Over the last year I’ve been giving the Discipleship Tech team a little bit of help on the project management side of things. I’ve known Andy for many years now as we’ve worked together on Kingdom Code, and a couple of years ago we worked together on the Redeeming Time app[1].
Each year Andy puts out an ‘in review’ blog post, and it’s been so encouraging to see the result of the work that he and Josh have been putting in over the last twelve months. You can read the full thing on the Discipleship Tech blog: 2023 in Review, however I wanted to pull out a couple of highlights, and make a couple of asks in the the process…
PrayerMate Sync
Syncing PrayerMate content between devices has always a little bit problematic[2]. At BUILD 2022 the PrayerMate team explored doing a desktop/web version of an editor… however the way that everything had been built made the process very slow. So ahead of BUILD 2023 we put together a project to reimplement sync.
One hackathon later– the concept had been poked and tested, and now Josh has a very full backlog of work to fully implement the sync solution that was tested at the hackathon. I’ve been using a dev build for the last couple of weeks which is working nicely. PrayerMate is a big app. There is a lot more work to do before this is ready for primetime release, but it’s moving forwards!
The asks:
- Would you be interested in being an early tester of PrayerMate Sync? Please get in touch.
- You don’t need to be a regular user of PrayerMate yet… in-fact if you are someone who struggles with prayer, and the idea of testing an app daily may seems like a good a motivation towards that goal you would be especially welcome.
- We’ve got a couple of key usecases for PrayerMate Sync (eg syncing between your personal phone and your work phone, or syncing between your phone and your tablet)… I’m curious to know some of the other use cases that people may have (or want!)– what would PrayerMate Sync enable for you that you can’t do already?
The Serpent & The Seed
The big focus of the time with Discipleship Tech has been supporting The Serpent & The Seed team in building out each scene in the game play. Andy has wanted to build a game for as long as I’ve known him (and longer), this has been in the works properly now for a couple of years. Before getting involved with this project I had no idea how much work producing a game is.
Over 2023 we’ve had a couple of key conferences where the game has been put in people’s hands to play through and test. Acts 1–3 are now in a (more or less) playable state, the illustrated graphics are beautiful, and the team is going to be spending the first month of January racing to polish Act 1 ahead of demoing it at PocketGamer London.
The polishing work over the next year is huge, Act 4 still needed to be built, and the Trello board backlog is mammoth.
The asks:
- We are looking for a technical artist to pick up some work to really elevate the lighting, animations, and fine details. Could that be you? Do you know anyone who it might be?
- Towards the middle of 2024 we’re going to be looking for some beta testers who are 8–14 years old to put the game through it’s paces.
There is a load of other progress from the DT team– features in PrayerMate and Redeeming Time, new devotional content for PrayerMate, and more. Do read the post from Andy: 2023 in Review.
Footnotes
For Redeeming Time, I threatened to build the app in my non-existant sparetime unless Andy got there first… I gave Andy a bunch of designs, a backlog (that is still being worked through), and a few lines of design related code. ↩︎
A review from the PrayerMate on the Google Play Store: “…syncing is still hit and miss (mostly miss, sadly). I’m disappointed, because other than that, this app is the best of the apps that I’ve seen out there, and works full screen with iPad… If you don’t need to sync across devices, it’d be a good choice.” ↩︎
Post changelog
- 2023-12-28 – DT Progress post
