Ocean Drive Racing - Game

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  Daily leaderboards, podium flair, and a weekly promotion/relegation league - 3199 Players on day one!

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  Your hub: today's race, your car, and your next rival — all inside Reddit.

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  Pure-timing racing — nail the launch, shift on the sweet spot, hit the nitro.

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  Every run is scored — beat the rival for stars, cash, and parts.

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  Collect and tune cars; upgrade five parts on every machine.

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  Rivals throw down trash talk before every showdown

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  A 15-race career across three tiers — all the way to final boss Saint.

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  A fresh reward every day — the reason to keep coming back.

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  Open crates for parts and rare cars.

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Inspiration

I've always been a little obsessed with racing games: Need for Speed, and especially CSR Racing. Something about the loop of tuning a car, chasing a perfect run, and climbing a ladder kept me coming back for years. When I found this hackathon, I noticed the Reddit games space was full of clever ideas, but I wasn't seeing many real racing games. That felt like a blue ocean: take the hook that kept me playing for years, and bring it somewhere it didn't exist yet... right inside a Reddit post.

Demo: link

What it does

Ocean Drive Racing is a racing game you play without leaving Reddit. Tap the post and you're on the line: hold to rev into the perfect launch window, nail each gear shift on the sweet spot to build a combo, and burn nitro to take the finish. Under the hood it's a real skill game as your launch, your shifts, and your timing decide the run.

Around that core is the reason to come back tomorrow:

• A fresh daily race with a rotating track and modifier
• A season-long league with real promotion and relegation, from Rookie to Elite
• A community leaderboard the whole subreddit competes on, with podium flair for the top finishers
• A garage and career - cars to chase, parts to upgrade, and rivals to beat

It runs fully responsive on both phone and desktop, so it feels native wherever a Redditor opens it.

How we built it

The entire game is built with Phaser, running inside Reddit through Devvit. The race is a real-time simulation with gauges, parallax, particles, and engine audio that tracks your RPM so you can hear the redline coming.

On the backend, I leaned on Devvit's tools to make it genuinely social: leaderboards and league standings, automatic daily race posts, and persistent player progression. Races are validated server-side by replaying the exact input sequence through the same deterministic physics, so the simulation is reproducible:

$$f(\text{inputs}) \rightarrow t_{\text{finish}} \quad \text{(same inputs always yield the same result)}$$

That determinism is what keeps the leaderboard honest.

A lot of the work also went into a cohesive art direction - dozens of cars, characters, and tracks that all had to feel like they belonged to the same neon world. I built a custom pipeline so every asset came out consistent in style instead of a patchwork.

Challenges we ran into

The hardest part by far was making the game truly responsive on both mobile and desktop. A racing HUD is dense (gauges, gear, timer, nitro, buttons) and getting all of it to hold together across a tall phone screen and a wide desktop layout meant wrestling with alignment, overflowing text, and a feed that crops differently than a full screen. I ended up designing around fixed portrait and landscape layouts with a camera that fits each cleanly, so nothing breaks no matter where it's viewed.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

I started this from scratch for the hackathon, so the thing I'm proudest of came on the very first day: people actually played, and then came back. There were kind comments, real names climbing the leaderboard, and even a few players grinding for experience and reputation points. Seeing strangers care enough to chase a high score on something I'd just shipped told me the hook was real - and that's the whole point of this hackathon!

What we learned

Two big things. First, that Devvit makes the hard parts approachable: the backend tools let a single game feel like a living, social experience without standing up infrastructure of my own. Second, that responsive design is a craft in itself; making one game feel hand-made on both a phone and a desktop taught me more about layout discipline than any project before it.

What's next for Ocean Drive Racing - Game

More cars and tracks, deeper league seasons, and more reasons for a subreddit to show up together every day. The dream is for Ocean Drive to become a daily ritual on Reddit and a place for our community to keep coming back, one race at a time.

Built With

• css
• devvit
• hono
• html5
• javascript
• node.js
• phaser.js
• reddit
• redis
• typescript
• vite
• web-audio