Hello, and welcome back to the WalkScape DevBlog!

Over the past two weeks, we’ve been primarily focused on fixing critical issues that arose from the WalkScape engine rework, while I’ve been working on what we’re calling DevTools 2.0. Let’s dive in!

Hotfixes

After the engine update, we deployed a total of three hotfixes to address the most critical issues that were identified:

• Hotfix +413
• Hotfix +418
• Hotfix +419

With these updates, we resolved all of the most apparent and critical issues, including the traveling bug, WalkPedia issues, crafting issues, and rendering issues on PowerVR devices, among others. The game should now be stable again. We will still implement at least one or two more of these hotfixes, but the release schedule for those is not as urgent. My focus is now on developing DevTools 2.0 so we can introduce new content updates to the game as soon as possible.

Thank you for your patience. The engine update was substantial, and I'm glad that all of the critical issues that were introduced were things we could address quickly.

For those interested, the traveling bug was quite absurd: it was caused by your character's profile picture (PFP). When the game was loading and you were traveling, whenever you arrived at a new location, the game would update your PFP. I had made an error there, where this part of the code inadvertently replaced your game state with the state before loading steps.

Android 9, Android 10 and older Android GPU issues

One new issue was introduced in the new Flutter version, which is something that has broken the game to some players entirely and is not something we can fix.

People with older Android devices (A9, A10 era) have been experiencing crashes or major rendering issues. I’ve been doing my best to inform the Flutter team about this and push for a fix. You can check the issue I've reported here. It's already under their radar and something they seem to be working on, so no need to comment on that issue unless you've got some information that might help them!

The Flutter team has marked it as P1 priority, their second-highest priority level. I’m quite optimistic that this means they’ll release a fix in the coming weeks, but naturally, I can’t make any promises on their behalf. Once they do, we’ll incorporate it into the game.

DevTools 2.0 progress

Now that the game is stable again, I’ve shifted my focus to DevTools 2.0, while myzozoz continues working on fixing the remaining bugs and issues.

DevTools 2.0 has been mentioned quite a bit in our past dev blogs and communications. It’s basically our name for an improved internal toolset to help with content creation and development.

Working on these tools will take a significant portion of my time in the coming weeks. Our plan is to build DevTools 2.0 as quickly as possible so floursifter and maxchill can start working on our next content update. The more advanced features will come later—our top priority right now is just getting the tools ready so we can start delivering new content ASAP.

It’s still a bit too early to give an estimate on when the next content update will be ready, but all my effort is going into making sure we get it out as soon as possible.

Until next time

That's all for today! I hope you enjoyed the update. I can't say enough how excited I am to finally focus on DevTools 2.0 and what it will bring for all of you. Once it’s ready, content updates and feature development will run as separate pipelines. This should allow us to release content much more frequently than before.

Stay hydrated and keep walking, everyone! 💙