer to hurry them :D Last week I was at Gamescom and managed to meet with a director from Google, and asked to connect me with Health Connect team so I can tell them what’s broken and maybe have some insight on when stuff is about to get fixed.
When it comes to Apple, there’s no problem with this. But we want to release wearable support to both platform simultaneously.
We have a newsletter available on the website, and also Reddit, X/Twitter, Discord and WalkScape Portal (which is our own “Reddit alternative” for the game).
Typically, for any game that has a campaign, I would consider completing that completing the game.
That doesn’t mean you can’t continue to have fun in endless modes or multiplayer. That’s a different orientation.
For multiplayer games, there’s no completion really. Play the tutorial? All maps once? Win once? Ranks? Endless leveling progress? All achievements? None of those really fit. There is no completion to a game without designed, completable progress. If there’s a max level, one could consider that a kind of completion. All achievements may subjectively fit too.
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