My RuneScape-inspired fitness RPG, WalkScape, has a new Closed Beta wave starting one June 1st!

schamppu@lemmy.zip to Games@lemmy.world – 662 points –

Hello! ❤️

I'm the developer of WalkScape! My game is an online RPG that is inspired by RuneScape, where all of the in-game progression happens by walking in real life.

I myself have struggled to exercise enough, and I'm diagnosed with ADHD. This project started off as something I was working for myself to help me exercise more. The game has been in Closed Beta since January 18th, and the player feedback so far has been awesome!

There are three key things that make the game very unique for a mobile game, in addition to just being a nice and cozy game that incentivizes you to walk:

  • No GPS. Unlike games like Pokemon Go, WalkScape uses pedometer instead of GPS. This means you can walk where ever you like, including at your home or gym on a treadmill. And doesn't compromise your privacy.

  • No MTX or ads. I'm against all kind of predatory trends in gaming, especially predatory monetisation. WalkScape is completely community funded with Patreon and Buy Me a Coffee with no external investments.

  • Not hungry for your attention. WalkScape doesn't even need to be opened in the background for you to gain progress in it. The game is designed in a way where you only need to open it after your exercise, and if you forget to the game it doesn't punish you. It saves your "missed steps" for later.

If you're interested to give it a try, you can check out https://walkscape.app to find how to join the upcoming beta wave, see some stats about the game (people have already walked more than 1.5 billion steps!), and our roadmap.

I'll answer any questions you might have. Happy walking and stay hydrated ❤️

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I've been using this app for the past several months. I really appreciate the fact that you can just go about your day and then open the app 1 time in the evening and see all of your progress at once. Ultimately it's been a way better way to inspire me to get out and walk more than Pokemon Go was.

With PoGo, I'd constantly be stopping while walking about so that I could catch Pokemon. On top of that, with PoGo my routes were more or less predetermined since I'd need to walk specific places to spin stops to have enough pokeballs to keep playing. Not to mention the heavy battery drain with PoGo as the screen and GPS were constantly in-use. Additionally, PoGo always made me feel a bit awkward walking around parks if kids were playing nearby since I'm sure I looked like a total creep with my phone out...

But no more! Now I put my phone in my pocket and walk whatever direction I'd like for however long I want. No stopping, no battery drain, no daily streaks to maintain, no FOMO events to try and keep me using the app. And no more looking like a weirdo lol.

Love this app, thank you for making it. I hope one day soon it can use my activity tracker (I use a Fitbit) instead of relying solely on the phone being in my pocket, but my expectations have been blown away regardless. Phenomenal job.

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

Looks sweet; applied for the beta.

Same, let's see if we can get in. Sorry OP for my long application text.

This has been a phenomenal dopamine factory for my wfh software ADHD ass.

It's beautiful, clearly a labor of love, and I can't wait to see the roadmap progress! Wishing you the best of luck!

Thank you so much! And awesome to hear you've been liking it and it's been helpful ❤️

Do you have integration with other health and fitness apps to retrieve non phone step counts?

I have a Garmin watch that does all my health tracking etc.

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.

I would very much like this too! Especially if it can count distance/steps from other kinds of activities like biking, stationary bike, maybe even swimming.

Ditto but for Gadgetbridge on Android :)

wave:selling mith arrows 1k ea

wave:selling mith arrows 1k ea

wave:selling mith arrows 1k ea

fishing lvl?

That's amazing - Would it be fine if I covered this on my (very, very small) YouTube channel? My content isn't really related to anything fitness, but I am in the process of getting a bit fitter at the moment, so this could be a very fun thing to do and talk about for me, as I do have a weak spot for both RPGs and privacy respecting apps!

Tried it the last time I saw it it posted. Be warned, this takes a huge amount of battery life to run in the back ground. So much so I had to stop playing.

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.

Does the app need to be open (like old PokeGo...) or does it just track in the background?

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.

May I ask what the reason for the battery drain was?

I seriously have no idea. The Pixels had something weird going on when we wanted to keep track of the steps, and it drained a lot of battery. On other devices, it was not an issue. When I made the frequency of getting the steps lower, that fixed it.

I tried the beta a few months ago and it was great! I kinda lost interest when I struggled to find a city with the workshop I needed at the time, but I'll try again now that a few updates have come out!

I guess World of Walkcraft was too close to a takedown.

I'll keep an eye on this one because I do like my long middle aged man walks, and don't care for the constant fiddling needed for the likes of Pokémon Go, which seemed to reward laps of crowded spaces over meandering walks down rivers.

iOS or Android? I can’t seem to find anywhere where this is specified. As a fellow ADHD’er I’d love to check this out as I have the same issues. Also would love to support you if I can.

It's very cool you're making it in Flutter, my personal favorite for any coding task.

Is the game open source? Understandable if not, but if it is open source I'd be wanting to contribute! 😁

If you like flutter and know python check out Flet! Based on flutter with python bindings, I've used it a couple of times during work and it was a dream

I'm a huge fan of Dart myself, but that's pretty cool to have as an option for a python project. Thanks for the link!

Not open source, unfortunately

I know in previous posts, you've talked about leaderboards and comparing stats to friends. For those who might be embarrassed by their stats or who would be anxious comparing stats, is ir possible to hide these menus and/or play the game without them? In particular, is it possible to play with other social features still enabled?

There have been talks about being able to be anonymous on the leaderboards, but nothing set in stone yet

I tried to sign up but never got a confirmation email. It's been about 30 minutes. I checked my spam folder and it's not there.

Game looks cool though.

Hi! We have some problems with some email providers. Could you contact me and tell the email you tried to sign up with at contact@walkscape.app and I can see what's going on

I was in the Summer event and came third or so for Jarvonia overall. Like a dope I stopped using Discord right after that and haven't seen anything from the game since. Looks awesome, can't wait to get in.

So RuneScape X Poke'mon go?

Hmm

Well yes and no! Pokemon Go depends on GPS, so this is very different from that. And I talked to Niantic's manager at one convention, and they said their games are mostly focused on AR.

RuneScape in a lot of ways yeah! But we can't use their IP naturally, so the world and content is completely different.

they said their games are mostly focused on AR

This is amusing to hear. I've not played pogo for a few years ago I don't know if things have changed, but absolutely everyone I knew used the AR for 5 minutes because it was cool and then disabled it forever because it made the game sightly harder!

I thought the exact same. For me, the AR stuff feels like such a gimmick.

Pikmin Bloom was their most fitness focused game

Sounds great! So I understand you skill up stuff by walking, I assume traveling through the world as well? The site mentions there is combat as well, how does that work?

Yes, travelling through the world is also done by walking irl. Though obviously the distances aren't quite 1 to 1. Combat is not implemented yet but coming later. Current plans are that it will be a turn based system and will be what's called "couch content", something you can do at home from your couch without having to walk. But all subject to change still.

Awesome, thanks for answering!

From my view: If I get a game called WalkScape I don't want to play it actively. So if those things can only be progressed on the couch, I won't touch them. And if that locks me out of other content, that sucks.

And if it's just AFK, then it also goes against the purpose/vision of the game. Not saying that you're doing it, but don't bloat it with unnecessary mechanics.

From what we've heard from the community, players are initially drawn to the game because they love that concept of inactive playing. They then get hooked on the game so much that they actually also want to do something in the game even when they're not doing exercising, so something active. It's a very often heard suggestion. Obviously it's impossible to please everyone, but the majority actually does want this. If that's not you, thats unfortunate but understandable.

Edit: also, seems like you will need to basically "charge up" combat points with steps, which you can then use to fight some stuff. So you will still need to be walking first to be able to do combat.

Which is kind of what the point is. Start it without a habit, form a habit of playing that makes you want to do the action of exercise

Made an account and tried to sign up for beta access, but the Submit Application button doesn't work on my phone for some reason (or its sending 100 applications as i tried a few times lol). Using a Pixel 6, firefox mobile.

It requires at least 200 characters to the text field. Did you have something written there, as that might've been causing the issue?

Double checked that i had more than 200, that doesn't seem to fix it. I'll probably try doing it on my PC later

Does it work for cycling?

Not officially supported, but if you have your phone in your pocket while cycling, you'll get some!

It's probably less optimal than walking since I seem to get less steps in when I bike, but I can confirm it works

I remember hearing about this on Reddit a few years ago. Congrats on your beta!! Will check it out 🙏

It's a really nice game. The eggs and animals are a new addition right? Haven't seen them in-game yet.

Yup, pets feature is something we're working on right now. You might've seen Animal Shelter in Salsfirth, it's very much related to the pets feature.

Tried to sign up for an account but I never got a confirmation email. Checked spam folders but nothing was there.

I was using my yahoo mail account. Does it only work with Gmail accounts?

Yahoo should work. If you still haven't gotten it after like 2 hours, please send an email to contact@walkscape.app with your username and email you used to sign up

Uff took about 3 hours for the email to arrive it seems. When I clicked the link today after checking my mail again, it said the link was expired reeeeee. I'll probably just wait for the official release. Thanks for your help though!

Probably because of the influx of new players. I'd recommend trying again or sending an email, it's well worth it!

what's the main engine looking like? only using pedometer? if yes, what's the availability of the sensor nowadays?

asking because I used to run a similar kind of game years ago and I had to give up because it was a very difficult fight against battery optimization tools, localisation/sensor policies, etc

Yes only pedometer. iOS has been a walk in the park (no pun intended) since the beginning, Android was a mess until they released the Recording API like 2 weeks ago. Now it's on the same level as iOS.

glad to see this going forward. hopefully this allows the "idle walking" genre to finally flourish

thanks for posting your progress! and keep doing it!

I was in the previous beta but after getting a new phone "jelly star" it kept reporting i had done 0 steps every time i would open it. Like how it would prior if i was updating the game it would forget the steps i did from the last time i opened it. Don't know if it has something with it starting to auto update. I also disabled so battery optimisations on my phone to do with the app and anything system wise for the pedometer.

Absolutely love the game though and an eager for when this is fully out and i can more easily recommend it to friends.

We just released an update on this yesterday, which starts using new pedometer API released by Google. It should be a lot better now than before.

My post on this: https://portal.walkscape.app/post/664

Just want to let you now that I've not had any issues since. Everything's been working as expected now.

Wow this seems great and really well presented!

Let me in! Looks fun, guess I'll have to wait for the next round of beta entries.

Sounds awesome. I average 12k steps a day, might as well do so while enjoying a fun game. :)

This looks rad! I love gamifying life 😅

Signed up, and I hope to support this soon! I wish the development process well!

I found I did a lot more chores when I started tracking them with a points system.

I watched more new TV & movies when I signed up for Trakt, more games with Exophase and Backloggd, more books with StoryGraph, more anime and manga with Myanimelist...

I've been beta tester for a month or 2 now, it is a really great lil walking game!

So many words required to apply! I'll just check back in a few months. Looks awesome 😎

It's 200 characters, not words. Less than a tweet!

I've been trying to walk more lately, so this might just be the thing for me

This looks very cool! Hoping I get into the next wave!

My partner and I are so stoked to sign up.

Awesome! I hope you'll like it ❤️

Our other dev is starting to work on a friends system to the game that makes it even more fun to play this with friends, partners, etc.!

Looks great ! Thanks for sharing

If you don't mind me asking, how long have you been working on it ? Are you working on it full-time ? If not, how do you balance it with the rest of your day ? Are you working on it alone or ... ?

I've been working on it for two years. You can see the full story and evolvement of the team in https://walkscape.app/roadmap

I worked alone on it for quite a long time, and then other people have joined the ream. Now working on it full time.

This looks really cool - I put in my beta tester registration!

Been keeping my eye on this one for a while! Very happy to see it steadily progress, can't wait to try this out! 🙌

Looks awesome I love the art! Applied for the Beta and supported on Patreon. <3

Very much looking forward to playing this :—-)

I'm stupid, so I gotta ask, wouldn't there be cheaters in this game if it doesn't rely on GPS?

Cheaters? In my single player game?!

Spiderman pointing meme

Any game has cheaters. I know the team does have monitoring in place to catch suspicious behavior and players have seen consequences for it.