Seven Hours, 1.3 MB, 300M Views: How I Built Mojo Ski for Snapchat
Mojo Ski started with a memory. On my first day skiing, two of my friends dropped me in front of a slope that looked terrifying, and I've never forgotten that mix of fear and excitement. What I wanted to bottle is what comes next: the cold air, the hush of the snow and the thrilling, chilled-out feeling of sliding down a mountain with nothing to do but steer.
The catch is that I'm an engineer, and for years I've wanted to build a really fun game. For years my games were boring. My brain goes straight to architecture, performance and getting the physics right, and by the time everything works I have no energy left for the only question players care about: is this fun?
So when I needed a test game for the new Snapchat Web Lens features, I flipped the order. I let an LLM write the boring base in minutes, then spent my time playing the game and fixing whatever felt off, one small change at a time. The result is Mojo Ski: you, as your own Bitmoji, snowboarding down an endless mountain. It took about seven hours, it's 1.3 MB zipped and it has had 300 million views on Snapchat.
Mojo Ski was originally called Bitmoji Ski.