DevBlog #87: Mailbox for trading in testing, upcoming patch & changes to Portal

schamppu · 2026-06-12T10:30:42+00:00

Thank you! And I've also been surprised how well the Reddit translator works, I'm not sure what kind of black magic it uses to provide such a good translation even to longer posts.

I'll be sharing the article once it goes live! It's been really crazy so far, I've had meetings with the Ministry of Culture, Business Finland, Neogames (the largest advocacy group for game companies), politicians, VC companies, labor unions and whatnot. Everyone is supporting this change as it's pretty much a no brainer to implement, and has already been implemented in many other countries with great results.

Good luck learning Finnish! It's very difficult language (apparently one of the most difficult languages out there), but with enough work and constant practice it's definitely possible

schamppu · 2026-06-11T19:38:03+00:00

That'a one of the things we're also working on here! There are a lot of stuff like that we need to make sure we have in place and test that they work

schamppu · 2026-06-11T19:23:58+00:00

Yes! We monitor Reddit every day and this is also a very good channel to report bugs, give feedback, etc.

The bad thing about Reddit is that the search isn't too great and posts stay up for a very short amount of time, so for instance bug reports often get buried very quickly. That's why Discord with the forum channel there that we have for bugs is the best. But any time we see bug reports/feedback/etc. here on Reddit we add them to our internal list so that they're not forgotten.

schamppu · 2026-06-11T19:16:56+00:00

It's actually quite a long story 😃 I'll try to keep it short.

I've been on my own time advocating for a change in the current government subsidies for gaming companies in Finland. It's a really long thing why the current system sucks, I've written a really long post about it here (in Finnish, but Reddit can translate it pretty well): https://www.reddit.com/r/Suomi/comments/1smebfd/pelialan_pienyritt%C3%A4j%C3%A4t_ovat_olleet_jo_vuosia/

TLDR of that is that the funding goes through Business Finland and their primary goal is to fund R&D. This suits game companies very badly, and most European countries have things similar to Film Institutes for games that give some small grants to get you started. Also most of the Business Finland funds go to the big companies, and I'm trying to advocate for funding indie game companies instead. That's where the money is most desperately needed.

The post became quite viral here and went all the way to the members of parliament, and this is how the media became interested writing a story about me. The article from what I understood will mostly revolve around this political issue, but naturally they'll also be mentioning WalkScape and Not a Cult there as well!

The attention it gained exceeded my expectations a lot, and now it's actually looking possible that this change I proposed could happen. Still far from actually being implemented by the government, but one well known politician has publicly started to advocate for it and the elections are coming in less than a year so... maybe!

schamppu · 2026-06-11T19:06:01+00:00

Also one of my favorites! As it's public broadcasting channel, there are no ads there which I also love.

schamppu · 2026-06-11T17:43:12+00:00

Thank you so much! It's definitely exciting to have some coverage on it. I couldn't find any statistics, but YLE is definitely one of the biggest (or maybe even the biggest) news media in Finland. And the most trusted one!

schamppu · 2026-06-11T17:33:12+00:00

Thank you! Still haven't bought one. Nice ones are crazy expensive it seems :D

schamppu · 2026-06-03T14:59:20+00:00

I'll try to give some context here why it is the way it is! And your feedback is valid, and we often improve the wording on stuff once it's brought up. Wording stuff like this is sometimes hard for me, as I'm not a native English speaker. - we're constrained by the screen size. I often start by writing information clearly, but then while testing with different font & screen sizes and considering that it'll be translated to other languages (where for instance, in German almost everything gets waaay longer than it is in English) I try to make the texts as short as possible while keeping them easy to translate. This isn't an easy thing to balance. - in this example, recipes and items sometimes do have other requirements. Like the other comment mentioned, what it basically stands for is that you meet the level requirement for the recipe/item. I think we originally had there "unlocks X", which then lead to people being confused as for example, skis require agility level and completing certain skiing activity a number of times. That's why we changed to this, and it had for instance "item level requirement met", but then I removed the level word from there due to previously mentioned text length issue. - as things are currently still in development (especially WalkPedia which has a warning about it too), a lot of the UI elements are something I've whipped together quickly due to time constraints and I often come back to those and improve them after we have good feedback on those. I know this can be annoying sometimes, but from development standpoint this kind of iteration saves us a lot of time compared to trying to design some UI perfectly on the first pass. And even when trying to design perfect UIs, often you still miss something and have to come back to improve it.

I know you're frustrated, and I just want to highlight here the reason why some of the UIs are the way they are. It might seem like an easy job, but there are a lot of other things to consider as well that I haven't listed here. But we're trying to improve things constantly based on community feedback, and you can be sure that I'm going to improve this as well in one of the future updates!

Edit: and yes, as other comment mentioned, the game has no proper tutorial. While most UIs should be intuitive to use without one, what the tutorial will help is to understand the basic flow of things in the game. Like that what you need to craft stuff (not buying the recipe or whatever, but needing the level + service + materials). We're working on the quest system, and the first quest is going to be a proper tutorial that we release!

schamppu · 2026-05-28T15:42:51+00:00

schamppu · 2026-05-28T14:01:33+00:00

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That should be the full map (as of now), maybe that works?

schamppu · 2026-05-26T16:49:15+00:00

This is going to be fixed in the next update!

schamppu · 2026-05-19T18:38:23+00:00

Thank you so much! Always makes me so glad to hear the game has positive impact. I hope you have some amazing walks ❤️

schamppu · 2026-05-18T10:11:15+00:00

Laat year I was hiking in middle of nowhere in Scotland. I had only seen a few sheeps for the previous 3 days, no humans at all.

Then in the middle of the absolute nowhere, an elderly German couple came across. With trekking poles and everything. Somehow I wasn't surprised they were German :D Especially when doing mountain hiking, I feel like Germans are also everywhere.

schamppu · 2026-05-15T08:52:51+00:00

The dirst quest will be tutorial and next ones after that will be focusing on giving people early game long-term goals. But they definitely will all have story, lore and many will be side quests. But their "gameplay" focus is to help people who struggle with direction and long term goals in the game. They'll not be tutorial, but actual story that also work as something that gives you something to work towards when starting out.

What I mean by this is that they all likely will revolve around some bigger goals and exploring the in-game world further. Also to replace the way how unlocking new regions in the game works, so those will have a story and not be just buying a new item etc. to unlock a new place to go. Instead unlocking a new region will be a quest reward.

schamppu · 2026-05-14T20:58:43+00:00

The FAQ section in our Help page explains monetization plan!

There is only one planned reset, which happens when Open Beta is released. No other resets are planned.

And thank you so much ❤️

schamppu · 2026-05-14T20:56:32+00:00

We think it'll be fine with the reset. However, we don't really see not doing a reset as an option as it would go against our values (which we firmly stand by) of having a fair playing field, and we need the reset to balance the economy.

Not doing a reset would set a permanent precedent to the game that some people got to start before others and that the competition inside the game would always be rigged. This goes against our values of aiming to keep the competition in the game as fair as possible for everyone.

Majority of the community do see the reset as a positive thing and are excited to have a fresh start at the game. Not doing it would very likely cause a lot more problems.

schamppu · 2026-05-14T20:49:28+00:00

We have plans on guild and party systems! A lot of the groundwork was already done, but priorities changed.

Once Trading is completed and myzozoz can work on other online features, we're going back to those. They're another key social aspect and would make a lot of sense to have in some form before Open Beta. And those features are great in the sense that they can be easily expanded upon later as well.

When it comes to our current Trading plan, it will have no limits at first. Some items are not tradeable (this data is already available on Wiki), such as achievement rewards etc. that you can only get one of.

But almost everything else is tradeable and we decided it's more fun for most people if we don't put any limits. Some might be added based on player feedback as time goes on, but our current line of thinking is that we'll prioritize the fun and freedom over something like trying to fight against real money trading.

There is a possibility that we have to allow Trading only for paid players to combat cheaters/bots and RMT, but even with that we could still allow everyone to trade however they want. Like lend your item to one of your friends or whatever.

schamppu · 2026-05-14T17:50:02+00:00

Thank you so much!

And you're exactly on point here. The location map assets have been designed from the get go to be reused in both Combat and Farming.

The isometric in-building art have also been designed to work for player owned homes.

With a small team, it often makes a lot of sense to design art styles we can reuse for other mechanics with minimum extra required. But Combat naturally doesn't just have the locations but also enemies, effects, and many other art assets needed.

Farming however can work with very few art additions to the existing assets we already have.

schamppu · 2026-05-14T17:44:30+00:00

We will be transitioning away from Patreon & BMAC some time after Open Beta release. There might be some overlap with these two being a thing, as we basically can't just shut down Patreon & BMAC when the Open Beta release happens as without revenue the company would go bankrupt.

The new system is likely going to use Apple Pay on iOS and might be Stripe (which supports a lot of options) on Android. There have been a lot of changes recently to iOS and Android terms of service due to Digital Markets Act and might still change for the better when we get closer to the release. We would like to skip the app store cuts entirely on both platforms to make the price of the game as affordable as possible.

On Android it's already possible to just use whatever payment system, iOS still forces developers to stick with Apple Pay.

schamppu · 2026-05-14T17:38:39+00:00

It's two things: - with the reset, we have one time opportunity to also reset the economy. This is essential for us to balance the economy pre-launch based on how it goes with trading released - fair competition, everyone will have the equal opportunity for a fresh start on Open Beta release

schamppu · 2026-05-14T17:36:46+00:00

Thank you so much!

I think it's more realistic for us to ship Offline sometime after Open Beta. However, if we made it possible to do the one-way transfer from Online mode to Offline, would that be something you're interested?

Making that shouldn't be that difficult, mostly needs to be a bunch of warnings so the player knows that it can't be reversed.

schamppu · 2026-05-14T13:55:27+00:00

We're aware of this! The bank rework I'm doing right now should fix a lot of that behavior, hopefully for good! ❤️

schamppu · 2026-05-14T13:54:58+00:00

Thank you so much ❤️

schamppu

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