Myndrot

Starting Scene at The Pier
Starting Scene at The Pier by night
GPU Shader Grass interacting and Y-Depth sorting with units
The misfits
GO
Flamethrower Moose at night
Sketches - The lore
Fusion Unit Showcase - Solid Snape
Anidex
Allies - Merge Screen
Animushaker2k and the creator - Kaolun
Kaolun Pixel Art Portrait
Myndrot Reddit Banner
Building our little world
Devvit Coop Diagram

How did this happen A day late and a dollar short?

We decided very spontaneously to enter this Hackathon after it had already started. Flow (Programmer) asked Nemo (Artist) on a whim if they were interested in going in Duo queue. To his surprise, they instantly said yes. At that moment Flow realized that he had not been prepared for a yes at all really. That day, the Nemo x Flow Devvit Hackathon train departed on what would become quite a wild ride.

Inspiration The art of the steal

Video games have been around for a long time now. So many things have already been created. Could we add something meaningful to that pile with an easy-to-grasp hook? Just do something based on Flow's five-year project Bubbits or Nemo's viral video hit Sandborne? No. Something new. Something with ingredients players are familiar with, but arranged into a dish unlike any other on the table. A useless hero. A flock of animal allies that can. An interesting world to explore. Unit merging. Fusion recipe collection (you always wanted to fuse a sheep and a rat. Oh, you did not!? How about a pirate bunny with a pistol and a snake into Solid Snape? Still no!!?) And a community World Boss to fight together. With mountain-sized ambitions and a lot of self-doubt, the railway switches for our train were set.

What it does 3 rats, a sheep and a bunny go into a bar

You just arrived at the Pier of Green Meadows. You've got nothing. The controls of Myndrot are simple: Move. STAY command. GO command. You run up to three dizzy rats lying on the ground. You cure their dizziness and they start following you. Now the STAY and GO commands make sense - the rats are at your command! You and the rats defeat a Myndrot-ridden sheep and an archer bunny. Now the sheep and bunny follow you as well. Explore the Meadows, see other players, meet animals and destroy Myndrot Crystal towers to unlock the Area Boss.

A WORLD BOSS APPEARS

You see a new marker, run in its direction and when you arrive, two other players are already fighting the World Boss. You join in seamlessly! You defeat the World Boss and afterwards, continue to build your flock of animal allies, choose perks that benefit your specific flock composition and finally head to the Area Boss. The composition you crafted was a bit chaotic but you were able to get the job done. Area Clear!

A Reddit Roguelike? Each Myndrot run will be a little different. Different perks will be available to choose from and objectives can appear in different parts of the map each time. Utilizing seeded random generation, we can bind a specific run to a Reddit post, leveling the playing field and enabling meaningful leaderboards for each post! Want to share your team comp and Boss Damage after an Area Clear? Sharing it as a comment, complete with a cool table showing your top damage-dealing units, is just one click away! Two leaderboards, two ways to play: There is a leaderboard for the quickest overall Area Clear time and also for the quickest boss fight. Whether you love moving quickly right from the start or want to craft the perfect team composition before killing the Area Boss in seconds, there is a leaderboard where you can shine!

And there is more: Night Runs. By leveraging Phaser 4's new lighting system (more information in the tech section below), we did not just change the visuals, but added random modifiers to each run. All rats do chain damage now? Sheep can move at double their normal speed? These are run modifiers that don't just feel like a tacked-on gimmick, but can really influence how you approach building your team and picking perks. Unlike in most other games, these modifiers do not just influence enemies! Our core mechanic of recruiting fallen enemies means that you will not only fight enemies empowered by these modifiers, but also use the same advantages yourself after recruiting them!

How we built it Is this AI or is this art?

Myndrot's creation has really been a fusion of an artist and a programmer working closely together. At a time when AI is taking over, we wanted to strike a balance between human creativity and the use of AI. Our decision: Leverage AI to code, while leaving the art, audio - and this post - to be human-made. Nemo is a jack-of-all-trades but most at home with pixel art, while Flow is an experienced Phaser developer. The goal: Bring pixel art onto the canvas in a way that makes people stop for a second and think: You can do that on Reddit!? This is where Phaser 4's new set of features comes into play. The following paragraphs provide a quick rundown and deeper dive into what we found to be the most interesting uses of the Phaser 4 framework (skip the following section if you are not interested in the tech part):

1. Fixed-Slot Phaser 4 GPU Rendering Units, pickups, HP bars and combat VFX are all rendered through SpriteGPULayer slots. This takes full advantage of the GPU rendering pipeline and avoids GameObject and buffer churn while keeping large, dynamic battles batched into very few draw calls.

2. A Shader-Driven Breathing World Custom Phaser shader additions animate grass (we are very proud of our grass - the current map contains roughly 470,000 strands of it), plants and tree canopies entirely on the GPU. Shared wind and gust calculations set the overall feel of the environment, while units physically bend the grass as they move through it. Supporting this level of visual fidelity on mobile would be unthinkable without this tech.

3. Dynamic Role-Aware Unit Steering (Not Phaser 4 specific) Units blend body separation, flock cohesion, player leash containment, obstacle avoidance and combat positioning into a single target position they strive to reach. Tanks want to be at the front line while ranged units can even kite their targets. A deterministic flow field handles blocked routes efficiently, allowing units to follow the player without constantly getting stuck.

4. Per-Pixel GPU World Depth World Y-position is written into the WebGL depth buffer so grass, units, plants and props like tree trunks, buildings or statues occlude each other correctly per pixel. This approach produces surprisingly convincing spatial layering.

5. Phaser 4 Native Dynamic Lighting Phaser 4's Dynamic Lighting enabled us to not just tint or redo all our art, but to change the look and feel of our entire overworld with lights and self-shadowing across all of our GPU-rendered layers. A reusable camera-aware light pool supports player and unit illumination, torches, campfires, pickups and dynamic short-lived lights like attack flashes.

Challenges we ran into Sheep got plans & a world to share

One of the biggest challenges turned out to be (insert surprise Pikachu face) unit steering. If the companions on your journey are not controlled by friends but by the computer and they are not just eye candy, chances are you will get angry at them very quickly if they aren't acting the way you expect them to. That involves units running away when they should be standing still, standing still when they should be moving or not respecting collision boxes as you hoped they would. When you see a situation on screen, you always know what you'd like a unit to be doing, but getting it to actually do that in a battle situation that changes from second to second by design has been a real challenge. In the end, we combined different techniques, some really simple and some quite advanced so Myndrot's animals feel alive and only occasionally stupid! The second biggest challenge for us (one could argue it was equally or even more challenging) was to creating a synchronous multiplayer system using Devvit's infrastructure. In his main project, Bubbits, Flow is used to Colyseus and a high server tick rate for handling online multiplayer. With only serverless functions and Redis available, we had to rethink how a synchronous multiplayer system that involves a synchronized World Boss, other players and their flocks of units could be implemented. Devvit Coop Tech Diagram

The idea: Sell the illusion.

Some things are not negotiable, like a well-replicated boss that needs to be in the same position for all players with actions that match and influence every player's screen. But apart from that, be smart, simplify, and even cheat if necessary. To keep data flow manageable, we only sync the eight strongest units of each flock, use a very low-Hz tick rate and rely on a lot of interpolation to display other players as ghost units.

A shared boss without a server. How?

Have one of the players "host" and process the boss steering, then replicate it to other players! If that player dies or leaves, switch the boss host on the fly to another participant to seamlessly continue the fight.

Accomplishments that we're proud of Touch grass

We're proud of keeping human creativity alive and being able to reach parts of our roadmap that, in the beginning, we did not think were remotely possible. Submitting a hackathon entry made completely from scratch that pairs stellar pixel art with state-of-the-art rendering techniques feels like a big accomplishment to us.

What we learned Humans after all

Flow learned a lot about new Devvit and Phaser tech, while Nemo learned how working with technical project requirements differs from pure artistry, but the real gain was between the lines of code and the pixels drawn. Nemo and Flow are almost 20 years and 5,000 miles apart - one a creative dreamer, the other a pragmatic thinker. An unlikely duo. A few weeks of passionate feature pitches that broke half the game and heated arguments later, both of us learned a lot. Nemo learned a little more about the sometimes harsh reality of game development and Flow learned a little more about how dreaming is not a fool's errand, but an integral part of creating something special.

What's next for Myndrot The start of a journey

Even though we managed to put quite a lot of content on the table during this hackathon, our plans included more. More of everything. More areas, more quirky animals to meet and befriend and more bosses to conquer (and then befriend too! We love Captain White Tusk!). To us, it feels like Myndrot is not at the finish line, but has just left the starting blocks.