Island Rain
Explore a beautiful island 🏝. But it is sinking. Catch what you need from the rain, and escape before the flood - every single day. Fail, and you get to suggest the next puzzle.
Inspiration
Inspired by visually stunning exploration games and word-unscrambling puzzles, Island Rain blends the two into something fresh for Reddit.
Hook
If you fail to escape, then instead of just losing, you get to suggest the word for an upcoming day's puzzle - turning every defeat into a contribution the whole community plays next.
What it does
Memorize under pressure! Study the scrambled target letters during a short briefing phase before the rain begins - test how sharp your memory really is.
Catch it before it's gone!
Letters fall like rain onto a low-poly island. Grab the ones you need for +15 points each - but decoy letters cost you score and precious time.
Race the flood!
Once every letter is collected, drag the tiles into the correct order before the rising water swallows your island. Solve it in time to escape the island.
Compete for first place!
Climb live leaderboards for both fastest time and highest score, all tracked per daily puzzle.
Practice anytime - Archive Mode! Missed a day or want another crack at an old puzzle? Replay any past puzzle in Archive Mode, no pressure, no leaderboard.
Daily Challenges! A brand new deterministically-generated puzzle drops every single day, so the community always has something fresh to race.
Play anywhere - mobile and desktop! Take the word-puzzle fun anywhere you go, with first-class support for both mobile and desktop.
Share your victory! Winners can post their result straight to the comments as their own Reddit comment.
How we built it
Using Reddit Devvit Web, React 19, Three.js (via react-three-fiber & drei), Tailwind CSS, Hono, Redis, TypeScript - and using creative mind.
Challenges we ran into
- Rendering the island - getting a detailed low-poly 3D scene to run smoothly inside a Reddit-embedded iframe
- Smooth rain animation - fall speed, and physics so the rain felt satisfying and alive, not janky or overwhelming.
- Readable letters in the rain - balancing letter size and fall speed so players could actually spot and catch the ones they needed in time, without making it too easy or too chaotic.
- Keeping it easy to use - designing tap-to-catch and drag-to-unscramble controls that felt intuitive on both mobile touchscreens and desktop.
Accomplishments that we're proud of
- Something fresh and new - exploring a beautiful and creative game combo and not just any random low graphics game Building something fresh and beautiful - Refreshing island, lively rain, live leaderboards, and native comment sharing - that runs smoothly inside a Reddit post on both desktop and mobile. ## What we learned Mindset of what matters for a game to be lively and beautiful and actually implementing it in reddit. ## What's next for Island Rain Possible new beautiful islands and new challenges.
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