Today, we’re officially releasing React Native Godot to the public. For the first time, every React Native developer can create games with an amazing UI on top. This unlocks a new era of apps and games. github.com/borndotcom/react-…

A technically interesting challenge when building Pengu was generating transparent images for each user’s unique Pengu. With over 350 clothing items and countless possible combinations, plus varying device sizes, pre-generating images in the cloud quickly became infeasible. To solve this, we moved the computation to the device itself by leveraging React Native Godot. Here’s how it works: ① The user changes the Pengu’s clothing, and React Native calls a GDScript function. ② Godot opens a subwindow with a specific scene that renders the Pengu. ③ Godot takes a “screenshot” and closes the subwindow. ④ React Native receives the File Path of the screenshot as a return value. You can get quite creative with how you leverage Godot’s subwindows. Screenshots are captured in just a few milliseconds, without the user ever noticing.

One of the most important features for Pengu was the ability to download and launch different games (Godot pck's) on the fly. Under the hood, our React Native Godot library manages the entire Godot lifecycle: stopping, cleaning up, and starting a new instance with a different pck. Everything happens within milliseconds, without restarting the app.

We’re open-sourcing React Native Godot this Sunday. After a year of testing, polishing, and making it scalable across all the different Android devices. Over the next few days, we’ll share all the different features we’ve built and best practices on how to use them. We built much of Pengu’s core functionality on top of this library, and it opened up a whole new world of possibilities for us. I can’t wait to see what you’ll all build with it!