DIG DIG DIG

A whole subreddit digs ONE bottomless hole that never resets. Race the daily leaderboard on one breath of air, dodge gas, grab treasure, and don't let the community's canary faint.

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Inspiration

Most games reset. You play, you get a score, the board wipes, and tomorrow it is like you were never there. We wanted the opposite. We wanted one thing that a whole community builds together and never loses.

So we made a hole. One hole, shared by an entire subreddit, that only ever gets deeper. Every tap anyone has ever made is still in there. The number on the screen is the community's memory, in meters. Once we had that idea, everything else grew out of one question: what is worth digging toward, and what happens if everyone stops?

What it does

DIG DIG DIG is a communal digging game that lives inside a Reddit post.

The whole subreddit digs one shared, permanent hole. On top of that, each player takes their own run: a fresh, daily, seeded mine, one tank of oxygen, and a simple goal, which is to go as deep as you can on one breath before you black out.

While you dig you grab gems, open chests for the community museum, dodge gas pockets that drain your air, and blast boulders for big depth. Tap in rhythm and you build a combo that multiplies your digging. Run out of air and the run ends, you get paid in grit, and you dig again.

The hooks that keep people coming back:

  • A fresh daily mine, so everyone races the same layout each day.
  • Day streaks that multiply your reward for showing up.
  • A personal best chase, with your live score turning gold when you beat it.
  • Permanent gear you buy with grit, so every future run goes deeper.
  • Real subreddit flair ranks, from Worm all the way to Core Dweller.
  • Pip, the community canary. Pip is fed by anyone digging. If the whole community goes quiet for too long, Pip faints, and you can see it right on the post. The next person to dig revives the bird. A healthy Pip even chirps to warn you about gas. The community keeps the bird alive, and the bird keeps the community safer.
  • A daily and all time leaderboard, a museum of every treasure ever found with the finder's name, epitaphs you can bury at the spot you died for other players to dig up later, and a button to post your run as a comment in your own words.

Every subreddit that installs it gets its own separate hole, so communities can race each other.

How we built it

It runs on Reddit's Developer Platform using Devvit Web, with a Phaser game in the webview and a small Node and Hono server behind it.

The part we are most proud of technically: the game ships zero art and zero audio files. Every texture, every particle, every sound effect is generated in code when the game boots. The clay and rock, the crystal clusters, the shovel crunches, the gas hiss, all of it is drawn and synthesized on the fly.

State lives in Redis, which holds the community depth, each player's progress, the leaderboards, the museum, the epitaphs, and who is currently online. The live layer uses Devvit realtime channels so you can watch the counter climb as strangers dig, with a polling fallback if realtime drops. The daily mine is seeded, so everyone gets the same earth, and all the treasure rolls and depth checks happen on the server so nobody can cheat.

Challenges we ran into

Mobile sharpness was a real fight. On high density phones the game looked blurry, and the honest fix was to render the canvas at the device's real resolution and drive the whole layout through a zoomed camera. Once we did that properly, text and art got crisp.

Compliance taught us a lot. Reddit's rules are strict about acting on a user's behalf, and rightly so. We reworked the game so it never posts on its own. When you want to share a score, you tap a button, a native form confirms exactly what will be posted, and it goes out from your own account, either as a reply to a single pinned score thread or as its own comment if you add your own words.

We also got real player feedback that the screen felt busy, and that people were not always sure what their taps were doing. So we calmed things down, made the active row obvious, made the oxygen gauge clearly read as air, and added a proper home screen so nobody lands mid game and starts tapping by accident.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

  • The hole is a genuine permanent artifact. It never resets, and it is the community's shared history in meters.
  • We passed Reddit's app review and stayed fully compliant with the user action rules.
  • Real strangers actually played it and left their mark, filling the leaderboard, the museum, and the epitaphs.
  • We ran several deep code reviews and fixed everything they found before shipping, including race conditions, identity handling for logged out players, and a bug where the game could have told you it posted a comment when it had not.
  • Zero asset files. All the art and sound is code.

What we learned

We learned how much a game lives or dies on the first sixty seconds, and how many small clarity choices add up to whether a new player gets it. We learned a lot about Devvit and Phaser, about designing retention that feels like care instead of pressure, and about listening to feedback quickly and shipping fixes the same day. The canary in particular taught us that a gentle sense of shared responsibility can pull people back stronger than a plain streak counter.

What's next for DIG DIG DIG

More reasons to come back and more community texture: deeper strata with their own surprises, more to find and put in the museum, and sub versus sub bragging rights so communities can compete on who digs deepest. And of course, we want to find out what is actually behind the door at sixty meters.

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