Hello and welcome to DevBlog #71!

Like said in the last devblog, we are currently on the development side working on some large features. This means that for the time being, we don’t have much to show regarding the upcoming features, but we’ll share teasers on the new content that’s being worked on simultaneously and the results of the last survey and what we learned from it!

Content update teasers

Let’s start off with what might be most exciting to many - the content teasers! It’s probably clear that we’re working on expanding the game world with the new update, and some keen eyed people might be able to guess where things are headed.

Here are some teasers!

Survey results

Alright, we did a survey last time and here are some thoughts & results from it!

Step & health effects

89.6% of players have seen increase in their daily steps, and 34.8% of players use at least some smartwatch. The smart watch usage in WalkScape is much more than average of smart phone users.

Complexity

How players felt about game’s complexity follows a bell curve, with vast majority of people feeling like it’s complex enough, but not too complex. There were very few people who felt it’s too simple or too complex.

Content - achievements

Players are love Achievements, especially those which require interacting with multiple parts of the games. Some often mentioned liked achievements:

• Cooking Shark and similar that requires interacting with multiple skills and mechanics.
• 30k daily steps achievements. It feels like an epic achievement for many to get.
• Things that have funny references (Comrade, Lord of the Rings ones, Harry Potter ones) are frequently mentioned as being good.

Content - activities

There were a full spectrum of opinions regarding the activities in game. People both love and dislike high step activities, such as Rescue Team etc.

Many people also said they really enjoy activities with rare drops, unique pieces of gear, and those that drop collectibles.

Content - items

Speaking of items - Ring of Homesickness was mentioned a lot here. The item grants a lot of utility, and we’ve now taken into consideration adding another really useful teleport item even before introducing Magic, which is the planned skill to do most of teleporting. This skill however is still quite far away from being implemented.

Other items that were widely loved are: Omni Tool, Screwdriver, Treasure Grabber. Items that grow in strength got mentioned a bunch.

Content - regions

Jarvonia was by far the most liked region. It’s what we also consider as the “most full experience” of a region, with a bunch of interesting mechanics, locations, and unlockable routes. This is what we think made Jarvonia as popular as it is. New players might have also not experienced the later regions of the game as much, which might skew this a bit.

Syrenthia is the second most beloved region. We think this is due to the interesting unlock mechanic and how thematic it is. Syrenthia also kind of works as a clear and self-contained region, where you grow in strength and unlock new things. We think these factors make it so popular.

Trellin and Erdwise were average in popularity, and Swamp was the least liked region that is in the game.

Things that were disliked

Here mostly what got mentioned is that people want more Quality of Life (bank sorting, inventory sorting, more work on the gear sets). We know these are very popular QoL additions, but we have a major UI overhaul planned, and we have decided that for now it’s better to do it later, once we have more of the major features ready. So it could be around the end of Closed Beta. That way it’s easier to overhaul all bits of the UI at one go, and should take significantly less time and result in more cohesive UI experience.

Bank, gear and inventory management QoL additions are likely to be done before that, as those are not as big in scope to add and would help with a lot of the frustrations people have had with the UI.

RNG was also being mentioned being ruthless.

Conclusions

This was a really good survey, and thanks for everyone who participated in it! This gave us really good direction in terms of content design, and now that we’re working on a large scope content expansion, it’s great we got this done and got so much feedback. We hope that with this feedback in mind, we can deliver the best content addition to the game so far!

Until next time

That’s all for this devblog! There’s multiple big things upcoming, and we can’t wait to show you all more about the things we’ve been cooking. Like said, it might still take a few weeks until we start having more things for devblogs to display, but the progress so far has been great.

Stay hydrated and keep walking everyone! ❤️