One Tower

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  splash screen

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  tower

Inspiration

I kept thinking about how most Reddit games are single-player things with a leaderboard bolted on the side. Everyone's alone, together. I wanted the opposite: one object the whole subreddit touches at the same time. A shared tower was the easy part. What took me a while was the blocks. Plain stone felt hollow. Then it clicked that the blocks should be the community's own words, and suddenly pulling one wasn't a move, it was taking something a stranger wrote and yanking it out of a wall everyone built.

What it does

The whole subreddit shares one tower, and every block is something a redditor wrote. Pull a block and its words tear loose and drift up off the tower, and you get to read whose words you just took. Most blocks are safe. The tower shows you which ones are load-bearing, so you're reading it, not gambling. Push your luck and it comes down, and when it does, every word scatters across the screen at once.

It's built to be played together, for real. There's a shared goal, the Ascent, that the whole coven chips away at across every pull. You can brace a row instead of pulling it, so some people play reckless and some people play safe, and the tower needs both. Each night there's a Keystone, one gold block nobody's supposed to touch, because touching it almost always ends things. Topple the tower and your own words become its epitaph, kept forever in the Hall. Then a new tower goes up from a new night's words. And every time the coven ascends, it unlocks another piece of the tower's story, so the lore is something you earn as a group.

How we built it

It's a Devvit Web app. Phaser 4.2 on the client, a little Hono server, and Redis holding the shared state: the one tower, the words carved into it, the Hall, the Ascent progress, the all-time record. The 3D is the part I'm weirdly proud of, because there's no 3D engine under it. It's just math, an oblique projection with yaw and pitch, back-face culling, and painter's-order sorting, drawn to a single Phaser Graphics object and redrawn every frame. That's what lets you orbit it, zoom it, and drag it around with the mouse. Realtime sends every pull to everyone's screen, so a busy tower actually feels busy. The sound is all synthesized in code too, the whispers, the heartbeat that speeds up as the tower gets shaky, the roar when it falls.

Challenges we ran into

The worst problem was that pulling didn't feel like a decision. My first version used one global collapse chance, so a block the game told you was "safe" still fell maybe one time in five. It felt random and cheap. I threw that out and rebuilt it around actual structure: how thin the row is, how much weight is sitting above the block, whether the neighbors are already gone. Then I put that reading right on the tower, so what you see is what you get. The other fight was with the idea itself. For a long stretch this was just 3D Jenga, and it was fine, and fine is forgettable. Making the tower out of the community's words, and making every pull rip those words out, is the thing that finally gave it a point.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

Honestly, the 3D. A tower you can spin and zoom, running smooth inside a Reddit post, with nothing but projection math holding it up. I wasn't sure that would even work. And the first time I saw a block fly off with a stranger's words trailing behind it, then watched a whole tower come down in a storm of voices, that was the moment it stopped being a Jenga clone and became its own thing.

What we learned

Piling on features doesn't make a game deeper. Meaning does. It was the exact same tower with the exact same blocks, and it went from forgettable to memorable the second the blocks meant something. I also learned that "everyone shares it" and "everyone cooperates" are not the same sentence. A tower the whole sub can touch is just a crowded object until you give people something to reach for together and a way to help each other get there.

What's next for One Tower

Building the blocks out of the subreddit's real comments, so the words are actually things people said. Roles, like a Mason who braces harder or a Scribe whose words carry more weight. A dawn deadline you have to beat as a group. And coven versus coven, two subreddits racing the same tower with the map as the scoreboard.

Built With

• devvit
• hono
• phaser.js
• redis
• typescript
• web-audio