Mine the Gap

Mine the Gap turns a Reddit post into a mining obsession: crack blocks, chase rare runes and chests, forge stronger pickaxes, and prestige your way from stone to the singularity.

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Inspiration

I had a last minute idea for this one that was just too good to pass up. Inspired by the Minecraft Prison game mode, I cooked up "Mine the Gap": a lightweight, minimalistic version of it.

Keeping all the addictive elements and none of the bloat, I thought it would be perfect to play while you're browsing Reddit.

What it does

Mine the Gap is a bite-sized incremental/daily mining game that lives inside a Reddit post. You, as players, break blocks, collect increasingly valuable ores, and sell what fits in their backpack to fund stronger pickaxes and more inventory space. Better gear increases both mining power and ore yield, turning each upgrade into a noticeable jump in progress, which you will need as things get harder and more expensive as you progress.

Your mining journey starts in the Overworld and continues through the Core, Asteroid, Solar, and Singularity mines, each with tougher blocks, rarer materials, and its own daily supply. Along the way, you can discover runes to enhance their pickaxes, find Company Chests, claim daily rewards, compete on leaderboards, and eventually prestige to restart the climb at a higher difficulty while preserving valuable equipment and bonuses.

There's a global leaderboard where you compete on prestige levels, blocks mined, and total balance earned.

How we built it

I used Devvit's Phaser template, added React, and started development from there.

Phaser powers the hands-on mining grid-like board. Phaser scene renders a responsive 5-by-6 grid for blocks, runes, and chests. I also used Phaser for pointer input, resizing, sound effects, camera shake, damage indicators, falling blocks, impact fragments, floating yield text, and animated or tweened ore and rune drops.

I used the provided Hono backend for server authoritative actions so users can't cheat. I also used the provided Redis to save data and progress.

Challenges we ran into

I think the biggest challenge was to make server authoritative as the source of truth. It took a lot of tweaking.

But I added client-side hit prediction so every strike feels immediate, then batch those hits and reconcile the scene with authoritative snapshots from the server.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

After adding sound effects, everything really came together really nicely. I really like the feel of the mining experience. I also created my own artworks.

I used Inkscape for those both to enforce the "simple" and "minimalistic" theme I was going for but also because it's easier for me as a non-artist.

What's next for Mine the Gap

Rebalancing is definitely needed. I wished I had more time to fully test out the game end to end to keep things hard enough to be challenging but not stagnant enough to be boring. It's still pretty good currently though.

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