Maggot Miners

Tutorial Level 1
Procedural World Generation
Onboarding
Tutorial Level 2
Level Completion

Inspiration

Maggot Miners started as a hole-digging idle clicker name hole game, then became a side-view Terraria-style digger. Neither felt fun. My bro suggested something more like Lemmings, and that finally clicked: units walk on their own, you assign roles, and the puzzle is getting enough of them home alive.

What it does

Maggot Miners is an underground puzzle game on Reddit. Earth maggots spawn from a portal and walk toward trouble on their own. You select a unit, give it a role (Digger, Tunneler, Climber, or Blocker), and try to save enough of them to reach the goal portal. Short tutorials teach each skill, Chapter 1 offers handmade levels, and a new procedural daily challenge drops every day. Across the colony, players can see today’s shared stats and fastest clears.

How we built it

We built it as a Devvit web app with Phaser on the client and a serverless Node backend (Hono + tRPC). The dig world is procedurally generated from a seed, and daily levels carve connected puzzle routes through that terrain. Shared game logic lives in one codebase, so movement, mining, climbing, and blocking stay consistent between client and server. The client adds portal animations, ability feedback, and Reddit-native onboarding and mode select.

Challenges we ran into

The biggest headache was procedural level generation. Early versions looked fine but were often unsolvable: broken paths, bad spawn depth, and puzzle pieces that did not connect. We went through several generation pipelines before landing on connected routes, floor validation, and handmade levels to sanity-check the system.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

Turning a scrapped idle digger into something actually playable. The procedural world, four distinct unit roles, tutorial and Chapter 1 flows, daily challenge pipeline, community colony stats, and first-time onboarding came together into one coherent Reddit-native game loop.

What we learned

Cool terrain is not enough. The game only worked once the player had a clear job. Procedural content needs the same discipline as handmade levels: connectivity, readability, and solvability matter more than fancy caves.

What's next for Maggot Miners

More handmade levels at deeper depths, better daily generation, clearer maggot personality in the UI and audio, and more ways to share daily results on Reddit. Long term, we want harder multi-ability puzzles and an even smoother path from tutorial to daily challenge.