Made a little update to my Silly Face app; crown & hair.

On Slack my colleague mentioned his daughter had been playing with my Silly Face app during the holidays. I created the app at the end of 2022, and it only has about 20 users. His message was a good reminder and motivation to create a little update.

How it works

It's a simple app where you tap the canvas to create silly faces. You add eyes, mouth, ears, etc.

It's more a toy or creative tool than a game, but you can discover new icons by combining them. For instance for this update, if you add a mouth to cat-ears, you get a crown. With this update I also added straight and curly hair.

A little bit of tech: How icons are selected

The app is created in React Native and uses a large Flatlist to form a grid of buttons. Each cell on the canvas is responsible for its own icon and color.

One of the fun things of the app, is how the icon on the brush button can be slightly different on the canvas. An eye can hang on side of the face, a mouth can be multiple cells wide, etc.

There is a single large file that holds all the icons in multiple arrays. It's structured so I can easily add more content and it immediately works in the app, without updating any code. This makes it easy to do an update like I did today.

Once tapped by the user, the cell cell will get an icon name, for instance "mouth". The cell will look the sides to see if these cells also have a mouth. Based on these checks, the appropriate icon will selected with code like this:

if (matchLeft & matchRight) {
    return icon[INDEX_MERGE_HORIZONTAL];
}

Create your own silly faces

It's a free Android app, without ads, text, menus or account requirements.

I created the app as a tech prototype for the TinyUX app. That's for wireframing on your phone or tablet.

This Silly Face app is just for you and your silly kids to create silly faces. For fun, not for profit, you can get the "Silly Face Builder Toy" over here.

If you play around and enjoy the app, a review on Google Play would be much appreciated, so more people can discover the app.