Deck Keeper: Raid & Ruin

You are the villain. Build your dungeon by stacking cards, survive the daily hero raid and out-fear your subreddit.

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Inspiration

I wanted to create an MMO like experience for the player. Since I read: "The Best Experience That Will Keep People Coming Back". The game I have probably the most gametime in is World of Warcraft and back in the 90s when I was a kid: Dungeon Keeper. And I also wanted to create a Deckbuilder like game for some time. So I stole some ideas/mechanics from WoW: Raids/PvP, the base building from Stacklands (try it, it's awesome), and the overall vibe from Dungeon Keeper.

What it does

The #1 rule was, Respect the players time. Don't reward the player who clicks the most or is the most online. Instead reward smart decisions and continues play. The player can come online everyday, manage their dungeon, optimize production, train minions, breed new minions, start a raid or build up a defense. And after every new login after the raid finished (time is displayed in the splash screen), see how your minions fought, could they defend the dungeon and earn some Fear points to get to the top of the leaderboard to be the most feared keeper in the sub.

I also had a major focus on good mobile gameplay and UX. No easy task, when building a dungeon card game. There is still room for improvement, but I think for the short time frame, it's pretty good.

I also made use of user flair for "Fear"-Level and Stats and with posting the Raid-Report as a commentary for creating user engagement.

How we built it

Since I am more of a gamedesigner, than a game programmer I used Claude Code as my Coding Minion. I did the gamedesign, playtesting, and art direction. Claude Code implemented against structured prompts. Client is Phaser 4 + TypeScript + Vite; the backend is Hono + tRPC v11, fully server-authoritative with lazy idle simulation, no background work while the player is gone, it computes everything the moment the player returns, from timestamps. All on Devvit Redis.

Challenges we ran into

Testing testing testing, to find these bugs and weird game behaviors only a human can find or imagine. And testing the whole thing on mobile and desktop again and again and again.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

Shipping a complete, server-authoritative game with a real economy, async PvP, and community features of course with the help of AI, but damn, what a time to be alive. :D

What we learned

All your automated tests can be green, but in the end a human playing the game is the best testing you can do. I did catch some nasty bugs while just playing the game myself.

What's next for Deck Keeper: Raid & Ruin

I want this game to grow and I have some cool ideas in my backlog I had to scrap because of scope creep.

  • Some of them are: "Raid my dungeon" challenge posts (post your formation, the whole subreddit can raid it), maybe with some form of auto-battle mechanic.
  • A marketplace where players can trade cards they do not need.
  • Sub wide "world" PvE events, where the whole sub can fight together against one big boss. (btw. this was my overall first game idea for the hackathon).
  • more buildings and recipes as the dungeon levels up. ... and there's a walled-off passage in the dungeon we haven't opened yet. :D
  • and of course get better game art, I bought a pretty awesome assetpack from itch.io for the game (the cards and icons), but had to use nano banana for the dungeon background. I want to change that and get better human artist made art for that.

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