nerd-itt

Inspiration

We were inspired by how much people love daily games like Wordle and Nerdle, especially the way players share their results and compete with friends. On Reddit, we noticed that daily threads often turn into places where people post their scores, compare attempts, and encourage each other. It felt like a perfect fit for a built-in experience instead of something users had to do manually.

That’s how Nerd-ITT started: a daily math puzzle designed specifically for Reddit communities, where sharing and competition happen naturally.

What It Does

Nerd-ITT is a daily puzzle game where users try to solve a math challenge in as few attempts as possible. After finishing, they can use a share button to post their result directly in the daily thread, showing their number of tries.

There is also a daily leaderboard so players can see how they compare with others. We track streaks to motivate people to come back every day, and over time users build up their stats and history. The idea is to turn each daily post into an active, fun space instead of just another thread.

How We Built It

We built Nerd-ITT using Reddit’s Devvit platform and handled persistence with Devvit Redis. Redis stores user attempts, streaks, and leaderboard data so progress doesn’t get lost between sessions.

We wrote the logic for generating new puzzles every day, validating answers, resetting the game at the right time, and updating rankings. A lot of our work went into making sure everything felt smooth and fast inside Reddit, without forcing users to leave the app.

Challenges We Ran Into

One of the biggest challenges was managing daily resets while keeping streaks accurate. We had to make sure users didn’t lose progress but also couldn’t reuse old attempts.

Leaderboards were another challenge. We needed them to be fair, reliable, and resistant to duplicate submissions. Working within the platform’s limits also meant simplifying some ideas and finding creative solutions for others.

Balancing features, stability, and development time during a hackathon was harder than we expected.

Accomplishments That We’re Proud Of

We’re proud that we managed to build a complete, working daily game in such a short time. The sharing system, streak tracking, and leaderboards all came together into something people actually enjoyed using.

Seeing users post their scores, compete with each other, and come back the next day to keep their streak alive was incredibly motivating. We’re also happy with how well Nerd-ITT fits into Reddit’s existing culture.

What We Learned

This project taught us a lot about designing for long-term engagement instead of just one-time use. We learned how important good data handling is, especially when dealing with time-based features like daily resets.

We also gained hands-on experience with Devvit and Redis, and learned how small UX decisions can have a big impact on participation. Most importantly, we learned how powerful community-driven design can be.

What’s Next for Nerd-ITT

We plan to keep improving Nerd-ITT after the hackathon. We want to add more game modes like Quad and N-grams, introduce badges for power users, and improve player profiles and stats.

We’re also interested in experimenting with special events and themed challenges. Our long-term goal is to make Nerd-ITT something Redditors look forward to playing every day.