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Hello and welcome to another WalkScape devblog! ​

Last week we released the massive work that had been going for the last couple months, reworking the game engine, our servers and more. As expected, this amount of changes came with some bugs that were not spotted in our internal testing. For the next week or two, we’ll focus on fixing the issues. A list of the issues that are currently known is here: ​

Reddit post of known issues ​

This development blog post will be a bit shorter one than usually, as post-release our main priorities are to fix any issues or bugs that arise, so there aren’t much news to share.

Buy Me a Coffee fix

Buy Me a Coffee had an issue due to their APIs being quite buggy. We’ve now deployed a fix to this, and anyone who were previously having an issue with their BMAC supporter tier not showing up should now have it working. The speed that BMAC is connected to WalkScape account should also be quicker. ​

Please let us know if you still have an issue with BMAC by contacting our email! ​

Anti-cheat improvements

With the engine rework, we’ve also released our improved anti-cheat. ​

The new system has shown some really great results, and we’ve banned a bunch of players that we’ve caught cheating in the game. We’re very happy with the new system, and it should support hundreds of thousands or even millions of players, so definitely a lot more scalable than our previous solutions. Our new anri-cheat also can be more easily improved over time, which is also a great things. ​

Most of the time, I like to stay quite tight lipped about our anti-cheat development so that potential cheaters can’t prepare for what we’re working on. However, a lot of people are always quite skeptical if fitness games are able to run anti-cheat measures effectively. I think it’s mostly due to people’s experience with Pokemon Go, and how badly it was handled there. ​

We take cheating very seriously, and will keep improving our anti-cheat as much as possible, and already have some effective solutions in place. And it’s definitely possible to build anti-cheat solutions for games like these! ​

Short term plans

Like covered in the previous development blog post, we’ll be fixing the bugs for next week or two until we have the game stable again. Then, I’ll be moving onto building our new improved development tools (devtools 2.0) so we can start delivering new content again! ​

We already have art and designs for multiple new content updates, and our goal with devtools 2.0 is to remove any bottenecks from developing and releasing new content of the game. Maxchill and floursifter have been hard at work, and we can’t wait to get these things released! ​

Until next time

That’s it for this time! ​

Considering how massive this rework was:

It goes without saying that we were expecting a lot of issues, but I’m actually surprisesurprised how few there were. The biggest and most tricky issue to solve is the issue we have with the new server tech, where there’s a memory leak. This results in the server restarting every 5 hours or so, so if you’re having hard time connecting it’s often resolved if you try again in few minutes. ​

Thanks for the patience, and we’ll keep working on fixing the new issues! I might include a couple small QoL improvements here and there too - we have a pretty good list of suggested small improvements that wwouldn’t take that long to implement. I already implemented a few in this update: banking from the bank button in inventory, starting actuvities from the world map, wardrobes in all settlements, and so on. ​

Keep walking, and stay hydrated everyone!