There’ll be all sorts of great Christian ministries bringing projects. I’ll be there bringing a project related to our new Bible adventure game, The Serpent & The Seed, particularly around the desktop/Steam version of the game. So if you’re a Unity developer or have experience launching Steam games then maybe you’d like to join me!

See you there!

I hope you love it as much as we do.

iOS Android

Our old sync implementation was built on top of Firebase Real-time Database – something that was never really intended for our use case. We had separate native implementations on both iOS and Android, which was another major source of bugs, due to minor discrepancies in how they were implemented. I also often felt hampered by our commitment to building an app that could be used completely offline, and that supported anonymous usage where none of your data was synced to the cloud.

Then we discovered PowerSync. PowerSync describes itself as a “local-first” sync engine. It had a Flutter API, meaning that we could build a single implementation that worked across both iOS and Android. And it was completely designed with our use case in mind – building apps where the local database was considered primary, that worked fully offline – but then syncing that data to the cloud.

Our experience with PowerSync has been incredibly positive. They have an amazing array of demo projects that helped us understand how to implement many of the different use cases we wanted to support. Their customer support has been exceptional, answering any of our questions promptly and thoroughly. They also have an active Discord server where we could get help when we needed it.

But most importantly: it just works. When you add data on one device and see it appear on another, it really is magic. It also supports attachment syncing, and we’ve been able to rig up the same solution for data encryption that we had running in our old system too. Of course there’s been a HUGE amount of work dealing with all of the edges cases (what happens when you sign in for the first time, what happens when you sign in on a second device or an existing account, what happens when you sign out, and so on and so on…) and we have still not yet managed to reimplement ALL of the functionality of the old app in the new system (“Groups” support being the most obvious omission right now) but we are getting there, little by little, and the systems that we HAVE rebuilt feel a lot more robust and more intuitive to use.

In terms of getting up and running, I would say the biggest pain point was having to set up our own PostgREST server to sit between the app and Amazon RDS, but I understand that PowerSync are working on a simpler solution to this. In general we have been very impressed at their rapid rate of development – whenever we have identified a missing feature, we find they often get around to implementing it so quickly that the solution is often in place before we even get to the point where it was actually a problem for us.

So, if you are trying to implement an app with offline capabilities and want a way to reliably sync your data between devices, I highly recommend trying out PowerSync.

It’s coming back for 2024 – Kingdom Code BUILD, our Christian hackathon event in London. Come along for 24 hours of fellowship with other Christian developers, designers, project managers, entrepreneurs and innovators, to get our heads together with some fantastic Christian ministries to try and help them move forwards on their projects. Many of those who come each year say it’s the highlight of their year – if you’ve not been before, we’d love to see you! 11-12 October, St John’s Hoxton in Shoreditch. Get your tickets now!

I put together this devlog video sharing some of our experience:

With that shot in the arm for our confidence, it’s enabled us to go out there and hire an extra team member – a Technical Artist, to help us make the game look even better, adding lighting, writing shaders, and so on. It really feels like things are starting to come together now, and I can’t wait to see how it develops over the course of this year.

It was especially helpful for us as a motivator to get Act 2 of the game into a playable state, and particularly the Abraham and Moses sequences. Here’s a little devlog video sharing something of what we accomplished, by God’s grace:

We recently got back from a conference in Wales where we demoed a small slice of Act 1 of The Serpent & The Seed. I’m so encouraged by the response it received, so here’s a little video about how we got on.

This video also serves as a bit of an announcement that we have now launched a crowdfunding campaign to get the rest of the game built. We have some “matched giving” lined up, so for every £1 you give, we get £2 towards the project (or £2.50 if you’re a UK taxpayer and can Gift Aid!) – so even the smallest gift can make a big impact. If you’ve been following my 18 year journey of trying to make a Bible video game, or if this is the first time you’ve heard about it, I’d love you to consider making a contribution – even if it’s a small one! (I’d far rather have 16,000 people giving £1 each than two people giving £8,000 each!) Donate today at https://discipleship.tech/serpentseedgame

Here’s a couple of videos I made. First is what my kids made of it after playing through the prologue:

Here’s my fuller response after completing the game:

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