BumpMe - Worst Bumper Cars Ever on Reddit

Inspiration

Inspired by the subreddit communities r/unexpected, r/maybemaybemaybe, and r/midlyinfuriating for their quirkiness and pure chaos. Whenever I want a good laugh or escape, I lean on these community to induce anxiety, frustration, but also a sense of calm and belly aches laughter.

I wanted to blindly trust Bolt.new to create an exciting 3D game of (what we'll call/assume is) bumper cars with a tiny bit of guidance on the lighting, camera, animations, scene, environment, etc... instead, it did its best and rendered.. something 🥲

What it does

This game (of sorts) was built as an interactive post on Reddit.

Redditors can drive (or float) around "Reddit Land", the a sad little 3D town I've created full of your typical NPC drivers. Using the arrows on your keyboard, players can control the speed and direction of their floating/driving car as they clear as many drivers as possible, racking up points that no one cares about nor will know about because there's no leaderboards (I think).

User can view a live map to see their location in Reddit Land and find other cars to smash to get more points.

How we built it

I utilized Reddit x Bolt's starter template for getting Devvit API and components and Redis via Devvit. I also prompted Bolt for three.js. I heavily referenced Devvit's documentation and Discord server for support, especially given that this was only my second three.js game I've created (the first also being an interactive post game on Reddit).

My initial prompt for Bolt was very thorough and detailed. Within it, I aimed to prioritize having Bolt understand a clear picture of what exactly I wanted and the focus of the game. I included:

Scene management,
Camera angle,
Geometry, textures, and shapes,
Lighting,
Animations,
Post-processing effects,
Image examples,
And more!

I also include code in my prompts to really guide Bolt more. I was nervous with each iteration and unsure what it would spit out exactly.

Entrusting Bolt's creativity, I drafted several monster prompts to get this game developed. After many arguments between myself and Bolt demanding for a steering wheel and better car, I present to you the world's first car-less bumper car. How it drives? The world will never know.

Challenges we ran into

Honestly, Bolt was incredibly incompetent and painful to use for developing this. With each small prompt of me requesting a steering wheel, describing what it should look like, and even providing designs and screenshots, the game got worse overtime. Each small prompt some how inspired Bolt to completely change the scene, game logic, cameras, environment, mesh, materials and designs. It was frustrating.

And after a lot of back and forth with Bolt on it denying the changes and burning through tokens without any real results, I just gave up and accepted whatever output I got.

I tried to go back in to Bolt to add a leaderboard and timer, and instead received numerous errors as Bolt made changes to files it wasn't supposed to despite discussing the changes prior to implementing them. In fact, as I'm writing this submission, I'm having trouble getting Bolt to revert these changes. It has been reverting for the past 20 minutes.

While I may not use Bolt again in the future for developing this project further, I will definitely be building more Reddit Devvit games. I've created several just for this hackathon.

I'd encourage you guys to please review my conversation history with Bolt and test out each of its output because each one was different.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

I'm happy and proud of myself for testing the three.js with vite in Bolt. And building a second Reddit devvit game in it. I know what this game could look like if I didn't use Bolt for all of it, which makes me proud and excited that I can build something for the entire Reddit community to enjoy with just Reddit Devvit and some other no-code, low-code tool.

At first, I wasn't to proud of this. At the last minute, Bolt really screwed me over by refusing to revert changes but I'm not going to let it stop me.

This took only a few prompts to build and I'm definitely proud of that.

What we learned

The Reddit Devvit team is awesome! They were so responsive and incredibly supportive. If it weren't for them, many of the Devvit games I built over the last two weeks would not have made it across the finish line.

Other things I learned:

Bolt can make entire web apps and draw cats beautifully but can't make a 3D car or steering wheel.
Bolt can't handle clear explanations, even when the code is provided directly to it.