superM0D

Inspiration

I always liked the Animator vs. Animation idea, a drawn thing breaking loose and turning on whoever made it. When Reddit announced this jam with Phaser, the twist wrote itself. What if the thing hunting you wasn't animation software, it was a moderator, and the canvas wasn't a drawing app, it was Reddit itself.

SuperMOD is a bored Discord moderator who claws his way onto Reddit's front page to hunt the cursor of whoever's trying to farm karma illegitimately.

What it does

The game rebuilds the actual subreddit it's posted in, matched to whether you run Reddit in light or dark. The posts, the comments, the images, they're the real ones from that community. superM0D spawns behind a basement door and starts hunting your cursor across your own feed. Every post he touches takes damage that never repairs for the rest of the run, and it stays wrecked even if you leave and come back.

You're not just running. You're farming. Stand on a fresh post and a quick target sequence pops up that you have to trace your cursor through, on a timer, while he closes in. Farm one he's mid swing on and it pays double.

Survive long enough and instead of a normal death, a gold elevator rises out of the floor. Management calls him upstairs, a faster replacement mod tags in, and then the first one comes back as a Revenant. Now two of them hunt you.

And under all of it there's a secret. A little figure walks past carrying a sign. Follow it and you start spelling a name, one letter at a time, hidden across the worst corners of Reddit. Spell the whole thing, farm enough, survive the two of them at once, and you summon the admin. He drags both mods to hell and hunts you himself, by teleport, until he gets you. Because he always gets you. The only win is lasting one minute against him for a thank you and a tip of the hat.

How I built it

Devvit Web and Phaser 3. Everything on screen is Phaser. The fake Reddit page is built out of game objects so the mod can physically wreck it, and the damage is drawn live with Phaser Graphics, no pre baked damage art. The chase runs on a small state machine with one rule I never broke: a catch only ever happens inside a telegraphed wind up. Every other attack pressures you but can't kill you. No cheap deaths.

The arena comes from Reddit's first party server API, not a mockup. The letter hunt and the score board persist per player through Redis, so the secret survives across runs and the death screen can name real people from that community.

Challenges I ran into

The scary part was getting anything to run inside Devvit's actual sandbox. It doesn't run npm install, so the server has to ship as one bundled file. I hit a recursion bug where my own dev script was calling the playtest command from inside the thing the playtest command was already running. And late in the jam I found out the client caches assets by path, so every update looked like it did nothing until I stamped a content hash on every file. That one cost me a night.

Accomplishments that I'm proud of

The Reddit fidelity. The game opens on something that actually looks like Reddit, in your theme, not a cartoon of it, and by the end of a good run the sub looks like a warzone and stays that way. And the ending. Most games give you a win. This one tells you straight that you can't win, and somehow that made people want it more.

What I learned

The scoring changed after real playtesting. It started as how long did you survive, which is passive, you just run and wait. Watching someone actually play it, including my 16 year old, made it clear the loop needed a reason to move toward danger, not just away from it. Karma farming, and turning it into an aim challenge instead of a hold still timer, came straight out of that.

What's next for NECKBEARD

The letter hunt was designed to pull people back day after day. The next step is a proper community layer on top of it, so a whole subreddit can chase the same secret together and see who reaches the admin first.

Built With

• devvit-web
• esbuild
• hono
• html5
• javascript
• node.js
• phaser-3
• reddit