Cat Burglary

Inspiration

Late-night cats sneaking through the house for snacks — and the panic when someone wakes up. We turned that into a push-your-luck stealth game: grab treats room by room, bank your score at the exit, and try not to get caught by Granny (or her chihuahua).

What it does

Treat Dash is a sneak game built as a Reddit interactive post. You play a stray cat working through a house — Kitchen → Living Room → Hallway → Bathroom — looting treats from furniture and crossing each room's exit to bank what you're carrying. Get spotted and Granny chases you and throws her slipper. Three hits ends the run.

Between runs you earn coins to unlock new cats and silly outfits (hats, glasses, bow ties, mustaches). Regular, Easy, and Dark modes change how punishing the stealth is. The splash screen runs inline in the feed; tap Play to expand into the full game.

How we built it

Art: 100% hand-drawn by one teammate in Aseprite — cats, Granny, the chihuahua, furniture, treats, outfits, everything. No AI art; that's the soul of the game.

Levels: Phaser Editor 2D made layout visual and intuitive — drag furniture into place, drop in Granny, mark treat spots, hit Play to preview. No code required to shape a room the way you want it.

Code: Cursor AI took those editor scenes and wired up the gameplay — stealth cones, detection, slipper throws, dog barks, banking at exits, the shop loop. Describe what you want, iterate in the browser, fix what breaks. The stack is Devvit Web + Phaser 3 + TypeScript on the client, Redis on the server for profiles and scores.

The combo felt like the best of both worlds: a non–tech-savvy person can design the game in Phaser Editor, and AI can make it work without needing to write everything by hand.

Challenges we ran into

• Reddit post versioning — old posts stay pinned to the app version they were created on, so we had to create fresh posts after every deploy.
• Editor + runtime glue — Phaser Editor paths didn't always match Vite's asset layout; we added preload rewrites so level design stays in the editor, not in code.
• AI code vs. human art — keeping the handmade sprites front and center so the game feels personal, not generic.
• Granny AI polish — hitboxes, patrol behavior, and sprite facing took a lot of playtesting so chases feel fair.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

• A cohesive handmade look — every character and prop drawn by one person.
• A workflow where level design doesn't require programming — Phaser Editor for layout, Cursor for logic.
• A full four-room run with escalating difficulty and real stakes (bank or bust).
• Stealth that reads clearly: furniture blocks line of sight, detection ramps from suspicious → alert → chase.
• Proof that you don't have to be a traditional developer to ship a game on Reddit.

What we learned

Phaser Editor + Cursor AI is a genuinely great pipeline for people who have game ideas but not a CS degree. You lay out levels visually, say what behavior you want, and the AI implements the systems while you playtest and steer. AI moves fast on boilerplate; a human artist gives it identity. Building for Reddit means designing for the feed first — inline splash, one tap to expand — and remembering that each post is locked to whatever app version was live when it was created.

What's next for Cat Burglary

• More rooms laid out in Phaser Editor, more sprites from our artist.
• Daily challenges or seeded runs so players compare scores in the thread.
• More rooms, enemies, and treat combos.
• A public demo subreddit so anyone can stumble on a Treat Dash post and play.

Built With

• cursor
• phaser.js
• typescript