Inspiration

While sitting on the sofa in my room in my village, I noticed a ruckus outside. My neighbours and their dogs were trying to chase away a group of monkeys who had entered the area looking for fruits and vegetables for themselves and their young ones.

That was when it hit me: they were not taking all these risks just for fun. They were doing it out of compulsion. If they did not find food, they and their young ones would remain hungry.

The real problem is that the forests which once provided them with food and shelter are disappearing because of rampant development, construction, and human expansion. We often see these animals as the problem when they enter our villages and cities, but we rarely stop to think about why they were forced to come there in the first place.

That moment became the inspiration behind Ape Uprising—a game about apes fighting to recover food after humans have taken away the jungle they once depended on.

What it does

Ape Uprising is an Angry Birds-inspired, physics-based game built for Reddit.

Players launch different apes from a cannon and use their unique abilities to destroy structures, avoid traps, rescue captured animals, and secure fruits using a limited number of attempts.

Each ape has a different ability. For example, the gorilla can perform a powerful dive-slam that is useful for breaking stronger materials such as stone. Players must carefully think about their launch angle, timing, and which ape they should use.

The game is not limited to developer-created levels. Players can also build their own challenges using different materials, fruits, traps, animals, and structures.

Once a challenge has been tested and completed by its creator, it can be published as a Reddit post. Other players can then discover the post, play the challenge, and share their results.

The main gameplay loop is simple:

Build a challenge → test it → publish it as a Reddit post → play challenges created by others → share your result.

How we built it

We built Ape Uprising using Phaser, a JavaScript framework for creating 2D games.

Phaser powers the main gameplay systems, including projectile movement, gravity, collisions, destructible structures, character abilities, scoring, and level transitions.

We created a custom level builder that allows players to place and arrange different objects inside a level. The builder includes construction materials such as wood, glass, and stone, along with fruits, traps, animals, and other gameplay elements.

Players cannot immediately publish an untested challenge. They first have to complete it themselves, which helps ensure that the challenge is actually playable. After successfully clearing it, the challenge becomes ready to publish and share with the Reddit community.

We also built systems for loading community-created challenges, displaying challenge previews, recording scores, tracking the number of fruits collected, counting the apes used, and allowing players to share their results.

The visual style uses pixel art, which helped us give the game a playful appearance while still communicating its larger theme of deforestation and habitat loss.

Challenges we ran into

One of the biggest challenges was creating pixel art because it was our first time working with this style. Making characters, structures, objects, and environments look clear and expressive with a limited number of pixels was more difficult than we initially expected.

Learning Phaser was another major challenge. We had to understand how its physics system, collisions, scenes, cameras, animations, and object management worked while simultaneously trying to build a complete game.

The physics required a lot of experimentation. Structures sometimes collapsed too easily, refused to fall, reacted unpredictably, or behaved differently depending on how the pieces were arranged. Balancing the weight, strength, friction, and collision behaviour of wood, glass, and stone took a lot of testing.

The level builder also introduced several challenges. We needed players to be able to place, rotate, copy, delete, undo, redo, test, and publish objects without making the interface too confusing.

Connecting the game to Reddit was another important challenge. We wanted Reddit to be more than simply a place where the game was hosted. The challenge creation, publishing, discovery, playing, and result-sharing systems all needed to feel like a natural part of the Reddit experience.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

We are proud that we were able to turn an idea we had imagined into an actual playable game.

The result is still not exactly how we first envisioned it, but it is a strong beginning. We know there is still a lot that can be improved, and we will get there one step at a time.

We are especially proud of building the complete community challenge loop. Players can create their own level, test it, publish it as a Reddit post, play challenges made by other users, and share their results.

We are also proud that the game is not only entertaining but carries a message based on something we personally witnessed. The apes are not attacking simply because they are angry. They are fighting because the place that once provided them with food and shelter is being taken away.

Completing this project also meant trying many things for the first time, including pixel art, physics-based gameplay, custom level creation, character abilities, scoring systems, and development with Phaser.

What we learned

Through this project, we learned how different parts of a 2D game come together, including physics, collisions, animations, controls, scoring, user interfaces, level design, and state management.

We learned that game development is not only about writing code. It also involves art, storytelling, sound, user experience, testing, balancing, and a lot of patience.

Building the challenge editor taught us that giving players creative freedom also means designing clear rules. We had to think about what objects players could place, how levels would be tested, and how we could prevent impossible challenges from being published.

We also learned the importance of building features around the platform itself. Instead of treating Reddit as only a place to launch the game, we designed the game around posts, community-created content, sharing, and competition.

Most importantly, we learned that the first version of an idea does not have to be perfect. What matters is creating something playable, learning from it, and continuing to improve it.

What's next for Ape Uprising

We want to add more ape characters, with each ape having its own powers, strengths, weaknesses, and playstyle.

We also plan to add more construction materials, traps, enemies, environmental objects, level themes, and building features so that players can create more complex and creative challenges.

A community leaderboard is one of our next major goals. It could highlight the highest scores, most efficient attempts, most-played challenges, and best challenge creators.

We also want to improve the challenge browser with better sorting and discovery options, including popular challenges, recent challenges, difficult challenges, and challenges created by specific Reddit users.

Other planned improvements include better animations, sound effects, visual feedback, mobile controls, physics balancing, interface polish, and a larger story exploring the conflict between animals, humans, and the loss of natural habitats.

Ape Uprising may not be exactly where we want it to be yet, but the uprising has only just begun.