Brain Power Games

Brain Power Games started from playing an IRL memory card matching game with my kids. I thought it would be fun to build a web version which would mix and arrange the cards for you. I built the first version in CodePen, which became the first game, Match.

Sudoki was the 2nd game to be built. I had started to play Sudoku again, and was drawn to the challenge of trying to build my own version. I found it amusing that you can just map the typical 1-9 numbers to anything, including emojis, which led to the emoji game modes and calling it Sudoki. It's a fun twist on the classic game.

Decode was the 3rd game, and is the one I play the most. It's essentially a 1-player version of the game Mastermind, where you try to solve for a hidden code based on clues.

Now with three games in place, there's a lot of fun work ahead with improving the UI and UX, resolving tech debt, and building new games and game features.

Play now at BrainPower.Games

With this being a personal project, I only designed the UI in Figma enough to where I had clarity on some of the basics for layout, navigation and components. I wanted games to play, and am very comfortable designing with code, so I prioritized building the functionality for the MVP.

After the MVP, I went to work overhauling the UI implementation. I built a fully themeable design system named Cortex, which handles generating primitive color scales and semantic color tokens based on the current theme, along with other design system tokens for type scales, spacing and more.

With the logo design, I cycled through a few draft versions, none of which I liked very well. The latest installment feels really good though, and brings some personality into the app.

I wanted to use web tech (HTML/JSX, CSS, JS) for the initial version. I chose to use Next JS for it's file-based routing and easier DX, and to stay within the React ecosystem as well, getting more experience with state management, hooks, providers, etc. I've hand-coded it, from the React components to the supporting JavaScript and CSS, and am using Jest for tests.

Staying true to the name, no AI has been used or ever will be used to design or build Brain Power Games.