Diggit by r/Forgotmyacc

Diggit lets you explore Reddit’s buried past. Unique subreddit dig sites, excavate old posts, and race to uncover new sites before anyone else. Work together to dig deeper and unearth ancient relics.

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About the Project

I started out coming up with ideas guided by two main principles:

  1. It had to celebrate the communities of Reddit.
  2. It should feel exciting to see a post from the game appear in your feed.

Hello. With the principles those in mind I brainstormed and sketched a ton of concepts -I’ll spare you the messy details. Eventually, I landed on the idea of an excavation game. The core premise was simple: so much great content on Reddit is buried in the past. The internet has shifted toward fast-moving, here-and-now content. That phrase- buried in the past - triggered a lot of ideas. From that, I built the idea of collecting old posts in a museum, and wrapped it in a narrative of archelogy: depths, dig sites, shovels, artifacts, detectors, treasure maps and brushes.

What I Learned

Well, obviously a lot about Devvit.
But practiced my ability to scope and restrain, I made sure to trim the fat early and focus on the core loop.

The core gameplay loop I settled on was:

Enter Dig Site → Play Minigame → Add Artifact to Museum → View Museum

After that was up and running, I had a working game. If was fine, but it wasn’t great yet. So I added treasure maps. Each artifact has a 1% chance to be a treasure map instead of an old post. Finding a treasure map spawns a new Dig Site by posting it on behalf of the player.

That gave me two big improvements for the game:

  1. It added something super rare for that dopamine hit.
  2. It created a self-sustaining content system, generating new dig sites for players.

The next big addition was the Depths System.
Each Dig Site starts at surface depth, containing artifacts aged 0–3 years. When the community collectively uncovers X artifacts, a new Dig Site post spawns, same subreddit, but now depth: shallow, revealing posts aged 3–6 years. The next depth requires XX artifacts on that dig site. The addition of the community goals and depth system would hammer home the point of community, as diggit now foster it's own community in the act of uncovering dig sites.

Challenges

One major challenge was the splash screen limitation. Not being able to update content after post creation was a big factor in relation to my second principle: It should feel exciting to see a post from the game appear in your feed. Since I couldn’t make the community goal progress or the user’s own snoovatar part of the splash screen after posting, I had to find another way to make it at least somewhat exciting to look at while scrolling. I found a fun workaround by rotating between a few custom background designs. I still think a future improvement would be using each subreddit’s theme and color scheme to style its dig site, - and going for a inline view rather than a splash screen - but that was a darling I had to kill along the way.

Another challenge was Kiro. I started out super excited about the specs mode and used it successfully in the beginning. Later, I ran into a few issues with that same mode, it was both a blessing and a curse. (See this video about that: Kiro Feedback by u/ForgotMyAcc)

Reflection

In the end, Diggit became what I hoped:
A game that celebrates Reddit’s communities by letting players rediscover the platform’s buried past, somewhat together.

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