Redacted

Main menu
Game screen

Inspiration

Ever played those addictive New York Times daily puzzles? Well, I drew inspiration from them and designed this game called Voggle (https://voggle.com) that was basically math-meets-word-games, and I thought "Hey, what if I made this more word-nerdy and less number-crunchy?" That's how Redacted was born.

What it does

Redacted lets you hunt for hidden words by connecting letters on a grid.

How I built it

I built the UI using Devvit's blocks-based components and stored the game states in its redis service. I also recycled some assets from my Voggle repository.

Challenges I ran into

Devvit's custom posts come in two flavors: blocks-based and WebView-based. I went with blocks because it's Reddit's native UI framework and WebView was still labeled "experimental". Sure enough, I got blocked many times as I wrestled with undocumented surprises! I almost threw in the towel and switched to WebView, but stubbornness prevailed.

Another big hurdle was the lack of local debugging tools. The development cycle felt like sending a letter by snail mail. Sure, there's an online Playground, but it supports none of the backend services.

Accomplishments that I'm proud of

I managed to hack around the blocks-based limitations like a boss. No custom fonts? No fancy SVG features? No problem! Where there's a will, there's a workaround.