Faith Garden

Mar–Apr 2026iPhone appUnreleased

Faith Garden is an iPhone app I built for Christian teen girls that turns a daily devotional into a garden game.

A 90-second lesson each day pays out XP and coins, the coins buy plants and decorations, and the garden grows as the habit does.

I built it in four days and 113 commits as the second version of Path, with art from my own image pipeline.

lessons across four seeds: 60
daily verses: 365
decorations in the shop: 35
to build: 4 days

A devotional for the age the big apps skip

Faith apps split into two groups. The ones for adults are dense reading, and the ones for kids age out around ten or eleven. Teen girls fall in the gap, at the age when anxiety, identity and friendships are the loudest things in their lives. I'd already tested the idea with Path, a two-day prototype on TestFlight. Faith Garden is the version I designed to stick: one short lesson a day, and a reason to come back tomorrow.

Open the app and the home screen shows today's lesson, a daily verse and your streak. The garden tab is where everything you earn ends up.

The habit and the garden feed each other

The design is one loop. A lesson takes about 90 seconds and pays out XP and coins. Coins buy plants, paths and creatures for the garden, and new areas of the garden unlock as your level climbs. A share card turns the garden into an Instagram story, so the time you've put in becomes something you can show your friends, and showing it is a reason to come back.

The Faith Garden loop

Using it

From the first screen to a growing garden, in three steps.

Step 1: Pick a seed
The first screen asks what's on your heart and offers four seeds: Peace, Identity, Friendship and Purpose, with 15 lessons each. Every lesson opens with a moment from real life, like the 3 a.m. spiral or the 'what do you want to be' question, then a Bible verse and a short teaching. It ends with one of six ways to respond, from a one-word answer or an honest scale to a short journal entry or a prayer starter.
Step 2: Spend the coins
Coins from lessons spend in the Garden Shop: flowers, trees, paths and creatures, with a weekly pick at the top. Anything you buy goes into your inventory, ready to place in the garden.
Step 3: Come back tomorrow
Most streak apps punish a missed day. In Faith Garden the vine rests instead of dying, and coming back gets 'Welcome back! Your vine remembers where you left off.' The stats tab shows your best streak, this month's count and a 28-day journey calendar. Rewards pay out once a day, so cramming gains nothing.

Two Faith Garden screens: 'What's on your heart lately?' with four seeds, Peace selected, and a lesson titled 'The What Do You Want to Be Question' with a Continue button.

Two Faith Garden screens: the Garden Shop with a Gravel Patch weekly pick for 15 coins above owned flowers, and the garden view with a prompt to open the inventory.

Faith Garden's stats screen: best streak, this month's count, a one-day current streak and a 28-day journey calendar. Test account.

A real game engine under a devotional

Faith Garden is a native SwiftUI app with a game inside it. The garden is a SpriteKit scene, Apple's framework for 2D games, laid out on an isometric grid, so every decoration snaps to a tile and draws in the right order as you place it. Accounts and progress live in Firebase, and the garden syncs to the cloud, so it follows you to a new phone.

Four days from Path to Faith Garden

Faith Garden took Path's lessons and rebuilt the app around a world that grows, under the same App Store identity, so it replaces Path rather than sitting next to it. The garden art came from Generation Studio, the image pipeline I'd built to make Ippo's pets, so a new plant or creature was a prompt and a review away. The whole app took four days and 113 commits.

A devotional for the age the big apps skip

Open the app and the home screen shows today's lesson, a daily verse and your streak. The garden tab is where everything you earn ends up.

The habit and the garden feed each other

A real game engine under a devotional

Four days from Path to Faith Garden

A devotional for the age the big apps skip

The habit and the garden feed each other

Using it

Step 1: Pick a seed

Step 2: Spend the coins

Step 3: Come back tomorrow

A real game engine under a devotional

Four days from Path to Faith Garden

A devotional for the age the big apps skip

The habit and the garden feed each other

Using it

Step 1: Pick a seed

Step 2: Spend the coins

Step 3: Come back tomorrow

A real game engine under a devotional

Four days from Path to Faith Garden