Brood: Underwarren

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  concept art

Inspiration

I wanted to build a simulation where cooperation and voting mattered more than individual skill. The goal was an ant farm-like experience: a living colony you can watch, influence, and return to later.

What it does

Brood: Underwarren is a persistent troll-colony survival game inside a Reddit post. Players hatch trolls, create work, assign tasks, explore the warren, and vote on shared decisions. The colony continues while players are away, creating a story owned by the whole community.

How we built it

We built Brood through rapid prototypes and playtesting. Phaser renders the underground world, Devvit runs it on Reddit, tRPC connects the client and server, and Redis preserves each post’s colony.

Challenges we ran into

Running a realtime-style simulation in a serverless environment was the biggest challenge. We also had to handle missed updates, duplicate requests, multiple players acting at once, and a dense interface that works on both desktop and mobile.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

We created a persistent shared world that can safely advance while nobody is playing, then bring everyone back to the same colony state. We are also proud of its distinctive ASCII-inspired visual identity.

What we learned

This was our first Phaser project. We learned a great deal about Devvit, serverless simulation, realtime synchronization, and designing games around Reddit communities rather than individual players.

What's next for Brood: Underwarren

Next comes more polish, balance, onboarding, and event variety. Ultimately, we want to see communities develop their own strategies and compete to keep their colonies alive the longest.

Built With

• css3
• developer
• devvit
• hono
• html5
• node.js
• phaser.js
• platform
• realtime
• reddit
• redis
• serverless
• trpc
• typescript
• vite
• zod