Caleb Kim Designing the sound and onboarding user experience of a Tamagotchi-style companion app that gets users to open their Bible every day.
Shepherd is a Tamagotchi-style companion app that gamifies daily Bible reading — feed the companion by reading verses; skip days and it goes hungry. I designed its entry and onboarding UX and its sound: background music, interaction SFX, and community-driven feature testing through Discord. 50K+ downloads, with updates shipped May 2025 – January 2026 out of a 10K+ member community loop.
Users feed a virtual companion by reading verses — skip days and it goes hungry, come back daily and it grows. It's a behavioral design bet: attachment to a character is a more durable motivator than streaks and badges. Below, a broader look at the product — the audio you hear is mine.
My scope: onboarding wireframes, background music and interaction SFX, and community-driven feature testing through Discord. The onboarding front-loads the emotional hook — warm colors, friendly fonts, meeting the companion before any account setup, feeding in the very first session.
The selected soundtrack — this is the melody that made it into the app.
A draft that didn't make the cut — it never fully made it out of production.
“Because I didn't own the sprite, my audio work had to be reactive to motion I couldn't change. Every sound had to earn its place against animations I inherited as well as convey the desired user feeling — which sharpened the criteria.”
A steady stream of Discord-sourced updates shipped May 2025 – January 2026 — A-B tests, onboarding refinements, new SFX — each with a visible paper trail. When users describe the companion feeling alive, they're often reacting to sound they don't consciously notice: the work doing exactly what it should.
