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The game doesn’t need to be active on regular Android and counts steps when killed. I’m pretty sure the reason why it’s like that on GrapheneOS is that when the game is killed, the sandbox is killed and the Google Play Services shut down. If Google Play Services aren’t on there, the Recording API will not count steps in the background.
Probably easiest solution is to let WalkScape to run in the background, when it’s freezed the battery consumption should be basically nothing.
And thank you! I know it’s hard to also trust game devs these days, but we’re doing all we can to protect our users privacy. That’s why there are already privacy settings in the game too - you can hide your steps from other players if you don’t want to share those. And you can also hide your entire user profile so it’s not visible to other players. These settings also protect you if 3rd parties scrape the leaderboards etc.
We have lootboxes that are (and always will be) obtainable through gameplay. You can get chests from any activity while you’re playing the game. Same applies for cosmetics, which are also something you obtain through gameplay.
The very first devblog I wrote I already promised that we will never do predatory monetisation. Affordable subscription should be all we need to keep the game running. And no ads either!
We do have the privacy policy on there, which lists what sensitive information we collect. It’s a bit vague, and we could later on edit it to be more specific, but I don’t have the required skills to edit those kinda texts and we can’t afford a lawyer at the moment. The sensitive information we collect are your email, username and step data, and the step data includes device information (phone model & operating system).
Non-sensitive information includes all kinds of gameplay data, like items you got and how many things you’ve crafted etc. which we use for game balancing and when designing new content.
Thank you! Definitely our plan to get these documents through a lawyer when we can afford one. One of the surprises to me has been how many things there are these days that indie devs like myself need to deal with that are completely non-related (legal especially), and how expensive those can be. As we want to stay independent, we don’t have legal help from publishers, stakeholders etc. to deal with such.
When it comes to tracking, smart watch support is the most frequently asked addition and biking is the second. We will definitely add biking after smart watch support, as long as we find a viable way to do that. Biking relies quite heavily on GPS data which we don’t want to deal with, so we would likely be using Apple Health and on Android some specific apps to pull that data from.
The game doesn’t use location permission and doesn’t ask for it, and it will never require GPS data. We have that clause because we might at some point want to do rough location estimates using IP addresses, for instance to see how many players we have from specific countries.
I suck at writing legal stuff and English isn’t my native language, so I wrote the policy using different templates. We should probably remove the mention of GPS entirely as it’s quite misleading.
Running counts! Also treadmills or walking pads, as long as you have your phone in your pocket.
Smart watches are not supported yet, but coming. Smart watch support would already work great on iOS, but we’re held up by Google with it as they introduced Health Connect for smart watch integrations and it’s a buggy mess at the moment. Google Fit APIs (that would’ve worked nicely) are deprecated.
The game requires Google Play Services for the pedometer to work (the game uses the new Recording API to count your steps while the game is closed). On GrapheneOS I’ve heard it works if you run it in a sandbox. You don’t need a Google account for the Recording API to work, and according to the developer documentation data is stored locally.
If you can run sandboxed apps woth Google Play Services, it should work, but I’ve not heard from LineageOS users any experiences.
Thank you so much! <3
If you feel a bit stuck, I recommend to check out https://wiki.walkscape.app/ and https://map.walkscape.app/
In order to process higher level materials, you need to level up your craftings skills: Carpentry, Crafting, Smithing. You need to start with low end materials, which you have levels for. Then you can move onto higher level recipes.
When you craft yourself some good gear, progress in the game is a lot faster and you’ll find yourself progressing to further areas.
Sure: https://walkscape.app/privacy-policy.html
We’re based in Finland, so we follow GDPR.
Hello! Gear sets are actually coming in the very next update to the game, that feature is already pretty much finished. Most recent devblog covers this more! We held a poll about what are the most frequently asked QOL, and gear sets were #1 so we started with that.
You can check how the system works here: https://lemmy.zip/post/27883811
It’s kinda supported - if you have your phone in your pocket you do get some steps, but it’s not as efficient as walking.
I’m Finnish myself and my German skills aren’t that great :D The translations for the game are made by the community, you can help correcting errors at https://translate.walkscape.app/ (the tool is currently hosted on a very underspecced server so it’s laggy, we’ll be moving it to a beefier one soon)
Edit: Well this was sooner than I thought, I’ve moved it to another server and should be very usable now.
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Thank you so much!
Depending on how the legislations now post-DMA go, it might be possible to also handle payments throughout our Portal instead of app stores. The app stores, especially Apple’s, has still a bunch of rules in their ToS about this where they might remove the game entirely if you’re not using their payment system. Android is slightly more lenient on this regard though.
The cuts Patreon already takes (a whopping 14% in total, after which we then play VAT) already affects us enough that I would definitely love to rather have my own systems, but also they offer a lot of convenience to the users that we couldn’t at this point.
But overall it would be great if we could provide a direct payment system straight from Portal, as we could price that one also significantly cheaper than using Google’s or Apple’s systems when we don’t need to pay their cuts. It’s something I really want to do to be able to make the pricing as affordable as possible, and everything depends on if it’s both feasible and allowed by the app stores. But can’t promise this, as there are a lot of factors in play whether it’s feasible to provide our own systems and if it’s allowed by the biggest stores.
When it comes to direct APK downloads, maybe if we can get a good pipeline for those. I think the most realistic option is that we’ll pick the one for an “extra release pipeline” that we can automate most easily to our current systems. Could be Aurora Store, F-Droid or some other depending on what kind of automation options they offer.
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Before Google released the Recording API, that’s what we used. But it was a huge time sink - with the amount of Android devices and operating systems, there were a ton of device specific issues which were impossible for me to reproduce without buying the models that had these, and we don’t have budget for such.
Pixel devices tended to have battery consumption issues with it, and Chinede devices with battery optimization were killing it very often etc.
If you find some way, I would love to hear about it. In the future we’ll be adding in smart watch support, which could help you to count the steps if you have one.
Edit: also one thing to try out if possible is to remove battery optimization from Google Play Services. Your device might be killing that, which stops counting the steps.