🐮 Highland Havoc

Highland Havoc is a real-time physics battle arena built for Reddit, where players take control of adorable Highland cows and compete in fast-paced, chaotic matches. Every round rewards skillful movement, strategic charging, and clever positioning while encouraging players to return through daily challenges, progression, and community events.

Inspiration

Reddit communities thrive because people return every day to interact, compete, and share experiences. We wanted to create a game that feels native to Reddit—something that isn't just embedded inside a post, but becomes a fun social activity for an entire community.

Rather than building another leaderboard-driven game, we focused on creating moments that people would want to share: unexpected physics interactions, funny collisions, and competitive battles that are easy to learn but difficult to master.

What it does

Players enter a 3D arena as a Highland cow and battle against AI opponents using physics-based combat.

The game includes:

🐮 Real-time physics combat
⚡ Charge and knockback mechanics
🏆 Global and subreddit leaderboards
🎯 Daily rotating challenges
🔥 Daily streak rewards
🌍 Community Stampede Goal shared across players
🎁 Power-ups and shop system
📊 Persistent player progression
🎵 Dynamic sound effects and voice feedback

Players compete for the highest score while helping the entire subreddit reach community milestones.

How we built it

The project was built using Reddit's modern Devvit WebView architecture.

Frontend

React
TypeScript
Vite
Three.js
Web Audio API

Backend

Devvit Web Server
Hono
Redis
REST API architecture

Architecture

The project follows a layered architecture:

Client UI ↓ React Hooks ↓ Game API ↓ REST Endpoints ↓ Controllers ↓ Services ↓ Redis Repository ↓ Redis Storage

This separation keeps rendering, gameplay, networking, and persistence completely independent, making the project easier to maintain and extend.

Challenges we ran into

One of the biggest challenges was migrating a large game codebase into Reddit's latest Devvit Web architecture.

This required:

Replacing legacy communication with REST APIs
Separating frontend and backend responsibilities
Migrating thousands of lines of gameplay code without changing the game's physics
Refactoring the networking layer while preserving gameplay
Ensuring smooth rendering and responsive controls inside Reddit's embedded WebView

Maintaining identical gameplay while changing the application's architecture was by far the most technically demanding part of the project.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

Successfully migrated the entire game to the modern Devvit Web platform
Built a modular architecture with clean separation of concerns
Integrated persistent player progression using Redis
Implemented subreddit-wide community objectives
Created a fully playable physics-based multiplayer-style experience inside Reddit

What we learned

Building games for Reddit requires balancing performance, responsiveness, and social interaction.

We learned how to structure a scalable WebView application, optimize a Three.js game for an embedded environment, and design backend APIs that support persistent progression while remaining lightweight.