Faboolos Creatures

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Inspiration

I'm an illustrator and a mobile engineer, and Faboolos Creatures came out of wanting those two things to be the same job for once.

The idea is a collection of animals, each with a short illustrated story built from real facts about that animal. Not a talking cartoon bear: an actual grizzly preparing for winter, eating for cubs that don't exist yet, because delayed implantation means her body is quietly doing arithmetic all autumn.

That detail came out of research into how children actually read. Kids under about ten don't reliably extract a story's moral; they remember concrete, surface-level detail. So the design bet is that the strange true thing sticks better than any tidy lesson.

It is also not a solo project. Faboolos Creatures is made in partnership with Ponte de Livros, especially in the stories for Spiky the hedgehog and Spotty the jaguar.

What it does

Open it and you get a shelf of creatures. Tap one and its story opens: an illustrated scroll-story where the artwork responds as you read.

Every creature is researched before it is drawn, and the stories close with the sources they came from. Nothing in them is invented. The odd parts are the true parts.

There are no adverts, no timers, no levels, and nothing here collects anything about you or your child.

Some creatures are free. The rest unlock with a single in-app purchase handled by RevenueCat, and which creatures are gated is controlled remotely rather than baked into the build, so the collection can grow, and the free/paid split can change, without shipping an app update.

Everything is curated from a dashboard: creature metadata, cover art, which story it opens, whether it's visible, whether it's gated.

What's next for Faboolos Creatures

More creatures. The collection is written and researched well past what's in the app, and because stories are authored in the builder rather than programmed, each new one is roughly a day rather than a week.

Deeper stories, too. The scroll engine can do considerably more than the current ones use, and the interesting question is how much interaction earns its place before it starts competing with the reading rather than supporting it.

Faboolos Creatures is made by fffilipeee in partnership with Ponte de Livros, and it will be an ongoing project.