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.

The Tech

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. 😜

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.

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.

The Games

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.

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. 🤯

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.

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.