Putt Together

Project name: Putt Together

One endless mini-golf course, built hole by hole by the community.

Inspiration

The best Reddit games aren't games you play — they're games you add to. r/place wasn't fun because pixels are fun; it was fun because your pixel sat next to a million strangers' pixels. We wanted that feeling in a game with real mechanics: what if a mini-golf course never ended, because every player who beat it could extend it?

What it does

Putt Together is an endless community mini-golf course living inside a Reddit post.

Play the chain of holes other redditors designed. Every hole shows the course record and a ghost replay — the record holder's actual shots racing beside your ball as a translucent named ball.
Build the next hole in a tile editor: walls, sand traps, water hazards.
The gate: you cannot publish a hole until you ace it yourself — one stroke, no exceptions. So every hole on the course is provably beatable, and the course stays fun forever with zero moderation.
The economy: publishing pays more than playing, and creators earn royalties every time someone chases the record on their hole. Daily energy (10 scored runs) and streaks bring players back every day.
The comment section plays too: new holes and broken records are announced as live comments on the post, and a daily scheduled comment spotlights the most contested hole.

How we built it

Phaser 4 + TypeScript + Vite client inside a Devvit Web webview: three scenes (World map, Play, Build), all graphics drawn procedurally — zero image assets, all sound synthesized with WebAudio.
Hono server on Devvit Web with Redis for holes, records, ghost data, and per-player state; scheduler for the daily community comment; Reddit API for record-break announcements.
One deterministic physics engine, shared by client and server (src/shared/physics.ts). The client uses it to animate; the server re-runs every submitted run through the same simulation. The client never reports a score — only shot vectors. If the math doesn't sink the ball, the score doesn't exist. Cheating is physically impossible.
Ghost replays cost almost nothing to store: because physics is deterministic, a full replay is just the list of shot vectors, re-simulated on demand.
The nine starter holes were generated by a brute-force solver that fires thousands of angle/power combinations through the real engine until it finds a genuine one-stroke solution — the seed holes obey the same ace-to-publish law as the players. (Two of our first nine designs had no possible ace. The solver rejected them. The gate works.)

Challenges we ran into

Making the ace gate unfakeable. Client-side checks are worthless, so the publish request carries the creator's ace as shot vectors and the server re-simulates them against the exact layout. Deterministic fixed-timestep physics (with substepping so fast balls never tunnel through walls) made client and server agree to the pixel.
Fun under scarcity. Hard daily limits could lock a curious visitor out. Our compromise: out of energy you can still play everything — you just stop scoring. Scarcity keeps the leaderboard honest without ever blocking anyone.
Editor abuse. Impossible holes, buried cups, sealed tees — all rejected by layout validation plus the ace requirement. The community can't grief itself.

Accomplishments we're proud of

A complete self-sustaining loop — play, build, ace, publish, race ghosts, break records, earn royalties — inside a single Reddit post, where the content that keeps it alive tomorrow is made by the players of today.

What we learned

The hook isn't a mechanic, it's ownership. Play-testing made it obvious: finishing a hole is fine, but seeing a stranger fail to beat the record on your hole is the thing people come back for.

What's next

Weekly hole-building tournaments voted by comment upvotes, themed tile packs (ice, boosters, teleporters), hole-of-the-day pinned comments, and a world map that renders the course as one continuous scrolling landscape.