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Today’s Build shows your quests, vote timer, and vote power, so you can pick what to do next: play or modify the realm.
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The Library map shows discovered and missing chunks, giving players a clear view of community progress.
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Today’s Build Library tracks shared assets, live queues, and what the community still needs to create.
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Terrain Poll shows the chunk layout and height debug so each tile choice fits into the playable map.
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Tile voting lets players choose the terrain for a specific square, with Grass H0 currently leading the poll.
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Decoration Poll preview shows the loaded placement choices before the community decides what goes into the chunk.
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Decoration Poll lets players search pieces and vote on which decorations should be placed next.
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Play Realm mixes farming, resources, rocks, and corruption patches into one explorable shared map.
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The player explores the river dock area, collecting materials and moving through the community-built realm.
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Play Realm shows the shared world in action, with the player exploring the voted map from inside the Reddit post.
Inspiration
Realm Builders started with a simple idea: what if a Reddit post was not just where people talked about a game, but where they actually shaped the game?
I wanted to build something that felt native to Reddit instead of a normal web game squeezed into an iframe. Communities already vote, debate, remix ideas, and rally around weird little traditions. Realm Builders turns that behavior into the core loop: the community helps vote a shared world into existence, then players jump in and explore it as a top-down RPG.
What it does
Realm Builders is a Reddit-built fantasy RPG. Players can open the custom post, enter the expanded game view, choose a save slot, and explore the current realm.
Inside the game, players can move around, break objects, collect drops, farm crops, complete requests, fight enemies, and work toward boss progression. The shared twist is that the realm is influenced by community voting and build choices, while each player still keeps their own save, inventory, progress, and discoveries.
So the world belongs to the subreddit, but the adventure still belongs to the player.
How we built it
The frontend is built with Phaser and Vite, with the game running inside Devvit Web on Reddit. The backend runs in Devvit’s serverless Node.js environment using Hono, Redis, and tRPC.
tRPC ended up being a really good fit because the project has a lot of shared game state moving between client and server: saves, world chunks, community voting, leaderboard data, authoring tools, and progression. Keeping those contracts typed made the project much easier to grow without guessing what shape the data should be.
Redis stores the shared realm, player saves, vote/build state, progression, leaderboard records, and champion history. The client handles the game feel and rendering, but the server owns the important state so one player cannot overwrite another player’s progress.
Challenges we ran into
The biggest challenge was balancing “community world” with “personal adventure.” If everything is shared, players can ruin each other’s progress. If everything is personal, it stops feeling like Reddit. A lot of the architecture came from keeping those two layers separate: the community can shape the realm, but each player owns their own save.
Another challenge was performance. This is a full game running inside Reddit, so loading had to stay reasonable, especially from the inline splash into the expanded game. We had to be careful about which assets load early and which ones wait until the full game view.
Mobile controls were also a real design problem. A game like this feels natural on keyboard, but it still needed to work on touch without covering the screen or making combat awkward. Hence, why it forces landscape for gameplay to give enough real estate for the UI.
Accomplishments that we're proud of
I’m proud that Realm Builders feels like an actual game, not just a tech demo. You can move, explore, collect, farm, save progress, and interact with a world that has a real community layer behind it.
The Reddit-native part is the thing I’m most proud of. The app is not just using Reddit as a launch page. The post, the community voting, the shared realm, and the personal saves all work together as part of the design.
I’m also proud of the amount of structure behind the scenes: typed client/server APIs, server-owned saves, Redis-backed world state, and a codebase that can keep growing after the hackathon as I add more features!
What we learned
We learned a lot about building for Devvit Web, especially how different it feels from building a normal standalone browser game. You have to think about load time, iframe constraints, serverless state, Reddit identity, and what makes sense inside a post.
We also learned that community-driven game design needs guardrails. Voting is fun, but the game still needs structure so the world stays playable. The best systems let players influence the game without making the whole thing fragile.
The other big lesson was that polish comes from small things: readable controls, fast first load, clear save ownership, good menu flow, and making sure the player always knows what to try next.
What's next for Realm Builders
Next, I want to push the community side further: more build cycles, richer voting, better public world summaries, and more reasons for a subreddit to come back and check what changed.
I also want to expand the RPG layer with a better boss system, more requests, deeper farming, better rewards, and more authored content that can show up in the shared realm.
Long term, the goal is for each subreddit to feel like it has its own living little world: built by the community, explored by individual players, and remembered through leaderboards, and the choices people voted for together.
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