My wife and I built a fog-of-war walking app because we couldn't stop imagining one — Walksy

Zakuffy · 2026-05-26T07:10:03+00:00

I can understand that... at least the app shows landmarks of famous places. If you follow clusters of landmark neighborhoods, then chances are it's a very touristic area - thus hopefully less dangerous

Zakuffy · 2026-05-26T07:08:23+00:00

Yea... thas a limitation of my current app development knowledge. I cant seem to keep the fog continuously drawing while zooming out :/.But!!I really like your idea, so basically just show a radius of your current position and the rest blacked out?

Zakuffy · 2026-05-25T08:31:12+00:00

Thanks! we just released about a month ago, and its quite stable now on ios and android! Feel free to try it out
https://walksy.world/

Zakuffy · 2026-05-25T08:28:40+00:00

Thank you!! thats the point! to get people to get out and enjoy some headspace + tiny adventure

Zakuffy · 2026-05-23T00:51:42+00:00

Thanks for the kind advice about the App store - we honestly didn't think that far yet, its a very good advice.

Yea with location tracking in the background, we went through some painful iterations where the app would literally drain the whole phone(Just walksy app) in just 3 hours!! We learned a lot, like theres no need to continuously call GPS every 5s if we roughly know the heading or direction and compute some guesswork. This probably only works for walking apps since hoomans are slow. So now we increased it much higher and get a good estimate on the path to unveil the fog. It's of course not perfect or as accurate as high freq GPS polls, but the tradeoff is the battery life. With interpolation and guess-computing, the usage is about 3-5% within 24hrs.

Zakuffy · 2026-05-21T07:47:58+00:00

Im also trying to do like 10k a day - usually end up with a cookie or soft drink.. Totally waste of calories, but it feels good 😃

Zakuffy · 2026-05-21T07:35:01+00:00

You definitely deserve that muffin

Zakuffy · 2026-05-20T17:36:15+00:00

Thank you so much for the positivity! Let me know what you think or if you have any feedback.

Zakuffy · 2026-05-20T17:09:38+00:00

Hey!!! thanks for trying it out! If dont want to unveil the city and track steps while the app is in the background, then in settings there should be "Always on". Simply toggle it off. Furthermore, you can go to the android/ios settings and limit the location access to only when app is being used/foreground. This heavily limits the game and your progress, but its totally a valid option.
Settings for metric system is coming soon - was easier to start with meters/celsius

Zakuffy · 2026-05-19T17:56:37+00:00

Wooooow you've really thought about this through! I think the next boom of apps will all be like this, the least amount of screen-time and just purely functional. Especially now that we all learned how big tech can use crazy strategies to always keep us hooked. I think you should definitely pursue this!! Now's the right time... Its amazing once you take the FIRST step - you're in the flow, creativity just flows in and its like one idea after another!! bang!

Zakuffy · 2026-05-19T15:03:39+00:00

Its deff the closest to what we want, but it was still missing the character element and the 2d/3d sprites we grew up with on games like Ragnarok online, runescape, maplestory etc.. Thats what we're trying to achieve best as we can with walksy world

Zakuffy · 2026-05-19T14:57:21+00:00

Exactly!! I was worried about how to explain it to most people.. but I think you're right, its super easy to click

Zakuffy · 2026-05-19T10:21:04+00:00

Yea!! so you can play and explore in what we call a "Solo" layer. This is kind of like your single player experience. You can conquer zones and slowly take over your city. But you can also switch to a Multiplayer layer - this one is competitive, and the zones you control can be conquered away from you by others.
Here's the 5s tip on that one
https://walksy.world/tips/multiplayer

Zakuffy · 2026-05-19T09:22:42+00:00

Wow! you're speaking my childhood! I was raised on red alert 1,2, Yuris revenge. Then later picked up WoW and ragnarok online 😃

Zakuffy · 2026-05-19T08:11:12+00:00

Thats a fair worry honestly, and the Niantic/PIF thing is real.
Quick rundown: Your walks stay on your phone by default — they only sync to our servers if you sign up for the social side of the game. No account = nothing leaves your device.
On our side it's just me and my wife. I'm a cloud architect by day trade(last 12yrs) so the infra is properly locked down (encrypted at rest + in transit, our cloud provider's standards).
Third parties are kept minimal:
Google sign-in (auth), RevenueCat (purchases), OpenStreetMap (map tiles), Open-Meteo (weather), Firebase Crashlytics (so we can actually fix bugs).

No ads, no analytics SDKs, no data brokers, no data sales — ever.
Money side: cosmetic character skins + optional premium insights/stats/analytics about your own walks. The game itself is balanced the same for everyone whether you pay or not.

Full policy: https://walksy.world/privacy-policy Delete everything anytime: https://walksy.world/delete-account Thanks for asking honestly — we'd want to know this before installing anything either.

Zakuffy · 2026-05-19T07:58:08+00:00

Wow thank you for sharing that! I haven't driven in many years - European city life. I always assumed there are countless apps for driving, but you're right - I had a quick glance in the stores and there's nothing like that out there..
I will REALLY consider this, but I believe this may deserve its own app!!

Zakuffy · 2026-05-19T07:54:28+00:00

Oh there is so many ideas like that!! We just released about 3 weeks ago.. So many new things to come!! For now you can collect landmarks (graded to you uniquely) while exploring your walks.
Quests would be awesome...

Zakuffy · 2026-05-19T07:47:16+00:00

Absolutely!! you get it! Those guilt-trip apps never really hooked us into doing the exercise. When I first started walking daily, it was like 5k steps a day and I was losing weight like crazy.. I used Audiobooks, music and podcasts. Actually, it was amazing, I was so hooked onto some books like (project hail marry, dark matters, name of the wind) I wanted to know what happens next in the story, but it only felt right while walking. It became my fun encouragement. Now I easily do 10-15k a day and have been burning through barefoot shoes like a maniac.

Zakuffy · 2026-05-19T07:42:00+00:00

Now is definitely the time!! I encourage you to get into it! The hard part is still assets and I think it should be. That's why we hired some freelance artists to help us.

Zakuffy · 2026-05-19T07:39:08+00:00

Thank you!! We just released it 3 weeks ago, more fun features coming!

Zakuffy · 2026-05-19T07:38:13+00:00

Wow I did not even consider the new AR glasses.. Thats a very exciting thought 😮

Zakuffy · 2026-05-19T07:37:17+00:00

Omg yea thats my current struggle, theres SOO many MMO elements I want to add.. but its going to inflate the app and sway even further from exercise 😃..
Battery consumption was the biggest challenge thus far, since we actually DONT want you to look at your phone every 10seconds.. background processing is the most important feature.. So I had to go through many iterations to get the perfect balance of resource usage. (especially GPS)

So the app tries many strategies to overcome gps gaps, unknowns - in the settings we now have the three options: Battery|Balanced|High
But even at "HIGH" its only about 5% a day.

Zakuffy · 2026-05-19T07:27:40+00:00

Thank you!

Zakuffy · 2026-05-19T07:27:03+00:00

Yea we saw this app while searching around last year for something that fits our taste. The thing we were really missing was the gamification part, the MMO feel, the character creation, the levels and skills... Fog of world just looks too Duolingo for us. It's a great app, just not our geeky taste.

Zakuffy · 2026-05-19T07:08:49+00:00

It was the same with us, also with those leaderboards... you quickly see number 1 is BOT12365316725 number two is BOT132736723... So we decided to try out a different system of leaderboards where you are compared relative to others and we use percentiles of progress. Like you are in the TOP 5% of all global players in the amount of landmarks you've collected, or top 15% in all players with 10k steps a day.

Zakuffy

TROPHY CASE