Loose Cables — The Cable Tower

Elevator pitch: A 3D cable-untangling puzzle on Reddit. The whole subreddit untangles the same daily knot—fewest moves wins, and you can build and post your own tangles.

Inspiration

There's a drawer in every home where cables breed and knot themselves overnight. We made that the game—then made it a group activity. One board, one shot, whole subreddit. The fun isn't just untangling; it's untangling the same mess everyone else is stuck on today and settling it in the comments.

What it does

Drag a plug from one socket to another to pull its cable out of a physically simulated nest. Cables actually collide and shove each other—so freeing one reshapes the whole knot. The moment a cable stops crossing anything, it snaps loose on its own, chaining into multi-clears. Clear the board in the fewest moves before the 60-second clock runs out.

How to play

1. Open a Loose Cables post → Play.
2. Drag plugs to reroute cables out of the tangle.
3. Cables auto-clear when untangled—chain them for combos.
4. Beat the clock. Fewer moves = more stars (up to 3★).
5. Stuck? Spend coins on Freeze (stop the clock) or Cutter (snip one cable).

How it spreads on Reddit

• Daily Tangle: an auto-posted puzzle every day—identical board for everyone, so the comment section becomes a leaderboard.
• Build & post: the in-app Level Maker lets any player design a tangle on the real 3D board and publish it as its own post with its own leaderboard—player-made content flowing straight into the feed.
• Rankings: Daily (fewest moves), Weekly (most solves this week), and an all-time Tower board—each with avatars and your live rank.

Why it keeps you coming back

• Streaks with a "don't lose it today" nudge, plus a weekly ladder that resets Monday.
• The Cable Tower: 9 worlds, 99 levels, star-gated—easy to start, punishing at the top, always reachable.
• Stacking hurdles as you climb: bolted plugs, a golden cable that clears last, live wires that zap, blackout levels lit only by a torch you sweep, and mid-level power surges.
• 35+ achievements with live progress bars, coins, and unlockable tools.

How we built it

Devvit Web + TypeScript, front to back. Three.js renders the board; cannon-es gives the cables real physics (they knot and drape, not just animate). Hono serves the API, Redis stores profiles and leaderboards, and a scheduler posts the Daily Tangle with a comment recapping yesterday's winner. A single deterministic PuzzleEngine runs on both client and server, so every player gets the exact same board from a seed and scoring is verifiable.

Challenges we ran into

• Cables that knot believably without tunneling through each other—solved with a per-frame velocity clamp and tuned constraints.
• Fair, complexity-aware star scoring that agrees on client and server.
• Mobile performance: reused the WebGL renderer across levels, trimmed geometry, and cut the bundle from ~32 MB to ~9.5 MB.
• Devvit inline-webview quirks: the feed splash couldn't fetch bundled images, so we embedded the logo as a data URI for a clean first frame.

Accomplishments we're proud of

A tactile 3D board that feels good to drag on phone and desktop, a full game around it—99 levels, three leaderboards, achievements, coins, and a working 3D level editor—and a genuine reason to return every day, all with its own art and identity.

What we learned

The hook isn't a single feature; it's a stack of small pulls—a streak on the line, a weekly reset, one more star to crack open the next world. And that Reddit itself is the best game mechanic: a shared daily board turns strangers into rivals.

What's next for Loose Cables

Themed weekly challenge boards, a community spotlight for the best player-made levels, per-world community leaderboards, and Reddit Gold coin packs once payments are approved.

Built With

• devvit
• three.js