Karma Katcher - One Sh!tty Cat Distribution System on Reddit

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  Karma Katcher

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  Leaderboard

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Inspiration

As an avid fan and lurker on almost all cat subreddits, plus a recovering victim of the kitten distribution system, I thought to myself, "how fun and ridiculous would it be to make a game of raining cats".

Inspired by our furry companions, who thrive on getting stuck in trees and mysteriously getting into and falling from odd places, I made a skill-based game where Redditors who have dreamt of being chosen to partake in the cat distribution system, will finally get their moment.

Grab an umbrella! It's raining Karma Kitties!

What it does

User can play Karma Katcher with use of their keyboard. Any player can participate in the game.

During the game, the player will shake a tree full of mischievous kitties and use the the right and left arrows on the keyboard to try save as many as they can before they escape. But, it's not the tree the kitties will fall from, it's the sky!

In true, unexpected, chaotic fashion. kitties will appear at random as the fall at rapid and try to evade the safety of their catcher.

Players with the highest number of kitties caught will be added to the leaderboard.

How we built it

Thanks to Reddit x Bolt starter code and detailed ReadMe, getting started with Bolt was an ease. The initial goal was to use one megaprompt but quickly discovered a few limitations of Bolt. I utilized advance prompt engineering skills I acquired over the past months from participating in local hackathons. And also reviewing Bolt's system prompt provided on Github as a template for my prompts, as well as the prompt file locating in .bolt folder of the starter code as reference point.

I also utilized ChatGPT for support in generating concept images, to help guide asset and image creation. And used it to assist with troubleshoot errors when encountered.

I started with 26M tokens and ended this game development with 25.9M tokens.

Challenges we ran into

Discovered early that if not explicitly stated, Bolt will take it upon itself to change code it wasn't instructed to change. This force me to alter my prompt engineering to incorporate strict instructions on what Bolt was to and to not do.

Error handling also became a pain and would lead to Bolt again making changes it wasn't instructed to make. This resulted in me relying heavily on ChatGPT for terminal errors and debugging.

I ran into an issue where my project disconnected from the user account and had to create a new app name plus username. It was a quick fix.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

This being my very first game and Bolt.new app. I really wanted to participate in this Reddit challenge, as it was one challenge I have a lot of ideas for. I'm very proud to have been able to published my first Reddit game in React, TypeScript, Tailwind, Vite, and Express.

Not many people can say that, let alone celebrate it and that feels amazing!

What we learned

Prompts have to be explicit to get the desired outcome. Bolt felt more like a very talented junior developer intern. While it could handle multiple request simultaneously, as long as they clearly detailed, it would take things literally. I learn from this that I have to be very mindful of my prompts wording and to revert bad changes quickly.

I also learned how guide Bolt through errors and not let it attempt fix any without clear instructions.

And lastly, I learned more on Devvit and JavaScript. Despite being a software developer professionally over 5 years ago, I moved on to PowerShell and PowerFX for RPAs, losing a lot of my frontend developer knowledge. This experience has become very addicting and I'm exciting build additional projects.

What's next for Karma Katcher - One Sh!tty Cat Distribution System on Reddit

Community game play with multiplayer functionality and allowing users to create either posts or comments with their captured kitties!

Built With

• devvit
• express.js
• react
• tailwind
• typescript
• vite