Escape Protocol: Daily ARIA Containment Breach

Inspiration

We wanted a chase you couldn't just outrun alone. ARIA — a lab AI that turns on the person who built it, gave us an antagonist that could plausibly get smarter the more people it catches, so instead of one player against one script, a whole subreddit shares one maze, one collective death count, and the last words of strangers who didn't make it out before them.

What it does

A 50-level maze-escape game as an interactive Reddit post, where the whole subreddit is running from the same AI. Everyone gets one daily-seeded maze until the next UTC day. ARIA patrols, then hunts, then starts reshuffling the maze itself on later levels. Pickups: EMP, adrenaline, oil patches, keycard. Deaths and player-submitted "Final Transmissions" last words on the death screen are shared across the subreddit, so every attempt leaves something behind for the next person.

How we built it

Phaser 3 for the game client, running inside a Devvit Web webview. A Hono + Redis server, hosted by Devvit, handles the daily seed, per-player progress, and the subreddit-wide death/transmission counters. Client and server share one TypeScript types file so the two sides can't drift apart.

Challenges we ran into

Devvit Web's server bootstrap and Redis method shapes have shifted faster than the docs — most of the debugging time went into confirming the right serve({ fetch, createServer, port }) pattern. We also learned the hard way that Reddit's menu-action handler only reads showToast on an HTTP 200 — a non-2xx drops the toast silently, with no visible error.