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  Gene-dle

Inspiration

I spend a lot of time in r/23andme, r/Ancestry and r/illustrativeDNA. These are DNA based ancestry subreddits where many people share their DNA ancestry screenshots every day. These posts get massive engagement as people love comparing results and guessing backgrounds. I love seeing guess the ethnicity type posts on these subreddits- so when I decided to participate in this hackathon like 5 days before submission, I thought to myself whats the narrowest, ideally text based scope I can choose to make a guesser/quiz/puzzle time game and had a genuine eureka moment.

Gene-dle combines viral appeal of DNA ancestry and daily puzzle game like Wordle, but for genetics. Instead of guessing a word, you guess someone's THREE dominant ethnicities from a progressively revealed DNA breakdown.

What it does

Daily Mode: Every day, all players get the same mystery DNA puzzle. Players see a blurred out ancestry chart and a cloud of ethnicity tags. Players have 3 shots to pick the ones they think are dominant. Get it wrong and you lose a guess. Players have 3 tries to find the top 3 regions.

Challenge-a-Friend: You can also enter your DNA percentages, get a unique challenge code, and share that challenge code with your friends. Your friends try to guess YOUR ancestry.

Practice Mode: Unlimited puzzles with progressive system as well as 3-level hints for learning the ropes.

Social Features: Wordle-inspired share strings, leaderboards, streak tracking, tier badges (Gold/Silver/Bronze), and auto-generated daily wrap-up comments with community stats.

How we built it

I built this entirely on Devvit Web using the interactive posts framework. The architecture is:

• Backend: TypeScript on Devvit's server runtime with Redis for persistent storage (scores, levels, streaks, challenge codes, leaderboards)
• Frontend: Custom HTML5/JS webview with a custom Figma design system, CSS animations, Web Audio API sound effects, and particle effects
• Bridge: postMessage protocol for bidirectional Devvit to Webview communications
• Content: 24 handcrafted puzzle levels with realistic DNA distributions covering diverse ancestries worldwide, plus unlimited user-generated puzzles retrieved from relevant ancestry related subreddits

The game is especially targeted for mobile, with responsiveness and haptics.

Challenges we ran into

• Devvit Content Security Poilicy restrictions block all external API calls from webviews. My original plan to use Gemini AI for OCR and Tesseract library as fallback on DNA screenshots had to pivot to manual input. While this actually made the UGC flow more reliable, I would have love to retrieve existing images from r/23andme at scale to expand the scope of the game.

• ServerCallRequired errors Devvit's fetch doesn't work inside onMessage handlers. Had to pre-load all server data via useState.

• AbortController not available in Devvit's runtime I replaced with Promise.race timeout patterns.

• Redis limitations Hash operations aren't fully supported, so I switched to simple get/set with JSON serialization.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

• Just relieved I get to complete a game in 2-3 days sprint on a topic I genuinely like and care about
• The UGC loop is fun; entering your real DNA and challenging a friend

What we learned

Devvit's sandboxed environment requires a different architectural mindset than traditional web apps. The CSP, runtime limitations, and Redis constraints push you toward simpler, more resilient designs. The postMessage bridge pattern is powerful but requires careful state management.

What's next for Gene-dle

• Custom game art Since a puzzle game has narrow scope, I used a small amount of open source icons but I would like to expand on the design system to make custom icons and graphics for the game.
• DNA Twins: Match with other players who have similar ancestry profiles
• Gene Pool: Community-wide aggregated ancestry statistics and battles e.g. competition between r/23andMe and r/Ancestry
• DNA Wrapped: Year-end summary of your guessing patterns and accuracy
• Subreddit Leaderboards: Per-community rankings for r/23andMe, r/AncestryDNA, etc.

Built With

• canvas
• claude
• css3
• devvit-redis
• devvit-web
• html5
• javascript
• typescript
• web-audio-api