Frontpage Prophet

Inspiration

Reddit is full of moments where you scroll past a post and think "that's going to blow up" or completely misjudge one that turns out to be huge. I wanted to turn that everyday instinct into a daily game, the same way Wordle turned guessing a word into a ritual millions of people return to every morning.

What it does

Frontpage Prophet shows you four real post titles from a subreddit each day upvote counts hidden. You rank them from most to least upvoted, purely on gut instinct. Then the reveal happens: real upvote counts animate in one at a time, building suspense before your final score lands. Streaks, a daily leaderboard, and personal stats give you a reason to come back tomorrow.

How I built it

React + Vite for the frontend, structured as 5 distinct screens: Splash, How to Play, Game, Results Reveal, and Leaderboard
Canvas-based living background floating upvote arrows drift and fade, a slow-breathing radial glow, and a connected particle network, all built from scratch with no external animation library
A weighted scoring algorithm that rewards proximity to the real order, not just exact matches, with bonus points for correctly calling the top post and a separate perfect-order bonus
Up/down ranking controls instead of drag-and-drop, since drag-and-drop is notoriously unreliable on mobile where most Reddit traffic actually lives

Challenges I ran into

The trickiest part was the scoring system. My first version let bonus points push a near-perfect guess (nailing just the first and last position) to the same 100 score as a truly perfect ranking which meant the game couldn't tell apart "great instincts" from "perfect read." I caught this by writing test cases with known outcomes before trusting the scoring logic, and rebalanced the weights so a true perfect round is always distinguishable.

What I learned

Building the reveal sequence taught me a lot about pacing animation for emotional payoff staggering each bar's reveal with a real delay, rather than animating everything at once, is what makes the moment feel like a "reveal" instead of just a chart loading.

What's next

The game currently runs on seeded demo data for local testing. The next step is wiring it into Devvit's real Reddit API to pull actual daily posts from a subreddit, and switching from localStorage to Devvit's Redis-backed storage so streaks and leaderboards persist properly across all players in a live subreddit installation.