Sakawochi Devlog #1

Welcome to my devlog about Sakawochi -A game you would probably never touch.

In case you haven't heard of it, and I am pretty sure you haven't I'll give you a small introduction: Sakawochi is a real-time aquarium simulation where you need to nurture your fish until it grows up. The bigger your fish the more you get when you decide to sell it. From the earned coins you can buy additional fish of different type or decorations for your aquarium.

You can find the product page here: https://wend1go.itch.io/sakawochi

Sakawochi runs on Android, Ubuntu Touch, Windows, Linux and OSX.

It is currently available in English, German and French.

The idea to this game came to me after I got myself a new smart phone and installed Ubuntu Touch on it. While I really like the operation system and the fact that you can install both mobile apps and Linux desktop applications that you can run when plugging the phone to a display or television, I was a little disappointed about the emptiness of the OpenStore app store which as of today still has only about 120 games in total. So I decided to increase the number by at least 1. ;) After digging through a lot of game engines I found GDevelop5 Beta to be the easyest one to create games for Ubuntu Touch since it is pretty simple to turn an HTML5 game into an app that runs locally on a phone. On the 22.07.2018 I released the game on Ubuntu Toch OpenStore and the success was greater than I would ever have imagined for a game from a niche genre on a niche operating system. After about 3 weeks I had 144 downloads. When I pushed the first update it was installed by 65.5% of the players. So I figure that more than every second player who downloaded the game is still playing which I consider an amazing number. After I finally overcame a bug in PixiJS (on which GDevelop relies for mobile games) I was finally able to release Sakawochi for Android and Desktop (Windows, Linux, OSX) on Itch and Gamejolt yesterday, but to my surprise the number of downloads and even views was extremely scarse and stood way behind the numbers from Ubuntu Touch. When I already had roughly 50 downloads on the first day after release on UT the numbers on Itch were just 27 views and 10 downloads, on Gamejolt even less (8 views, 0 downloads). Posting about the game on Reddit and tooting on Mastodon increased the number of views by -> drum roll <- 3. (or 11%) Sounds much better, doesn't it ;) )

Since Sakawochi was pretty successful on Ubuntu Touch and all my friends who tested it are still actively playing several weeks later, I figure that it's not the game itself which is boring but the "aquarium simulation" genre.

So the question is: How do I make players install a game from a genre that they usually don't play? 

Due to the lack of content on OpenStore, people over at Ubuntu Touch are hungry for games, I think that makes them more likely try a game from a genre they usually wouldn't install.

I really need to find a solution for this problem but in the meantime I'm going to focus on improving the game. Next on my roadmap is a rewrite of the localization system to make it easier to add additional languages. I already got offers for Italian and Spanish on the Ubuntu Touch forum.