About the Project
One Pet. Thousands of Owners.
Pettit is a community-raised virtual pet built for Reddit. Instead of every player owning their own pet, an entire subreddit raises a single shared creature together.
The idea came from a simple question:
What would happen if thousands of people had to raise the same pet?
Most virtual pets are personal experiences. Pettit turns that idea into a social experiment. Communities vote on what Pettit should do next, shaping its personality, memories, mood, and story over time. Every decision becomes part of a shared history unique to that subreddit.
How We Built It
Pettit was built using Reddit's Devvit platform and Phaser. The project uses a Devvit web application architecture with a Phaser front-end running inside Reddit and a server-side backend responsible for game state, voting, memories, and journal generation.
The first playable prototype includes:
- Community voting on active quests
- Persistent subreddit-shared game state
- Personality traits and mood tracking
- Memory generation
- Journal entries that document Pettit's story
- Quest progression and outcome resolution
- Redis-backed persistence
The application is structured around a shared domain model that keeps Pettit's state consistent between the client and server.
Challenges We Faced
The biggest challenge was designing a game that felt meaningful when controlled by an entire community rather than a single player.
Questions we had to solve included:
- How should community decisions be resolved?
- How do we prevent the pet from feeling like a simple poll?
- How do we create a sense of personality and growth?
- How do we keep the story persistent between sessions?
We also had to learn Devvit and Reddit's game platform while building the prototype, which required understanding a completely new development workflow.
What We Learned
Through building Pettit we learned:
- How to develop and deploy applications with Devvit
- How Reddit-hosted game experiences are structured
- How community-driven game design differs from traditional single-player systems
- The importance of persistence, memory, and narrative in creating attachment to virtual characters
The most interesting lesson was discovering that even a simple vote-and-journal loop can quickly make a virtual creature feel alive when its history is shared by an entire community.
What's Next
Future development will focus on:
- Richer personality systems
- More quest variety
- Relationships between subreddit-raised Pettits
- Long-term progression and evolution
- Community events and seasonal stories
Our goal is to create a living creature whose personality is shaped entirely by the communities that raise it.
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