For many parents with young children the time spent raising a family and working is more than enough to keep them busy. But for Jane and Andrew Dyson of Sakana Studios from Brisbane Australia, developing an app in their spare time is all part of their days work.
Jane and Andrew spend their days at work and looking after young children but by night they spend their evenings working on their game ‘My Koi’.
My Koi is a unique fish pond app where you can create beautiful koi fish, feed them daily and watch them grow. The time of day changes and you can just sit back and watch your fish and listen to the relaxing sounds of nature.
Andrew Dyson has been working in the computer games industry for over 18 years as a Graphic Artist and Animator. He has also always had a passion for the great outdoors and wildlife, particularly fish. “Nothing was more captivating to me as a child than staring into a clear pool of water and wondering what might be lurking under the lily pads”, says Andy. “So in creating ‘My Koi’ I’ve really just combined my two favourite subjects.”
For Jane Dyson, who has worked for over 18 years in the marketing industry, it was a natural step to try and help out with the marketing and production. “I’ve watched Andy wanting to develop this app for quite a while now and as he got closer to getting it done he asked me if I wanted to help. I did a lot of reading and basically taught myself how to market and produce games and apps. I’m not an expert but I’ve definitely got a bit more of an idea than I did 12 months ago” says Jane.
“I have to be honest, being an indie game developer in our spare time is hard work. Getting anything done takes a long time. We don’t watch tv and we’re rarely asleep before midnight. Driving to work in the car is our Board Room and our spare room is the office. During the development phase we did have to pay someone to get help on the coding and we’re happy we did. We just didn’t have time or the know how to really do that ourselves. We’ve definitely made a lot of sacrifices but when we released the first version and started seeing some really nice reviews it was totally worth it and we knew we were onto something good.”
Sakana Studios released the first english version of their app in May 2016 on iOS. They have since localised it in 10 different languages and have just released it globally on iOS as of Sept 22nd.