Hello again, Lemmy!
It's been a while since I last posted here, and the reception for the post was really awesome - thank you all for that! I also created a community in Lemmy for the game: [email protected] where I'm posting every development blog post.
We have a new Closed Beta wave right now, so if you'd like to try out the game, you can follow the instructions available at walkscape.app/help. The wave is running until January 7th.
Since the last post, we've now started to add some Quality of Life updates to the game and we're nearly finished with the lengthy optimization process of the game engine and servers. We're expecting to release the next update next month!
If you haven't heard about the game before, I started this project as a personal hobby project to help myself walk more. I tried most of the games available, but I wanted to have something that didn't need attention while walking and wouldn't have predatory monetization like most mobile games tend to have these days.
The game is inspired by RuneScape, and you level up skills, craft gear, find loot and so on by walking IRL. We have a short introduction video to the game where I explain and show how the game works in more detail.
Once again, thanks Lemmy for all the awesome feedback we've got and for the countless encouraging messages that you've sent us. And I'm hoping to see more of you in the game & community!
I'll answer any questions or feedback here in the comments and in our own community. Happy new year, and happy walking <3
That makes a lot of sense.
It's allowed to run in the background, but I have now disabled battery optimisation and will see if that helps.
Yeah - battery optimization has tendency to kill apps, even if they're not consuming resources. If you're experiencing battery drain from doing this (or if it works fine), I'd appreciate if you send me your findings to our contact email address ❤️
It doesn't seem to be helping. If I ever work out a more reliable way to get steps counted I'll let you know. I know some pedometer apps don't need Google Play Services and use a persistant notification to keep it active, but it seems like quite a significant change from what you currently have which wouldn't be worth spending time on to appease such a small group of users.
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.
Yeah I can imagine trying to do it manually could get pretty tricky. I'll look forward to the smart watch support (though I don't own one, I might get one if others report it working well with GrapheneOS).
It seems it's already set to not be optimized. It doesn't seem to have access to the physical activity permission, but granting that permission didn't seem to help. It still doesn't count steps with the screen off.
No matter, thanks for all the ideas, I'll just keep watching and see if others find a solution. I've subscribed to the Walkscape community so hopefully you'll be posting updates there 🙂