DevBlog #45: First year of Not A Cult (and two years of WalkScape development)! Roadmap and more

Hello! It’s been two development posts since I last wrote one, as maxchill and floursifter covered for me while I was busy visiting Gamescom and organizing some business matters.

The first year of Not a Cult (the company founded for WalkScape) has come to an end, generating quite a bit of paperwork and planning.

In this devblog, I’ll cover our short-term plans for the rest of the year, review how the first year has gone, and preview what’s coming!

Wave 3 is still on-going

Just as a reminder, Wave 3 is still ongoing, and you can gain immediate access to the game by supporting us on Patreon or Buy Me a Coffee! Alternatively, you can sign up on Portal and apply for the beta.

If you support us before October 6th or get accepted into the beta, you’ll have access to the game for the entire Closed Beta period.

Roadmap

Alright, let’s get to it!

Now that we have added a bunch of features that were missing (achievements, consumables, jobs, reputation, and more), we’re going to start moving to the final missing pieces of what’s needed until we can start Open Beta.

The “big three” missing features are:

Trading: Enabling players to sell their items and gear to other players.
Combat: A turn-based system playable while not walking, consuming “combat points” earned with each step taken.
Quests: A comprehensive system to enhance the game’s lore and story elements through in-game quests.

The “minor” missing features are:

Smart watch & wearable support. We’re currently held up by Health Connect’s underdeveloped state, and we can’t rely on Google Fit API for Android as it’s shutting down next year. There’s no issue for iOS & Apple Health, but we want to release wearable support simultaneously on both platforms.
Party System. This feature will allow you to form a party with your friends. It’s the first feature myzozoz will develop after finishing maintenance work on Portal and localization support.
Proper tutorial. With the quest system, we can finally create an effective tutorial that’ll greatly improve the onboarding process.
And more. We’re not sure what else we can fit in, but it could include features like Guilds if we have time for it!

And the “invisible,” not immediately player-facing features that are needed:

Improving Portal. It’s always been a bit neglected, as usually our time is mostly spent on game features. Myzozoz is working on making it much more stable right now, and we’ve plans for an overall UI rework to make it much more intuitive.
Game engine enhancements. Mainly improving the more demanding computations of the game, so there would be improved step loading time and no more lost steps if the loading of steps is interrupted.
Reworked WalkScape development tools. As floursifter mentioned briefly in the last development blog, now that things have scaled from being just one developer to multiple, our game development tools are not as viable anymore and cause a lot of headaches. To make it easier and faster to do content updates, we need to rework how these function. I’ve been working on devtools for the last couple of weeks.
Anti-cheat and moderation. Anti-cheat is already showing a lot of promise, but we need to keep improving it even further. We also don’t have proper moderation tools for the game yet, and I usually need to do all of that directly by modifying the game database.
Infrastructure & scaling. Our current server tech is looking quite good and up for the task right now, but we have some plans to improve it. Mainly, our database and game servers are located on different servers (and are geographically distant), which makes all of the server calls take way more time than they should. Bringing these closer together and making them much more scalable is something we’ll need to do before Open Beta.

So that’s the list of what’s currently missing! I haven’t included things like quality-of-life improvements or content updates here, as we’ll continuously iterate and expand on those.

A rough timeline

We’ll try to update this to the https://walkscape.app/roadmap soon to reflect this, but here’s roughly how we’re planning to move forward towards Open Beta:

(In a week) Portal fixes. There have been issues where the Beta Access doesn’t update, and sometimes the verification link to email isn’t working. Both are pretty much fixed now along with some other improvements, and should be released soon.
(In 2–3 weeks) Hotfixes to Syrenthia. There haven’t been many critical issues, so I have prioritized some other things for now (mainly starting devtools rework). I’ll be moving to hotfixing now, and we’re hoping to release fixes to issues people have encountered.
(In about a month) Localization support. Include the translations we have in the game, and add the ability to change translations. This is mostly done, but our previous localization library broke, which caused a slight setback.
(In around 1–2 months) Party system. Going to be developed by myzozoz after localizations and Portal stuff are done.
(In about 2 months) Quality of Life update. This might be released in multiple parts, where when we have some set of QoL features implemented and tested, we’ll release them to have a constant feedback loop from players.
(Before/around the end of the year) Combat work started. This feature will take multiple months for me to develop, which is why the reworked devtools are very important (so maxchill and floursifter can work and release content updates even when there’s a longer time of no significant feature additions).
(Before/around the end of the year) Trading at least in internal testing. This feature is mainly worked on by myzozoz, and we anticipate that it will spend a bit more time than usual features in testing due to the complexity and possibilities for exploits/abuse.
(Before/around the end of the year) Reworked development tools. I’ll likely spend part of my time throughout the rest of the year working on and improving these, so we can start using them for combat-related content and doing content updates more easily.
(After combat) Quests. When we have the combat and trading ready, this among some other minor stuff is what we’ll be working on until we have the game ready for Open Beta.
(When Health Connect is fixed/improved by Google) Wearable & smart watch support.

So, that’s the very rough and quite optimistic timeline — some of it might change over time, but for the most part this is the only viable way to work on the remaining features. We’re aiming to have the game ready for Open Beta next year, and based on our rough estimates it would likely be possible to have all this ready somewhere in Q3/Q4 next year. If we managed to expand the team with one more developer, it would become a lot easier to hit this target.

First year of Not a Cult, two years of WalkScape development

The first year of Not a Cult operating as a company ended!

This has created some momentary bureaucracy overhead for me, as we need to finish all of the paperwork to pay out taxes and to have all of the accounting verified and sent to the tax office. It’s now mostly done, so that’s great!

WalkScape itself has now been developed for a little bit over two years in total. For the first year, the development was mostly done in my free time, and only for about a year now I’ve been working full-time.

Things are looking great — the last year has been intense, but we managed to ship the Closed Beta and we’ve kept it running for nine months while improving it and adding more features and scaling the team.

A lot has been learned in the last year. For the next year, our goal is to focus on finishing what’s missing so we could start the Open Beta.

Also, a lot of stuff has happened behind the curtains. The game engine and how all of it works has been greatly improved over the year, making sure that the game stays stable while adding more features. We’ve hired another developer, myzozoz, who has been working on a lot of the infrastructure & server stuff, giving me time to work more on the features. Maxchill and Floursifter have been able to start utilizing the development tools and work on content updates, which have also warranted the need to improve that area to support that more smoothly in the future.

We’ve also been showing the game at a bunch of conventions, including:

Pocket Gamer Connects Helsinki 2023
W Love Games Helsinki 2023
Pocket Gamer Connects London 2024
Gamescom 2024
Maagiset Messut Lahti 2024
And next month, Pocket Gamer Connects 2024 Helsinki

These conventions have always been awesome, as even though we get a lot of valuable (and much appreciated!) feedback on online communities, seeing people in real life, telling how much they like the game and how it’s been helping them is way different. Hopefully we can participate in more consumer-oriented conventions, as the B2B conventions aren’t always that useful when we are not looking for investors or publishers, but we meet some of our fans every time anyhow.

I’m especially looking forward to joining PAX West or East next year, hopefully we can make it!

Helping out & feedback

As a few last things, we are currently posting a lot to our perhaps lesser-known social media accounts. If you feel like helping us out, you can check these out and drop a like & follow:

As a game dev, I have very little clue on how to run these, so we’ve been trying all kinds of posts to experiment on what people might like. Ideas & feedback are welcome!

I would also love to hear more feedback and impressions from both long-time players & new players, especially when it comes to the most recent Syrenthia update. Based on what we’ve seen so far, most people have enjoyed a lot of what we introduced in the update, but having more feedback helps us improve our planning for future content & feature updates. You can write a feedback comment here, or post to Portal/Discord/Reddit!

Until next time

Thanks once again for reading! Also, huge thanks for all of the feedback and support we’ve been receiving during the third wave; it’s been truly awesome so far.

Keep walking, and stay hydrated! ❤️️