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.
We already have an anti-cheat in the game and it’s being developed further, although not exactly a priority at this point of Closed Beta. But it’s shown great promise of detecting cheating. In can’t disclose how it’s working, as that would make circumventing it easier.
There are already a bunch of activities in game that have been designed for people who hike and gain a lot of steps during it and don’t have service. Also, the offline game mode will not require service at all, so it’s possible to manage it even while hiking. In addition to the current activities, we also have special “Adventures” planned that can take tens of thousands of steps without needing to open the game.
Combat system also will pretty much work as “piling up the rewards” in addition to the core gameplay. You gain combat points for each step you take, and there will be a large cap to those. Then you can play the combat system and spend those points and gain a ton of combat progress fast if you’ve got a lot of points saved up.
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.
Huh, interesting. Could you send me the email you signed up with to contact@walkscape.app and at which point the beta application fails? Is it while you try to submit the fully written application, or even before that?
Especially on some older devices, it’s best to shut down the game entirely while walking. There’s some issue if it’s on the background where steps might get lost if your internet connection changes (for instance, from wi-fi to cellular).
Bugs can be reported either on our Discord (which has a dedicated channel for step recording issues) and on Portal to the bugs category.
We’ve been accepting thousands of applications each wave, so it sounds like you’ve been terribly unlucky if it took you that long. Sorry to hear that. We’re also accepting applications during this wave all the way until October 6th, so nee applicants have a good chance on getting accepted!
The Discord link is sometimes quite buggy, and I don’t know why exactly. I think our channel can now be searched for in the communities, maybe give that a shot? Or try this one: discord.com/invite/8F5CWpUc
Thank you! Privacy is definitely the biggest concern, but also GPS requires apps to be opened to register anything, and it kills the battery quite quickly (and requires active internet connection).
Thank you so much for supporting the development! You should’ve received an email that has instructions to link your BMAC on your account page. When you link your account there, you should receive download instructions either almost immediately (sometimes might take couple of hours for our automated system, but usually faster).
Thanks, and no problem! Reception here has been awesome for the project. I also actually developed my own Reddit alternative just for the game, which is the WalkScape Portal
And there are quite a lot of things to do in the game already. I recommend to explore the starting area, and there’s nothing stopping you from planning things you want to do. If you’re feeling a little bit lost (which I totally get, the game is still lacking a proper tutorial and starting quests) I recommend to check the wiki. There are guides there also how to make money. The NPCs don’t pay pretty much anything for early game unprocessed materials, but there are several ways of gaining coins. You can also get past the Fort of Permafrost by going under water and skipping paying for the toll entirely, for which you’ll need to find Diving Gear.
Currently no, but it’s the most frequently asked feature and planned to be added. Google decided to kill Google Fit APIs, which delayed our efforts on that front for a while as they replaced those with Health Connect that isn’t working too well at the moment, but hopefully will be fixed by Google soon.
Not necessarily, but in order to use map data, you’ll pretty much need it. This is why all of the GPS games require a connection, as they’ll download map data and cache your current surrounding areas
This is by design. You don’t lose your steps, but you’ll need to walk to consume them. When you walk with saved steps, you gain 2 steps every step you take, taking one out from the saved steps.
Doesn’t work as of now, but this feature is something we’re well aware a lot of people need, and high in our priority. We’re just waiting for Google to get their tech together so we can start supporting it.
As far as I know, it’s possible somehow. We currently don’t have enough resources to manage additional release pipelines, so it’s definitely tricky at the moment.
Managing two release pipelines is already a lot, and we currently don’t really have the time for supporting yet another one when 99.9% of users are fine with AppStore and Google Play. It’s something I’ll probably figure out at some point when we have enough time for that though!
And yeah, only relies on Google’s Recording API which is part of the services. It’s really annoying that they made (just recently) the pedometer APIs part of Google Services, but I can’t really change that either.
I created an official community for the game here on Lemmy !walkscape after many people asked for it. For official development blogs, I still recommend to check WalkScape Portal as I can’t promise we can post them here as well. But we’ll see!
Depending on how the legislations now post-DMA go, it might be possible to also handle payments throughout our Portal instead of app stores. The app stores, especially Apple’s, has still a bunch of rules in their ToS about this where they might remove the game entirely if you’re not using their payment system. Android is slightly more lenient on this regard though.
The cuts Patreon already takes (a whopping 14% in total, after which we then play VAT) already affects us enough that I would definitely love to rather have my own systems, but also they offer a lot of convenience to the users that we couldn’t at this point.
But overall it would be great if we could provide a direct payment system straight from Portal, as we could price that one also significantly cheaper than using Google’s or Apple’s systems when we don’t need to pay their cuts. It’s something I really want to do to be able to make the pricing as affordable as possible, and everything depends on if it’s both feasible and allowed by the app stores. But can’t promise this, as there are a lot of factors in play whether it’s feasible to provide our own systems and if it’s allowed by the biggest stores.
When it comes to direct APK downloads, maybe if we can get a good pipeline for those. I think the most realistic option is that we’ll pick the one for an “extra release pipeline” that we can automate most easily to our current systems. Could be Aurora Store, F-Droid or some other depending on what kind of automation options they offer.
Yup, I have! From development standpoint, building integrations with each of the manufacturer is not really an option for us right now, a it’s both a lot of work and we can’t afford to buy the devices to test it out.
Thank you so much! The current tutorial is just a placeholder, and not really that finished but I tried to make that nice looking and informative as well. Happy walking, and glad you’re liking it ❤️
I'm the developer of WalkScape, the RuneScape inspired fitness MMORPG where you progress by walking IRL. We're now accepting more people to the Closed Beta! angielski
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