Path of Baa: Flocklands
Inspiration
Creating a sheep game has been on my to-do list for quite some time. I grew up in the countryside surrounded by nature and, you guessed it, sheep! With Path of Baa: Flocklands I wanted to capture some of that picture, and reflect real-world events in it, making it both reasonable and educational as well as relaxing and giving.
What it does
Path of Baa: Flocklands is a cooperative sheep survival game that runs directly in the Reddit feed. Players guide their flock through a shared, persistent world - exploring regions, discovering paths, restoring biomes, cleaning up oil, building community structures together, and trading in regional shops. Every player shapes the same world, and progress made by one flock benefits everyone. It's cozy, social, a little educational with a touch of survival tensity - Baa!!!
How we built it
- Phaser 4 for lightweight, fast 2D rendering - small enough to load inline in the Reddit feed without an extra click.
- Devvit, Reddit's developer platform, with an Express backend and Redis-backed world state.
- Server-authoritative design: the client predicts, the server owns the truth. Heartbeats, polling, push events, and Devvit schedulers (cron-like ticks for weather and world events) keep the shared world alive without heavyweight real-time infrastructure.
- Vue 3 UI overlays bridged to Phaser via a typed event bus.
Challenges we ran into
- Making a world feel shared and alive without millisecond-level multiplayer sync - finding the sweet spot between server authority and simplicity.
- Squeezing a full persistent multiplayer game into Reddit's immersive mode with a separate onboarding scene in feed, while keeping load times short and performance smooth.
- Onboarding: taking players by the hand so they immediately understand what Flocklands is and why they haven't played anything like it before. (which still needs some finishing touches)
Accomplishments that we're proud of
- A living, shared world running entirely inside the Reddit feed.
- Being part of Reddit's Foundry program, which pushed the game toward genuine social play.
- A fantastic community that has shaped the game's development tremendously since the earliest builds.
- Art we genuinely love, made through a smooth remote collaboration.
What we learned
- Build the core game loop locally first; integrate the platform early to eliminate risk and gather feedback fast.
- "Real-time" is a spectrum - a slower shared-world model with server-side truth delivers the feeling at a fraction of the complexity.
- The Reddit audience is incredibly fun to build with: players become part of the development process early on.
Built With
- devvit
- express.js
- phaser.js
- tailwind
- vue
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