Detour

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  Splash Screen (Mobile)

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  Puzzle Scene

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  Puzzle Scene (Hard puzzle)

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  Results with leaderboard, stats, and call to actions.

Inspiration

I have always loved mazes. They were such a fun challenge as a kid growing up, and then I discovered tower defense games. I especially love the TD games where you can place blocks to force the creeps into a longer path so your towers have more time to attack them. There are countless examples of these, from custom maps on RTS games, to "fieldrunners" and other popular mobile games.

I have extracted the puzzle / challenge aspect of these types of Tower Defense games into a unique puzzle that is both challenging and rewarding. Since solving complex mazes is NP hard, this type of challenge requires the abstract thinking of a human and can spark competition between redditors for finding the most (least?) optimal path.

What it does

Puzzles are generated daily and weekly, with the weekly puzzle being extra hard (larger, more blocks, more waypoints, more possibilities, more challenge!).

Your goal is to create the longest "Detour" possible given the blocks available to you. Each puzzle has a random number of available blocks, fixed blocks, waypoints, teleports, and starting/finish locations. These number of these typically scale higher with difficulty.

Once you believe you have the longest maze, you submit and compare to your peers.

How we built it

We use Phaser and Devvit and some help from Claude Code. Given that I am not a graphic designer, I focused on graphics that I could code, so the UI and elements are basic. I believe this is strong choice for a puzzle game, as the focus should be on the puzzle and not on the hand painted textures and sprites.

Challenges we ran into

It had been almost a decade since I last worked with Phaser. This is also my first Devvit application. Claude helped me in digesting documentation and building a good framework to build off of.
I have also never modded a community, so there is a learning curve there too.

The biggest challenge for me was balancing the challenge for experience Detourers and the intimidation of the puzzles to someone who may be new to this type of puzzle game. To solve for this, I spent a lot of time fine tuning the tutorial and the tiers of difficulty in the puzzles.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

Honestly, I am proud of the entire game. I think it looks great, runs smoothly, and is very fun. I hope that other Maze nerds out there find it as fun and challenging as I do.

What we learned

That Devvit is a great framework, and Phaser has some really powerful engine tools. As someone used to Unity3d, I expected Phaser to be lacking a lot, but I was very surprised with just how powerful it is. I am looking forward to developing more games on reddit!

What's next for Detour

I would love to allow custom skins for the tiles, runner, and effects. I could offer these as unlocks through achievements, awards, and in-app purchases.

Built With

• devvit
• node.js
• phaser.js
• typescript
• vite