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One of the most challenging and fun projects I've ever worked on was building the four games that are featured in the Bible App for Kids app. Never would I imagine that something I've made would have reached over 14 million downloads.

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The Tech

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First and foremost, I'm not a game developer which made this project very challenging for me. In game development (vs. building a regular product), everything is about squares that are a part of maps, which use Maths and Maths is hard. 😜

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When LifeChurch approached us (Oven Bits) to build this app, neither React Native, or Swift existed. Even if they did, to successfully make a game-like app, you need a framework that will keep graphics rendering at the forefront since games are massive on the CPU. Thus, we found an excellent tool called CocosJS, which allowed us to build a game using Javascript. It wasn't anything verbose, but it was what we needed, and it still proves successful for the product today.

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Of course, being Oven Bits, we forked the repo and made our adjustments to the platform to ensure we had the upper hand in using a tool that would allow us to handle some custom scripts.

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The Games

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If I can remember right, one game was identical to the Mario \"match a card\" that has always existed since the good ole' NES days. Another was a coloring book type game (think Paint or something similar). The third was a sticker game where you could build a scene using digital stickers of characters and animals (totally BEFORE the whole chat sticker thing happened). And the last one...huh...I don't remember? 🤔 There was/is a fourth game, though.

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While building these games, I realized how easy the world of product development was. Never before did I have to understand the matrix and bounding boxes of elements while tracking the x/y position of someone touching and holding that touch on the device screen. 🤯

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I mean, your average web/mobile app is 1. Render a page; 2. Fetch data; 3. Display data. Compare that to game development = boring! Lol.

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While building these games, I realized that I actually had to use Computer Science. That was probably the last time outside of a custom handmade chart here and there. Other than that, no CS required in a CS profession. Very ironic.

","frontmatter":{"dateFrom":"June 01, 2015","dateTo":"September 01, 2016","description":"Mobile App (iOS/Android)","link":"https://bibleappforkids.com/","path":"/work/bible-app-for-kids","title":"Bible App"}}},"pageContext":{}}}