Directly from our FAQ:

Offline mode - One time purchase. You’ll be able to pay once to download the offline mode of the game. You’ll receive future content updates, not have a requirement to be online to open the game, and have a slider that multiplies your steps to reach the game experience that you wish. No multiplayer features.

Online mode - affordable monthly subscription. You’ll need to be online to play the game, but you’ll receive future content updates and all multiplayer features that the game has to offer.

Free to play area - both forms of the game will have a free to play area that can be enjoyed for free.

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!

We added an action queue system to the game long time ago. You can queue traveling and activities afterwards which did pretty much resolve this issue for most people. It doesn’t have crafting available for it yet but it’s going to be added and crafting isn’t as much of an issue like traveling + activities were.

Our DevBlog #64 on Travel + 1 if you’re interested to read on it.

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!

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 anywhere 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.

Also you would 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. Even harder to justify for all of our current players why we would be spending all this time when there’s a working solution that exists already that we could use.

And Recording API documentation claims that it’s offline, doesn’t need Google Account to work and data stays on device. Same deal with Health Connect. You’ll need to take Google’s word for it, but I think they’re bound by GDPR here more than anything which is why they made these changes in the first place and scrapped Google Fit APIs and reworked them to this new platform API.

There are some workarounds at least on GrapheneOS in Sandbox mode where you can get the game working from what I’ve heard!

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 rather 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.

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

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.

That’s to support the development through Patreon. If you don’t want to support the game you can also join the Closed Beta for free with the link I listed there.

And if you decide to support you keep access to the game if you cancel the Patreon support. Our Buy Me a Coffee also has a one time support option if you don’t want to deal with any subscriptions.

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.

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.

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.

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!

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.

I’ve explained in length why this was chosen as the design here if you’re interested (it’s a Reddit post):

DevUpdate #12: Saved steps and active gameplay feedback

There will be systems in the game that allow you to do stuff (especially Combat) with steps actively. We’re not currently considering changing this design due to the reasons that the post outlines there

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.

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.

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

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.