Hello again, Lemmy!

It’s been a while since I last posted here, and the reception for the post was really awesome - thank you all for that! I also created a community in Lemmy for the game: [email protected] where I’m posting every development blog post.

We have a new Closed Beta wave right now, so if you’d like to try out the game, you can follow the instructions available at walkscape.app/help. The wave is running until January 7th.

Since the last post, we’ve now started to add some Quality of Life updates to the game and we’re nearly finished with the lengthy optimization process of the game engine and servers. We’re expecting to release the next update next month!

If you haven’t heard about the game before, I started this project as a personal hobby project to help myself walk more. I tried most of the games available, but I wanted to have something that didn’t need attention while walking and wouldn’t have predatory monetization like most mobile games tend to have these days.

The game is inspired by RuneScape, and you level up skills, craft gear, find loot and so on by walking IRL. We have a short introduction video to the game where I explain and show how the game works in more detail.

Once again, thanks Lemmy for all the awesome feedback we’ve got and for the countless encouraging messages that you’ve sent us. And I’m hoping to see more of you in the game & community!

I’ll answer any questions or feedback here in the comments and in our own community. Happy new year, and happy walking <3

  • Corigan@lemm.ee
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    10 days ago

    The game is a lot of fun and good motivation for walking.

    But at a point the inventory management becomes a pain to manage and annoyance to switch gear sets around.

    Hope you come up with gear sets to help ease these burdens and give some qol. Bank filter would help but still would be a pain to switch sets.

    Keep up the good work.

  • rockSlayer@lemmy.world
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    10 days ago

    What a coincidence, I’m a QA tester that was illegally fired and therefore no longer bound by my moonlighting clause. I’ll have to give it a try!

        • tfkgmjfy@lemmy.world
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          9 days ago

          It seems that a moonlight clause is what someone has in their employment contract that tells them what they can and can’t do on their free time.

          If true, the QA above could not do QA work for anyone else while in employment.

          Something like that, I guess. 🤔

  • Hadriscus@lemm.ee
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    10 days ago

    I’ve been playing for a few months now. I love the concept, the art and the atmosphere of it. And I feel it’s been making me walk more. However, I can’t seem to make any substantial progress in the game. I’m still stuck on the starting landmass (Jarvonia), and while doing activities gets me raw materials and the occasional rare item, I can’t seem to do anything with them as transforming those requires skills I don’t have and don’t know how to obtain.

    Am I missing something ? Am I just not walking enough ?

    • schamppu@lemmy.zipOP
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      10 days ago

      Thank you so much! <3

      If you feel a bit stuck, I recommend to check out https://wiki.walkscape.app/ and https://map.walkscape.app/

      In order to process higher level materials, you need to level up your craftings skills: Carpentry, Crafting, Smithing. You need to start with low end materials, which you have levels for. Then you can move onto higher level recipes.

      When you craft yourself some good gear, progress in the game is a lot faster and you’ll find yourself progressing to further areas.

  • big_slap@lemmy.world
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    10 days ago

    hey! I am in the beta and love this game. just wanted to let you know 🙂

    • schamppu@lemmy.zipOP
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      10 days ago

      That’s really awesome to hear <3 Thank you so much, and there’ll be a lot of more awesome stuff coming to the game next year.

  • HollowNaught@lemmy.world
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    9 days ago

    Hiya, walkscape user here!

    Been loving the game, I’m just wondering if you could add a section to the website/game that explicitly goes over what data is collected and what it’s used for?

    • schamppu@lemmy.zipOP
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      9 days ago

      We do have the privacy policy on there, which lists what sensitive information we collect. It’s a bit vague, and we could later on edit it to be more specific, but I don’t have the required skills to edit those kinda texts and we can’t afford a lawyer at the moment. The sensitive information we collect are your email, username and step data, and the step data includes device information (phone model & operating system).

      Non-sensitive information includes all kinds of gameplay data, like items you got and how many things you’ve crafted etc. which we use for game balancing and when designing new content.

      • Senshi@lemmy.world
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        9 days ago

        Does step data just mean the number of steps (and timestamp, I assume), or do you actually track the routes walked, which would mean gps coords/ tracks.

        Cause the first is much less invasive and problematic than the latter option.

        • schamppu@lemmy.zipOP
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          8 days ago

          It’s just steps and the timestamp, no location data. We don’t ask for location permission, and it’s not accessible through OS APIs either.

            • schamppu@lemmy.zipOP
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              8 days ago

              And thank you! I know it’s hard to also trust game devs these days, but we’re doing all we can to protect our users privacy. That’s why there are already privacy settings in the game too - you can hide your steps from other players if you don’t want to share those. And you can also hide your entire user profile so it’s not visible to other players. These settings also protect you if 3rd parties scrape the leaderboards etc.

        • Ruben@feddit.nl
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          8 days ago

          The game doesn’t access your GPS, it won’t even ask the permission. It’s all steps only.

  • sandalbucket@lemmy.world
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    10 days ago

    I’m intrigued, but have two questions:

    1. Does running count?
    2. Can I pull in data from a fitness app / smart watch (Garmin)?
    • schamppu@lemmy.zipOP
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      10 days ago

      Running counts! Also treadmills or walking pads, as long as you have your phone in your pocket.

      Smart watches are not supported yet, but coming. Smart watch support would already work great on iOS, but we’re held up by Google with it as they introduced Health Connect for smart watch integrations and it’s a buggy mess at the moment. Google Fit APIs (that would’ve worked nicely) are deprecated.

  • TommySoda@lemmy.world
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    10 days ago

    Hey! I almost forgot about this when I left Reddit. I was so excited to see it come to fruition some day. I’d love to beta test but I’ve moved to an office job since then so I probably won’t be able to help much.

  • Nurse_Robot@lemmy.world
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    10 days ago

    Loved the game when I first started, now I’m feeling stuck. I need to watch the tutorial videos!

    • schamppu@lemmy.zipOP
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      10 days ago

      It’s kinda supported - if you have your phone in your pocket you do get some steps, but it’s not as efficient as walking.

      I’m Finnish myself and my German skills aren’t that great :D The translations for the game are made by the community, you can help correcting errors at https://translate.walkscape.app/ (the tool is currently hosted on a very underspecced server so it’s laggy, we’ll be moving it to a beefier one soon)

      Edit: Well this was sooner than I thought, I’ve moved it to another server and should be very usable now.

    • isaacd@lemmy.world
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      9 days ago

      +1 for biking. I track my bike rides with Apple Health and it’s pretty solid, I don’t know if it would be hard to make those importable to the game.

      • schamppu@lemmy.zipOP
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        9 days ago

        When it comes to tracking, smart watch support is the most frequently asked addition and biking is the second. We will definitely add biking after smart watch support, as long as we find a viable way to do that. Biking relies quite heavily on GPS data which we don’t want to deal with, so we would likely be using Apple Health and on Android some specific apps to pull that data from.

  • danciestlobster@lemm.ee
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    9 days ago

    The game is great, eagerly looking forward to smartwatch support as someone who doesn’t bring their phone on runs but otherwise having a good time with the game

    • pachrist@lemmy.world
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      9 days ago

      Same! Without smart watch support, it’s a great game. With it, it will be incredible.

  • oo1@lemmings.world
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    10 days ago

    When you say “android” does it depend on any google services? Or will it run on lineageOS with no(minimal) google stuff?

    • schamppu@lemmy.zipOP
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      10 days ago

      The game requires Google Play Services for the pedometer to work (the game uses the new Recording API to count your steps while the game is closed). On GrapheneOS I’ve heard it works if you run it in a sandbox. You don’t need a Google account for the Recording API to work, and according to the developer documentation data is stored locally.

      If you can run sandboxed apps woth Google Play Services, it should work, but I’ve not heard from LineageOS users any experiences.

      • oo1@lemmings.world
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        10 days ago

        Thanks.

        I’ll have a look if I can sandbox in lineage first, then maybe apply for the beta test if it looks possible.

        • schamppu@lemmy.zipOP
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          9 days ago

          If you apply, make sure to mention that! Would appreciate hearing if it works or not.

    • Dave@lemmy.nz
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      8 days ago

      I thought I’d mention as it hasn’t been mentioned yet: the only way to install the game on Android is through Google Play. You also need to join a Google Group to get access on Google Play.

    • schamppu@lemmy.zipOP
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      10 days ago

      For the online version it’ll be affordable subscription. For single player a one time purchase.

    • Hello_there@fedia.io
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      10 days ago

      The FAQ states it. Looks like some combination of subscription for multiplayer elements / ongoing events or a one time fee for Single-Player. Tho, tbd. He hasn’t really asked for feedback on that so far.

  • moonlight@fedia.io
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    10 days ago

    Looks cool, and I’ll check it out on release. If you want beta testers though, make it easier to sign up. I’m not going to write an essay just to maybe get beta access.

  • subignition@fedia.io
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    10 days ago

    Looked over your privacy policy and it seems pretty reasonable. I was curious about how location is used though - could you give me the gist of what kind of in-game features I might miss out on by denying location permissions?

    • schamppu@lemmy.zipOP
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      10 days ago

      The game doesn’t use location permission and doesn’t ask for it, and it will never require GPS data. We have that clause because we might at some point want to do rough location estimates using IP addresses, for instance to see how many players we have from specific countries.

      I suck at writing legal stuff and English isn’t my native language, so I wrote the policy using different templates. We should probably remove the mention of GPS entirely as it’s quite misleading.

      • subignition@fedia.io
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        9 days ago

        Thank you for the details!

        I definitely wouldn’t recommend tweaking a legal document without the advice of a lawyer, especially when it’s not in your native language, but hopefully the project will raise enough funds that you’ll be able to hire someone to do that soon though! Fitness games are good ideas, and the art here looks real cute.

        • schamppu@lemmy.zipOP
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          9 days ago

          Thank you! Definitely our plan to get these documents through a lawyer when we can afford one. One of the surprises to me has been how many things there are these days that indie devs like myself need to deal with that are completely non-related (legal especially), and how expensive those can be. As we want to stay independent, we don’t have legal help from publishers, stakeholders etc. to deal with such.

    • Hello_there@fedia.io
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      10 days ago

      … It doesn’t use location? To my knowledge. It just tracks steps. That doesn’t use GPS.

      • subignition@fedia.io
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        10 days ago

        From the Privacy Policy:

        Location Data. We collect location data such as information about your device’s location, which can be either precise or imprecise. How much information we collect depends on the type and settings of the device you use to access the Services. For example, we may use GPS and other technologies to collect geolocation data that tells us your current location (based on your IP address). You can opt out of allowing us to collect this information either by refusing access to the information or by disabling your Location setting on your device. However, if you choose to opt out, you may not be able to use certain aspects of the Services.

        I was asking for clarification about the last line.

        • Hello_there@fedia.io
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          10 days ago

          Not sure - but I just looked in my version and the only permissions I have enabled are notifications and physical activity and everything works. Maybe that’s a holdover they need to delete?

          • schamppu@lemmy.zipOP
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            10 days ago

            Yup, mention of GPS is a holdover as I’ve used some privacy policy templates to create the policy. Legal writing isn’t really something I’ve done as an indie game dev before :D