Greetings fellows,
Today I’d like to present you “Sakawochi” your personal aquarium that fits into you pocket. (Disclaimer: Even though it should be water prove, I take no warranty for wet trousers)
Sakawochi is a Tamagochi like game in which you have to take care of your fishes. Feed them at least once per day and they will grow. The game goes on when you close it and calculates what happened in the mean time when you start it again.
Please tell me if you find any bugs or if you have feature requests.
Known issues:
The game doesn’t run at all on Samsung Galaxy S5 mini, just a black screen is shown. (No idea why )
No sound on my old Huawei Honor U8860 with Android 4.0.3 ICS (tried both mp3 and ogg without luck)
How to play:
On the first start you will see an empty fishtank. Click on the shop Icon in the upper right corner to enter the asset store. Click on the fish tab and buy 2 blowfish for 15 coins each.
Close the store via the red “x”. You can see the stats of your fish in the aquarium by tabbing a fish. This opens the fish info box. Your new fish are hungry so tab the fishfood icon in the upper left corner to enter fishfood mode. While the icon is pulsating tab the screen to spawn fishfoot at the touch position. Tab it again to leave the mode again.
Your fish will get hungry every 6 hours no matter if the game is running or not so don’t forget to feed them regularly. After one whole day without food they will die.
If you take good care of your fish they will grow and their sell price increases. You can sell them by hitting the button in the fish info box.
You can spend the earned coins in the asset store on decorations for your aquarium.
The game doesn’t seems to be doing anything
I open it in Firefox and I see a blue background and that’s it. No GUI, No fish, nothing…
Am I missing something?
Also, I would recommend to share the game on itch.io
You can share games for all platforms. HTML to play in browser and Desktop, Mobile to download. itch.io/
You need to click near the bottom of the screen in order to open the menu (about 40pixels). I think I’ll enable the menu by default in the next update.
Itch sounds like a good idea but in it’s current state I don’t think Sakawochi is fun enough to make it more public.
Hmm, for some reason the game keep freezing for a moment every few seconds
Not sure what might be causing it.
Also when I add food the fishes just doesn’t seem to care. It would be fun, and it might be you have already planned if a fish is hungry and we drop food in to the tank it would run for it. Fishes could also have different speed and stamina based on their age and life and may even kind if there will be different kind of fishes. I’m definitely want to see some Piranhas and feed them with other fishes
The fishes start with a hunger level of 0 so you need to wait until it reaches at least 25 (about a quarter of a day) until they get hungry. If they are hungry they will follow and eat fish food on sight.
The game gets saved automatically every 2 seconds maybe that is the mini freeze you encounter. How many fishes did you add? Haven’t noticed any freezes on my end.
If I have only few fish in the tank I don’t notice it. But in case the number of fish causing it, you might want to save less frequently. Or how about save only if something is happened? The player added food, added a fish, a fish dead, grown…etc
Saving each fish individually when something happens sounds like a good idea. Currently I’m saving them all at once.
Best thing would be if GDevelop offered an onClose event when the application requests quit. But I doubt it would be possible for browser based games.
I also read something about Web Workers which would allow to perform the saving in a separate thread. Don’t know if it is possible with GDevelop since there are some limitations but I’ll investigate it.
Don’t know why the menu sometimes gets placed wrongly, I’ll try to animate it with another method.
There is something you can try actually. Add a Javascript event, and enter the following:
window.onbeforeunload = function(){
//save before unload
alert("Save");
}
The key is, when you close the browser, it does unload the content before close.
The above code is listening for the event if the browser is about to unload the content and will execute the function alert(“Save”); before it does.
In theory, only need to replace alert(“Save”); with the code that actually going to save everything and when the player close the browser the function should be executed to get the position, scale, angle of objects and values of variables and write the values in to web storage.
But it may not going to work for tabs.
An other thing you can also try is to save when the mouse button is released because when the pointer leave the canvas it is translated as mouse button released,. So when the player is about to close the window or the tab, the pointer must leave the canvas and in theory the action is going to be triggered.
Thanks for the hint. At least on mobile multiple tabs shouldn’t be an issue since the game runs in it’s own web container. Think I’ll combine more than one save condition but I haven’t had time to investigate yet.
Today’s progress:
Fixed the menu slide in animation offset issue
Added a pulsating icon that gets displayed when the menu is closed as a hint that the player needs to click at the bottom of the screen to open the menu
New fishes spawn slightly hungry so the player can already feed them once after they got created
The hunger value now grows faster (I accidentally forgot to calculate in 60fps so the hunger rate increased way to slowly). The fishes now need to be fed at least once per day
I will upload a new version once I have also fixed the saving freezes.
For the save you can add a “Save” button too, also you could do the autosave less frequently but always warn the player the game is autosaving, so the people know there is an autosave, how often, and it will explain them why the game freezes every X seconds/minutes. Also they will be able to save manually before closing the game.
The autosave warning could be a simple animated sprite created two seconds before launch the save, and deleted after the save ends.
Food will no longer spawn when moving the mouse out of the window
Fishes will no longer freeze in place when more than one fish is hunting for the same food particle
No more mini freezes when saving by storing the save file in memory and only saving it once (no noticeable freezes with 60 fishes (probably more))
Hunger now gets calculated when the tab / mobile game is sent to the background (before it was only calculated when the game was closed)
I will test the game a little bit more until I upload the new version cause I want it to run stable and bug free.
The next task will be adding a little more eye candy.
So stay tuned.
[size=150]New version 0.2.2 of Sakawochi released[/size]
Sorry it took a little longer but fortunately I didn’t specify which weekend the update would come.
If you have already played the former version the new one will probably feel like a completely different game.
So here are the main new features:
New Android version
Completely new comic style graphics
Sounds and Music
Brand new Asset store where you can buy fish and decorations for your aquarium
The game is localized now (EN, DE, FR*)
Unfortunately the French I learned at school has become quite rusty, so I had to let the computer translate for me. If you find something funny in the descriptions please let me know. (Also if you would like to contribute an additional language)
[size=200]Version 0.2.5 of Sakawochi released[/size]
[size=150]New Features:[/size]
Step by step tutorial
If you have played a later version of Sakawochi you need to reset the game in the options screen to see it.
The tutorial is in english, french and german. (please tell me if there are any spelling or grammar mistakes)
You can now buy crabs
Buy them in the store under “fishes”. Crabs eat spare fishfood and keep the tank clean
Spare fishfood now spoils the water
The more spoiled fishfood on the ground the more algae will grow in the tank
New version for Linux, MAC OS and Windows
In addition to Android and Ubuntu Touch
[size=150]Changes:[/size]
Fishes can now survive two days without food. But you can still feed them every 6 hours
Sounds and music was convertet into m4a format. Please tell me if sound is better on android now (haven’t gotten any feedback on this since last version).
I’m eager for your feedback (especially on the android version) You can find the download links in the opening post here.
Looks like you are more into action games but maybe I can encourage you to test this game with a[size=150] tasty cake [/size]for everyone that manages to keep their fish alive for two weeks?
[size=50]Don’t listen to him, the cake is a lie[/size]
You did come a long way with this game well done
Unfortunately I never had an aquarium for real because having a fish was never interesting to me and I guess I can’t really say anything different for this game either.
I also don’t really find virtual pets that interesting in general because all you do most of the time is feed them, wash them, treat them and you get nothing in return. Even if pets are funny with nice animations and sounds it get old really quickly so I don’t think I’m the right person to comment on this game from a player perspective. From a developer perspective I do find the game well made and polished and all it matters if you do enjoy the process of making it.
I think you should really share this game at itch.io as I was suggesting at the beginning because then maybe you could get valuable feedback from actual players who do enjoy and seeking this type of games.
Hey ddabrahim, thank you for your kind and honest words.
I indeed intend to publish it on itch.io in the near future but before I do this I’d like to get some feedback from other developers. There have been some issues with sound on android for example on my side and before I’m going more public I’d like to sort this out.
Even this WIP thread came too early since the initial version of Sakawochi was very bugged and unintuitive to use.
I’d really like to become a “real” indie developer one day which is why I want to publish only polished and nice looking games to the public so my portfolio doesn’t start with kindergarten graphics full of bugs. Sakawochi will probably not become the next Minecraft but I’d still like to train the PR stuff as early as possible since it is (unfortunately) one of the most important things for game creators nowadays.
Unfortunately I haven’t yet gotten any feedback for any platform while at the same time the game has issues on my own (dated Android phone) hardware. So I can’t publish it with a good conscience at the moment.
My own test results so far (family+friends): GD5 Preview / Web export:
Everything runs perfectly fine with Firefox and Chrome Android
Huawai Honor U8860 with Andorid 4.0.3 → no sound, runs very slow since WebGL was introduced around Android 5 or 6
Samsung Galaxy S5 mini → doesn’t run at all, just a black screen
Wiko Cink Peax 2 → runs smoothly but without sound and the game freezes after a couple of seconds Ubuntu Touch
Fair Phone 2 → runs nicely, only the sound level doesn’t update immediately - need to change the scene for that
)
