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: !walkscape@lemmy.world 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
Looked over your privacy policy and it seems pretty reasonable. I was curious about how location is used though - could you give me the gist of what kind of in-game features I might miss out on by denying location permissions?
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.
Thank you for the details!
I definitely wouldn't recommend tweaking a legal document without the advice of a lawyer, especially when it's not in your native language, but hopefully the project will raise enough funds that you'll be able to hire someone to do that soon though! Fitness games are good ideas, and the art here looks real cute.
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.
... It doesn't use location? To my knowledge. It just tracks steps. That doesn't use GPS.
From the Privacy Policy:
I was asking for clarification about the last line.
Not sure - but I just looked in my version and the only permissions I have enabled are notifications and physical activity and everything works. Maybe that's a holdover they need to delete?
Yup, mention of GPS is a holdover as I've used some privacy policy templates to create the policy. Legal writing isn't really something I've done as an indie game dev before :D
See lead devs response below.