walkscape
@walkscape@lemmy.world
- Comment on I'm the developer of WalkScape, the RuneScape inspired MMO where you progress by walking IRL. We released trading last week and we're looking for new players! 3 days ago:
I’d say most gamification apps are first and foremost an app and they don’t really feel like serious games (or games at all), think of something like Duolingo. And the main difference with WalkScape is that it’s a game first and a fitness app second. There’s a ton of lore, details, an interesting fantasy world and things like that which have been crafted to make a fun and interesting game that has actual depth to it. Not used just as fancy dressing for gamification app which aims to appeal to the casual players.
And in pedometer gaming space WalkScape was the first of this kind. If you think of stuff like Habitica and so forth those depend entirely on you checking off to-dos and whatnot, which you can cheat easily. With pedometer it’s a dfifferent thing and we have a pretty robust anti-cheat here as well.
On our Discord you can find people min-maxing their character builds, doing interesting self-imposed challenges, theorycrafting, and they’ve even built online tools to optimize the crap out of the game mechanics. I think these are positive signs of the game having actual depth through its mechanics, items, designs and so forth. And a lot of these people have been playing the game for couple years now and they’re still not bored of it, and I think that’s what for me is lacking on most gamification apps out there: the mechanics are usually shallow or even superficial and there’s not much actual game to it.
Sorry for a long answer, I couldn’t think of a shorter way to put all this :D but great question anyways, thank you!
- Comment on I'm the developer of WalkScape, the RuneScape inspired MMO where you progress by walking IRL. We released trading last week and we're looking for new players! 4 days ago:
I think they use SensorManager API which we could also use if Google Play Services isn’t available. SensorManager just has one big downside that it loses your steps if you restart your device, but at least it’d be better than nothing on de-googled devices.
- Comment on I'm the developer of WalkScape, the RuneScape inspired MMO where you progress by walking IRL. We released trading last week and we're looking for new players! 4 days ago:
- Comment on I'm the developer of WalkScape, the RuneScape inspired MMO where you progress by walking IRL. We released trading last week and we're looking for new players! 4 days ago:
Thank you! Indeed the combat & farming systems are designed to be something that you can keep doing while on a longer grind. And with good item builds you can bring down the steps required for some of the items. When it comes to chest drops like Candlehat they’re not as easy, but the coin system addressed that and I think the trading system addressed it even further (you now have multiple new options: buy the item directly from someone or buy the lesser tier items from people and turn those into the coins and buy the item you want from Mysterious Merchant).
And thank you so much, would love to see you in the game again!
- Comment on I'm the developer of WalkScape, the RuneScape inspired MMO where you progress by walking IRL. We released trading last week and we're looking for new players! 4 days ago:
The shoes are the symbol of Agility skill which that activity is categorized as :D but it’s a fun idea to switch them to something else while you’re in an underwater world.
- Comment on I'm the developer of WalkScape, the RuneScape inspired MMO where you progress by walking IRL. We released trading last week and we're looking for new players! 4 days ago:
Yes, indeed smart watches work! We have the list of supported smart watches here: wiki.walkscape.app/wiki/System_Requirements
- Comment on I'm the developer of WalkScape, the RuneScape inspired MMO where you progress by walking IRL. We released trading last week and we're looking for new players! 5 days ago:
Combat and Farming are both things that are planned to address having something to do while taking a break from walking but both will be fuelled by your steps! They’ll be the type of thing where you spend your steps but don’t actively walk while doing them.
Dungeons are also something we’ve been throwing around as an idea for the future, but that’s still quite far off.
Thank you so much for the comment!
- Comment on I'm the developer of WalkScape, the RuneScape inspired MMO where you progress by walking IRL. We released trading last week and we're looking for new players! 5 days ago:
Thank you so much for the feedback!
We have multiple systems coming out that will provide something else to do in the game actively. Practically mini-games but more than that. Main ones are Combat and Farming.
RNG is a divisive subject, we’ve found that many people love how “hardcore” it is (akin to the inspiration RuneScape), so it’s very much a subjective thing if people love or hate it. Now that Trading is out that works as RNG mitigation: you can just buy the item you need from another player who has it. And the game has plenty of ways to reliably grind money so you can afford to buy whatever you need.
When it comes to grinding some of the rarest items in the game - these aren’t something we really recommend unless you really want to. Most things in the game can be grinded with way less than 100K steps and there are only very few things that require million (or more) steps or anything close to that.
There will be more coming to the game to smoothen some of these things you mentioned and to make the overall experience better for people who want more interaction with the game. But a lot of people also love that they don’t need to interact with it much, so it’s a balance to have there. And this game is designed to be something that respects your time!
- Comment on I'm the developer of WalkScape, the RuneScape inspired MMO where you progress by walking IRL. We released trading last week and we're looking for new players! 5 days ago:
I’d really love to not having to use the Google platform APIs if there were any other ways. We did try but we found out that in order to build your own pedometer that would be anything near the same reliability as the platform ones it takes absolutely enormous time commitment and you need a ton of different devices to try it out on. Add in to the mix that a lot of Chinese phones have a ton of battery optimization that you can’t turn off which might kill your background pedometer to the game meaning that you’d need to have the game open for it to record steps.
Add in to the mix that you need to be constantly supporting all of the different changes happening on new devices and OS versions coming out and what we found out is that instead of being a game developer you become a full time pedometer developer.
When you’re developing a game it’s pretty much not an option spending at least a year (and then continuous support) doing all of that work which you’d much rather spend on making the game itself.
There are some workarounds at least on GrapheneOS in Sandbox mode where you can get the game working from what I’ve heard!
- Comment on I'm the developer of WalkScape, the RuneScape inspired MMO where you progress by walking IRL. We released trading last week and we're looking for new players! 5 days ago:
Couple things:
- When Google entirely reworked their APIs and added the new Health Recording API (which we use) that’s offline and doesn’t need Google account. Google claims the data on it stays on your phone but you’ll need to trust their word for it. Link to Google’s documentation on this
This API is accountless, meaning it does not require a Google Account to use the service, and data is stored on-device.
- We tried doing our own step counting system early on. But creating your own pedometer is nearly impossible these days and takes enormous amount of time that you’d be spending making the game itself. It’s just not possible, especially when you have the platform APIs for pedometer available and those work much more reliably than anything we could do.
- Comment on I'm the developer of WalkScape, the RuneScape inspired MMO where you progress by walking IRL. We released trading last week and we're looking for new players! 5 days ago:
Yeah the pixel art profile pictures use the classic portrait perspective and it’s used in many many other games when you want to show off the outfits. You can also change the expression of your character to other options too. I went for this expression just because that felt most like myself :D
- Comment on I'm the developer of WalkScape, the RuneScape inspired MMO where you progress by walking IRL. We released trading last week and we're looking for new players! 5 days ago:
It’s already out on iOS through TestFlight! You get the link once you get invited to the Closed Beta. You get it immediately if you support the development or you can join the Closed Beta for free through the link in the post.
- Comment on I'm the developer of WalkScape, the RuneScape inspired MMO where you progress by walking IRL. We released trading last week and we're looking for new players! 5 days ago:
I don’t go to the specifics but I’ve met with people from Niantic and I can say they never really cared that much about cheating. WalkScape uses quite sophisticated anti-cheat and PoGo was always more interested in GPS spoofing anyhow when step data cheating is way easier to detect.
We use specific APIs when you use your steps from smart watches etc. so we can detect exactly where they’re coming from and we have a whitelist & blacklist systems for that in place so any weird apps will immediately get blacklisted and players using such banned permanently from the game.
- Comment on I'm the developer of WalkScape, the RuneScape inspired MMO where you progress by walking IRL. We released trading last week and we're looking for new players! 5 days ago:
Offline mode that is coming after Open Beta release will have a multiplier for your steps and it’s aimed as an accessibility feature exactly for cases like yours! In the MMO version it wouldn’t work due to how people would be abusing it.
- Comment on I'm the developer of WalkScape, the RuneScape inspired MMO where you progress by walking IRL. We released trading last week and we're looking for new players! 5 days ago:
Thank you! Support for GrapheneOS is kinda sketchy indeed as the game relies on Google’s Health APIs to pull the steps. I’ve heard that if you have a Samsung smart band/watch/ring and use Samsung Health in the sandbox it might work pretty well. You might even get it to work pulling the steps of your phone that way.
- Comment on I'm the developer of WalkScape, the RuneScape inspired MMO where you progress by walking IRL. We released trading last week and we're looking for new players! 5 days ago:
Thank you! There’s a ton of new features, content, improvements and whatnot! The full changelogs of all the versions are available here on WalkScape wiki.
Smart watch integrations mean that a bunch of devices work. On Apple at least Garmin and Apple Watches work. But of course your phone works just fine too but if you don’t want to be carrying one with you then smart watches are pretty great!
- Comment on I'm the developer of WalkScape, the RuneScape inspired MMO where you progress by walking IRL. We released trading last week and we're looking for new players! 5 days ago:
Glad to see you here as well, and thank you so much! <3 I think the interview went pretty great too and Eric had some really nice (and not just easy) questions for us which I hope explained a lot of the design process.
- Comment on I'm the developer of WalkScape, the RuneScape inspired MMO where you progress by walking IRL. We released trading last week and we're looking for new players! 5 days ago:
Cycling isn’t cheating. Our rules state that:
In WalkScape, steps are generated by walking with your legs. We strongly oppose any non-walking methods of generating steps and discourage promoting them in our community (Reddit, Portal, Discord). The only exceptions are situations, where the leg is naturally moving in ways that count as steps (such as cycling) and only as long as the step rate is low enough to not be abusable.
There’s no specific support for cycling, but a lot of people do play the game that way. You do get some steps from cycling if you have your phone in your pocket although it’s not as efficient as walking.
- Comment on I'm the developer of WalkScape, the RuneScape inspired MMO where you progress by walking IRL. We released trading last week and we're looking for new players! 5 days ago:
We’ve had anti-cheat in the game since day one and we’ve been improving it ever since. I think most of our players can vouch for it being very effective. We also built similar solutions for the trading system to spot any abuse of it.
We definitely knew there’s going to be cheaters and I can tell there are and that’s why having a good anti-cheat has been a high priority for us all along.
- Comment on I'm the developer of WalkScape, the RuneScape inspired MMO where you progress by walking IRL. We released trading last week and we're looking for new players! 5 days ago:
Thank you so much! :D Always glad to hear people are loving it and there’s people here on Lemmy too still playing it! <3
- Comment on I'm the developer of WalkScape, the RuneScape inspired MMO where you progress by walking IRL. We released trading last week and we're looking for new players! 5 days ago:
Image One of our newest locations in the game
For the most part the pixel art in this game created by our artist maxchill has been very well received, I’m not sure how this reminds you of NFT monkeys or AI.
- Submitted 5 days ago to games@lemmy.world | 56 comments
- Comment on Developer of WalkScape (the fitness MMORPG where you progress by walking IRL) here again. We're accepting new players and have a Lemmy community! 1 year ago:
Eric from the community (and a bunch of others) have been making some videos on how to get started. One I’d recommend for beginners is the Ultimate Beginners Guide video.
Also, if you feel stuck you can try wiki.walkscape.app and map.walkscape.app
Thank you so much! When we get the quest system into the game, giving some direction to the players will be much easier.
