Hello, and welcome again to WalkScape dev blog! This time we got two new features to showcase that we've been working on, and we will be covering a bunch of other relevant things as well!

Travel + 1

Finally! This feature has been talked about quite often, and now I finally had the good opportunity to get to it and finish it.

Creating Travel + 1 meant that I needed to rework the entire current activity system, so once it goes live, all current activities will be cancelled and you won't get the steps from those returned as saved steps! This was quite a bit of work to basically recreate the way activities work from scratch, but as a bonus the new system is a lot more flexible in terms of what we can do with activities.

The first iteration of Travel + 1 will include the following:

• You can queue travels, including more than one. This makes it possible for you to queue up for instance travel to Port Skildar, then to Vastalume, and for Port Skildar to Vastalume, make it switch to diving gear.
• You can queue activities. With activities, you can also queue up a gear set switch before the activity starts. After queued activity, you can't queue more things.
• You can have 3 things queued up (basically right now travel, travel, start activity).

Future plans for Travel + 1 includes:

• Queuing up crafting recipes. These likely won't be limited similarly to regular activities, meaning you can queue up more than the current limit of 3 things.
• Queuing up withdrawing gear sets. If your queued up travel route goes through a bank, this is something you often would like to do.
• Queuing up depositing "unlocked items" if your queued travel route goes through a bank. This is first on my list of priorities, as it's simplest to implement and would be helpful outside of Travel + 1 too. Basically you can mark items in your inventory locked, and anything that isn't locked can be deposited by a single action.

Rumours

This is a smaller feature, meant to provide better early game experience and also to work as a bridge between some of the more "hidden" stuff in the game that we have currently. The button for this actually did exist in the game already way back, and now it's back as we now have good ideas for rumors and how they should work in the game!

NPCs that can give you rumours now have the Rumours button shown as one of their options. Pressing that will show you the rumours. Many rumours even unlock you WalkPedia entries, which will be shown differently if you've only unlocked them through the rumour but you haven't interacted with it yet. If you have a WalkPedia entry that you have heard rumours of, the rumours will be also shown there permanently to give you more context about the entry.

Quests naturally will be an even better system to guide the players forward, but we're hoping that this will also help newcomers and long-time players to discover new content more easily.

Step graphs issues

There is still an issue with steps graphs, where sometimes your graph data isn't properly sent to the server. We've now identified this issue, but as I've been focusing on the new features for the last couple of weeks, I haven't got to fix it yet. The steps in the game are counting like they should, so it's more of a visual issue. I will however get back to this issue and other bugs once we have finished Travel + 1 and Rumors, and my goal is to have this issue and the other minor things that have popped up released before our summer vacation.

Other things & summer vacation!

Myzozoz has also been working on server side stuff a lot, and we will be releasing these changes very soon as well. Main things about servers include the following:

• We now have a new server, which serves only Portal, authentication and 3rd party bots & applications. We have included some improvements to the new server when it comes to 3rd party developers and things like Herbert Discord bot. This also means that the game server will be under significantly less load as it now only serves the game.
• The game server now encrypts all of its messages between the client and the server. This will provide much more security for your data against Man-in-the-middle attacks. We have already had this for everything that consists any account information, but we've extended it further so that all communications are now encrypted.
• We've developed some new endpoints for 3rd party developers, such as census API.

Other smaller things apart from server that we're currently working on:

• Another content update, aiming to release it before summer vacation as well.
• New UI improvements & performance improvements.
• More fixes to bugs that have been reported by Closed Beta players.

Our summer vacation is starting on 12th of July and ends on 3rd of August. We will cover this more in the next devblog before vacation (10th of July). Long story short, this is the first year we are legally as a company required to hold a proper summer vacations for the employees (which is a good thing!). We decided to all have the vacations at the same time, so after it's over we're back at full capacity. However this means that there will be no one at the office during the summer vacation. That also means that on 24th of July there might be no dev blog, or if there's one it's going to be a light hearted one where we'll share some vacation pictures. Also on 7th of August we might not have much to share in the devblog, as we've just returned back from the vacation. There also will be no customer service during these three weeks, other than in emergency situations. Maxchill and Weasel might be active on some days during the three weeks at Discord and helping out people there.

Until next time

That's all for today! Our short term goal now is to have as many things as possible released before the vacation starts, so people will have new things to discover during those three weeks! After the vacation is over and our batteries are recharged from having some long needed time off from work, we'll be moving to some big and exciting new features once again!

Also thanks for all the supporters, both new and old! With the pricing changes & giving instant access always to supporters, we've now seen a steady increase in our Patreon and Buy Me a Coffee even after the wave was over. It's still too early to say if it'll stay that way, but if this trend stays we are reaching a point in few months where we would be able to hire another developer which would help us to speed things up.

Stay hydrated everyone, and keep walking!