Hello, and welcome back to the WalkScape devblog!

In the last development blog, I mentioned that I'm focusing on optimizing and improving the game engine itself. This work has been ongoing for the past two weeks. Today's devblog will be brief, as there's less to share than usual.

Optimizing load times

We've successfully completed our load time & game engine optimization, meeting the goal I set. Here's a video (using the Finnish localization for the game 😄) demonstrating the launch of WalkScape's development version which is using the remote server:

https://youtube.com/shorts/oERsdrMYYlE

The game now loads faster than it takes for the Not a Cult logo to fade away. While this may vary slightly depending on internet speed and availability, opening the game is now significantly quicker than before. It's a noticeable improvement, and should hopefully make it even quicker to check WalkScape during your day!

I've also implemented data compression for the heaviest server calls, which should result in about 75% data usage savings. Although I haven't received any complaints about the game using too much data (I've always tried to be very conservative in that regard) it should now be significantly more efficient than before.

Next up: optimizing loading steps & fixing the final step loading issues

With major changes to the engine and server technology complete, my next focus is improving step loading.

The primary goal is to address remaining issues where steps could be lost during loading, while simultaneously enhancing the speed of the process. As mentioned in the previous devblog, step loading problems occur when the internet connection drops or the game is closed/backgrounded while loading steps. Thanks to the recent engine optimizations, it should now be straightforward to implement a solution where, if step loading fails, your steps will be loaded normally on the next attempt without any loss. I'm aware this has been a source of frustration for some players (particularly on Android), and fixing it has been a long-standing priority. The engine optimization work provided an ideal opportunity to tackle this issue.

This improvement should be quicker to implement than the engine rework, and I anticipate completing it before the next devblog. Given the scope of these changes, we'll be doing thorough internal testing to ensure stability before release. During this testing phase, I hope to make significant progress on Gear Sets as well. Ideally, I'd like to release that feature alongside the optimizations and step loading fixes.

Character borders, CYOA, maxchill’s streams

Here are some minor updates on other fronts, in addition to the engine improvements:

Character Borders

maxchill has been working on Character Borders, a new feature we're planning to add with the upcoming Party System. These borders will allow you to stand out within your party. We're also considering using these unlockable borders in other areas of the game.

CYOA

Our "Choose Your Own Adventure" series on Discord is back on track! For those unfamiliar, it's our long-running series of stories where Discord members vote on how the narrative unfolds. We've already implemented some details from these stories into the game, and we use this format to test lore for upcoming in-game quests.

Link to Discord channel where the adventure takes place - ⁠CYOA channel

maxchill's Streams

maxchill's art streams have returned! These streams are typically scheduled for Fridays (with some exceptions, occurring at least biweekly) from 17:00 to 19:00 GMT+2. You can watch the streams at WalkScaper Twitch Channel

You can opt-in for notifications for streams and adventure posts on Discord here - ⁠WalkScape roles channel

More technical explanation of the optimizations

Also, some people said they'd be interested in an even more technical explanation of what was covered in the last development blog. I posted about this on r/FlutterDev, and if you were one of the people who were interested, check it out here:

r/FlutterDev post

Until next time

That’s all for today!

Thanks again for joining, and hopefully next devblog, we’ll have something to show about the Gear Sets. The engine optimizations don’t make too exciting devblogs, but these have been some very important changes to our tech, and I’m happy that we’re almost there with the upgrade.

Keep walking, and remember to stay hydrated! ❤️