Pirate's Parley

Crack the secret word and escape this cursed island. Scattered across these isles are chests brimming with clues. Tarry too long, and you might be starving for worse. Davy Jones waits for no soul.

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Inspiration

The concept of Pirate's Parley starts with the simple word game Hangman, mixed with a bit of Legend of Zelda and Pirates of the Caribbean. While we love the simplicity of a good word game, we couldn't help but add a bit of narrative, map levels, and a survival mechanic to spice things up.

What it does

Objective: Find the mystery word by digging around the island. Be the top pirate each day by solving the word faster than any other scallywags.
Open treasure chests for a chance to guess a letter in the word.

Moving around the Board Select the cell where you want to move to. Players can move their pirate in a X-Y axis per cell. Find the shortest way to your desired location.


Using Energy Each move costs 1 unit of energy. Removing shrubs costs 1 units of energy. Removing rocks costs 2 units of energy. You can find energy boosts on the map. Running out of energy will end the game.

But don't fret, food and rum can be found scattered along the island

Solving the Puzzle 
If you think you’re ready to solve the puzzle, go ahead. However, wrong guesses will take away 5 energy.

Daily Puzzles Puzzles are started each day at 12am PST and ends at 12pm PST.

How we built it

We started brainstorming on what type of game was feasible given our time, small team and knowledge. On the design side, we investigated dimensions for blocks and webviews and designed for both. We had to work on player movements and flows for winning and losing. To save time, we purchased 8-bit art assets to get us to the finish line.

The decision was made to use vanilla everything on the tech side. As this is a simple game, original tools are still powerful, and devvit provides a number of in-built tools already to solve any necessary use case (for things like db, state mgmt, etc.).

Challenges we ran into

We had high hopes to make the game social and leverage community content, similar to Pixelary. However, we were not able to solve the problem of cheating, and whether to go competitive vs cooperative. We would have liked to playtest more with friends to validate the level tuning and leaderboard progression.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

We made our game work well on both web and mobile. The system we created will allow a variety of daily puzzles using a mix of different map layouts and words (5-10 letters). Creating new puzzles each day would be easy. We were also able to leverage the devkit which made leaderboards very simple to create.

What we learned

Reddit's devkit is pretty cool. Also, learned to start and playtest early and often.

What's next for Pirate's Parley

Polish 8-bit art assets and add animation. Award flair to the top winners and most engaged in a week. Christmas and Winter theme island to celebrate the holidays We would like to work with Reddit to create Pirate avatars and achievements. Add 20 levels and increase complexity to 6 and 7-letter words. Add moving baddies that chase the avatar and also bonus chests that reward you two guesses.

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