Wandering Alchemist

Hey,

today while I was out and about I noticed that my GPS fix (1.4.3) utterly broke the game. It was all fine while walking around in the neighborhood and testing, but if you hopped into a car, drove somewhere else and then tried to play that's where the trouble started.

Anyway, came home from my day job, sat down for 8 hours to rewrite the GPS plugins, then had a walk in the dark to test (it rained, boo). I hope I finally have a fix for you :)

If you're already on 1.4.3, please update immediately! Sorry if you ran into any troubles, let me know if you find new ones. As it's the middle of the night I'll do more testing tomorrow.

What I did realize: The more content I'm adding to the game the tougher it gets to test it all. I have plenty of automated tests, but they can't catch everything. The test load nearly doubled now that I have to work on both Android and iOS. So I'm looking for people willing to test:

Benefits:

• You'll get new content updates before anyone else
• You can actively shape the game with your feedback
• You'll help me out a ton 💚

If you're interested you should play regularly and be willing to export your save (just for safe keeping if something does go wrong with an update and we have to roll back, knock on wood). Please send me a message if you want to give it a try!

I'm going to pass out now, good night!

Hey again!

I still wasn't fully satisfied with the GPS performance, so I did a full rewrite today and plenty of test walks. It's now much closer in behavior to Google Maps, much faster and more consistent.

It will run best on stock Android, using Android's Fused Location Provider (FLP), but I hope I didn't break anything on degoogled phones with the rework :)

Have fun 💚

All the energy possible! The most energy!

Just a tiny patch for something I noticed while testing the next big update: The GPS smoothing I introduced unfortunately led to undercounting the distance you walked.

This should be much improved now, so if you wondered why your companion didn't tick up or the next walking achievement lagged behind, this was it.

For a companion without speed upgrades you should get a reward roughly every 1000+ meters. Please let me know if it improved.

Running around testing with two phones (Android and iOS) feels awfully weird though (:

Hey again!

Another small update while I'm working on a much larger one.

Update 1.4.2

• Improved street map rendering performance
• Improved GPS behavior on resuming the game
• Replaced old house textures with new ones (Sorry! The original two houses were from back when you couldn't even zoom the game or scale decorations bigger. While working on bigger buildings for the new features I noticed just how damn blurry they looked. Dumbass me didn't keep the old original files around, so I had to put in new ones)

Still waiting on Apple for the iOS release :-/

As always, please leave a rating and review for the game, it really helps! 💚

Hey again!

Small update for now. Based on feedback I added a preview in the ingredient picker of what the last merchant you selected wants (only visible while you are near this merchant).

Plus there's a new screen lock function to protect against accidental taps. The game keeps running at reduced framerate to save battery and your phone will still vibrate when you run into something new.

Have fun!

iOS is still waiting on the review from Apple, they seem pretty backed up unfortunately :-/

If you want to support the game, the best thing you can do is rate it and leave a review, thank you 💚

Managed this one better, but I really doubt I'll get the max possible! Been really lucky with mills, but only one today!

I really like the game so far, but I haven't had the time to actually play it as intended: by actually walking around. This is planned for end of the week :D

What I like:

• The idea is great and fun :)
• The overall style. It feels unique and refreshing
• It is fast/responsive and does not drain my battery at all
• The tutorial is helpful and understandable

What I think could be better:

• Currently, I cannot rotate the "map". It would be useful to have orientation modes like navigation apps have, like a free manual rotation, e.g. by using two fingers in a rotating gesture
• Some merchants require potions with certain effects. It is hard to remember all their requirements. Having something like a "automatic note book" or "shopping list" would be really handy, if you could access it from the "brewing screen" to look up which ingredients you actually need.
• Pokemon Go has a battery save option which (1) dims the display and (2) activates something like a screen lock, which prevents accidentally tapping something while the device is in your pocket but the app is still running. They seem to use the proximity sensor to activate it, but a simple toggle/button would be enough tbh.

Hey there,

I wanted to try the game but it crashes immediately after granting location access for the first time.

I use LineagOS 23.2 (Android 16) with MicroG and installed the app from the Aurora store.

I can send you some logs if you tell me how :D

Hey again!

I've been working hard on the iOS port and it's finally ready. Currently it's in the Apple App review, but as soon as that is cleared it will be freely available on the App Store. I'll ping everyone who showed interest the moment it goes live 💚

Update 1.4

• New effect when selling potions
• New effect when walking
• Moved your character slightly up, their feet now actually match where you stand
• New building: The inn, pay gold to host a merchant of a faction of your choice for 12 hours. As with other merchants you can only sell a single potion to them
• New decorations: Animated fireflies (night) and butterflies (day) you can freely place
• Made the mill minigame slightly easier (larger collection tunnel)
• Hiding merchants no longer hides your own character
• Fixed mushroom minigame (no more angry mushrooms just when tapping them)
• Insects no longer escape your phone while flying around
• Overall performance improvements
• Bugfixes :)

Video of the new decorations, the inn and potion sale effect.

I'm telling you, making images is a lot easier than recording videos (:

If you enjoy the game, please leave a review. Have fun 💚

Had to go out and do many chores today, so met a lot of the best blue merchant guys! Now to save for a second market stall!

Update 1.3.2, just a small patch:

• On some phones the player and merchants were pushed too far down (Player menu, potion selling menu). Pulled them back up :)
• Added gem colors to the face runes (All the way to the bottom), ruby, sapphire, amethyst, aquamarine, ..

Keep the feedback coming! Please leave a review, it really helps the game 💚

When holding down the water ladle at the end of the water brewing stage the bellow in the next stage could get stuck.

Fixed, sorry for the inconvenience! 💚 If you ran into this bug, it's safe to force close the game and open it again, you do not lose your ingredients.

While I was at it I also improved the heating tutorial :)

New update 1.3.0 is out!

Highlights:

• 29 new companion skins
• 5 new player skins (more feminine due to popular demand)
• 2 new face runes and metallic colors (at the very bottom of the list)
• Slight minigame reworks
• Performance improvements
• Phone aware UI layout, buttons should be easier to reach
• As always, lots of bugfixes :)

I hope you enjoy! 💚

Google Play Store

If you'd like to support the project, please leave a short review on the app (one or two sentences are plenty). Google is still hiding the rating, which is a shame, as a lot of you rated the game at 5 stars. Thank you so much!

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New update 1.2.12 is out!

With so much positive feedback I got busy this weekend and decided to finally tackle achievements (plus a small building tutorial). I hope you enjoy, please let me know if I broke anything in the process 💚

Next up is a content update for the store, more skins, pets and runes to come :)

Thanks to your support the game is finally live and freely available for everyone 💚

I hope you have fun and go for more walks, whenever the weather permits. More content is coming soon, I'm working on adding more pets, player skins and decorations.

General roadmap right now:

• Adding achievements
• Adding buildings you can improve over time (tavern to attract merchants and an ingredient tree you need to grow)
• More minigames and improving the existing ones
• And of course bugfixes, please let me know if you run into issues :)

I joined the group and installed the app, but on startup it gets stuck on "Waiting for GPS".

I confirmed with maps and other gps based games that it should be working.

Pixel 9a Android 17

I'm currently working on a full day/night cycle, so even while you're lying on your couch in the evening you got something nice to look at.

In addition to lighting (which you can modify of course) :)

As always, if you are testing the game, or even just casually playing it, let me know! I'm glad for all feedback I can get.

For all the novice alchemists out there who can't read my mind, I added tutorials to every game mechanic in the game :)

Please let me know if there's still something unclear so I can improve, thank you! Also a big thanks to @Revered_Beard@lemmy.world for kicking my butt into high gear.

The visuals in the game look very artistic and beautiful, but I have no idea what I'm doing, and there's no text to explain what the various visuals mean. I know that the tutorial hasn't been released yet, but can you at least include text labels, or pop-ups, or some little bit of instruction to help explain what things are?

We finally have enough testers, just a bit longer and the game will be freely available in the app store.

Thank you so much for hanging around, if you have any feedback so far, please let me know!

If you want to test more in-depth feel free to also wish for new pets, skins or decorations, with the basics done I'm focusing on adding more content :)

Keep brewing 💚

The game is finally close to a full release!

It's fully free, no ads, no purchases, fully offline. A real world walking game, you collect resources, brew potions and sell them to merchants. With the gold earned you can buy skins, pets and decorate your neighborhood.

Optionally you can download a street map for orientation, it's a one time download and should work all across the world (if I didn't mess up). Let me know if I missed a spot :)

If you want to help out with testing, please join the Google group here (Using your Google Play store email):

https://groups.google.com/g/wandering-alchemist-closed-test

Then join the test and get the game:

https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.vlyn.wanderingalchemist

Screenshots: