Podium Header
Lettered Game

What is Podium?

Podium is a daily game platform that hosts a variety of original daily games. Each game can be played once per day and resets daily at midnight EST. Podium introduces a concept called Seasons which allows users to compete against each other on the leaderboard, but the season resets every 90 days. But you'll still have all time personal stats and streaks.

Users can also choose to create their own custom games and share them with the community with UGC. Each custom post contains its own leaderboard and stats, allowing friends and other subreddits to compete against each other.

This is the Preseason where the game is checked for stability. The current games for this season are:

Top X – Guess the top X items in a given category
- Top X is a game where users are given a prompt like "Top 3 countries by consumers of Snickers" and they have to input the top 3 countries. They are given a list of suggestions to choose from.
Lettered — Complete the phrase in pieces
- Lettered is a game where users are given a grid of empty letters and spaces and they must complete the phrase by dragging and dropping tetris-style letter pieces onto the grid. All boards and pieces are randomly generated so any phrase can be input and made into a puzzle.

New seasons will introduce new games and new features. And each season the leaderboard resets so users have a chance to reclaim their place on the leaderboard.

Inspiration

I love making original games and I obsess over making delightful user experiences. I have a bit of experience making daily games for web and when I saw Reddit release Devvit Web, I had to give it a try.

Tech Stack

This uses React, Tailwind, Supabase, and Devvit Web. Devvit Web was perfect because it's exactly like working with regular web dev stack but with auth and user management built in.

Challenges

The Lettered game uses a custom drag and drop implementation with native handlers. Existing libraries did not have the grid and piece cutout support I needed. It was a nightmare to get it working and performant on mobile. The game generation algorithm was also hard to get everything right and make it balanced with unique piece generation.

What's Next?

With the introduction of Seasons, I'd love to add more games and try out new game mechanics. I think it'll add an interesting way to keep the the game fresh and engaging. More games that can include user generated content would be a great addition.

I'd also love to add more in depth stats and analytics. We could get really creative with how to display the data.