Doesn't need to be, and designed around the idea that it is closed when you're exercising. Can be entirely closed, and still tracks the steps.
Sure thing! If you need anything or want to ask something specific, message me to contact@walkscape.app !
Not yet, but it's on our roadmap. Google is right now doing a major rework on this (Health Connect), which delays our efforts on that for a moment as we need to wait for them to release it fully.
The game still doesn't have a very good way for finding certain places. I recommend to check https://map.walkscape.app and https://wiki.walkscape.app in the mean time if you're struggling to find something
We are going to improve this in one of the upcoming updates
This was already fixed like month ago! It was mostly happening on Pixel devices only.
Give a try to the new version, it shouldn't use much battery at all now.
Probably. I'm not too keen on paying the 30% Google Play tax anyhow, as that cost would fall to be paid by the players with increased subscription cost. I want to keep the subscription as affordable as possible. I'll try my best to find ways around it, probably easy enough on Google Play but might prove to be more difficult on AppStore.
Edit: and even as of now, the game requires no Google Services. I'm doing my best to keep it that way.
Free to play so you can first try it out before making a purchase decision. Then you can either play it single player with single purchase, or if you want to play it online it's affordable subscription. This is the least predatory way of doing monetization that in my mind works great both for the players and makes sure we can support the game for long.
And thank you!
It's an online game, with option for single player coming later. We run anti-cheat and cloud save your progress when you open it up, plus validate that you're running on the most recent version of the game so you can't be exploiting old game balance etc. found in previous versions.
Offline mode of the game will be offered as one time payment, whereas the online mode costs an affordable subscription. Both will include F2P where you can try out the game for free to see if it's worth your money before making the decision.
If you're thinking of supporting, Buy me a Coffee offers one time purchase to get access immediately.
The reason we have subscription planned for the online mode is that we don't do ads or MTX. But running an online game comes with a hefty price tag, which we couldn't support with single purchases only. Affordable subscription at least to me personally is much better option than ads/MTX.
We're developing an anti-cheat, and have quite good plan how to deal with it. Obviously every MMO always has cheaters, but the great thing about WalkScape is that there's just one input to the game (your steps) which makes monitoring a lot easier.
We're already tracking the steps server side and getting some data to implement a version of the anti-cheat during closed beta, and then testing it out in our separate server with people who want to try cheating in order to perfect it before we go open beta. It's something we're committed to improve, and I'll do the best coding wizardry that I can.
My bottom line is that we probably can never catch every cheater, but as long as we can catch those who would ruin the economy or competition, it's not going to ruin the game for others. And I'll of course aim higher than that, but trying to stay realistic as this is an indie game and I don't have the resources to hire 20 people to work on anti-cheat.
This was really awesome to read. Thank you, you made my day! More updates are coming this summer to make it even better. And hopefully smart watch + band integration soon as well. We're currently a bit delayed on that front as Google is redesigning how health app integrations work with Health Connect