Reigncraft

Claim, Tame and Reign. Play as a girl, animal or a god, explore biomes, battle wildlife, tame pets, gather resources, cook, build and survive. Study fallen creatures to unlock new species and recipes.

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Inspiration

I really wanted to see how far I can push Devitt and how ambitious I can go. Reigncraft is a game I have always wanted to build. The idea came from the games I grew up on like Minecraft, Terraria, Zelda, RuneScape, Skyrim and dark souls. I love open world games and love RPGs. I love the randomness of it all. Where things are unpredictable and build your story and nothing is scripted. It's more fun that way. I wanted to build a game where things feels like its alive. Where the mobs aren't all the same. Each will have it own behaviors and hidden motivations. Like for instance, wolves that stalk their prey and wait patiently till more of their packs arrives before attacking. The hook here is exploration and wonder. Sharing game secrets in this rich diverse world with unique mechanics I coded out love for the RPG, survival and open world genre of games. Enjoy!

What it does

So basically, Reigncraft is a massive procedurally generated single player/multiplayer survival game on Reddit but there's a lot to it. At a basic sense you can choose to play as the "Girl" or play as an animal, you explore the world and learn it's secrets by studying the animals, the vegetations, the diseases and the ores are in the world. As you learn more about the world you will gain more knowledge on how each item works and also unlock recipes. Additionally, the more you learn about an item better you can use it. It game about accumulating game knowledge really. In the survival aspect too you will need to with hunger, temperature and even DISEASES. There a lot of different wildlife in the game too with each animal having their temperaments and age. Also animals behave differently by species as well. In this game you can also craft, build and claim land. You can harvest food and cook at campfires. Later in the game you can also brew tea and later in the game you can even build a forge. You can fight with stamina-aware controls, study corpses of animal to later transform to them. There's also day/night cycle that spawns different things. There's so much to do and talk about. Just try it.

How I built it

The client is React 19 and Tailwind, with the world rendered in PixiJS 8. Backend sits on Devvit Web (Node, Hono, tRPC) with Redis for multiplayer rooms and session state. Gameplay is split into declarative registries (biomes, wildlife, diseases, buffs, tools) so balance lives in data instead of buried if chains. Docs under gameplay/mechanics/ track what players actually feel, separate from engine wiring notes.

Challenges I ran into

A lot. Devvit is new platform so there a bunch of hickup here and there. Like my build stopped working for the https://www.reddit.com/r/reigncraft_dev/ for whatever reason. So had to transfer everything to the live subreddit. Another issues is that because I can only use reedits and I'm not used to it. I'm having trouble with persistence in the game and items can sometime disappear. Which was annoying I fixed it for the most part. Also because of the scale of the game I had to really devote a lot of time for optimizations. I had to build really sophisticated tooling to help me debug frame rate issues and bad code so my game can run at a relatively smooth 60 fps. Though lag can still happen. I think spend like 2 days just optimizing the game so its playable. Also another headache was the layers... That code was so finicky. It's just hard problem. Like how do you know if a grass tile should be in front or behind the player? And have that work consistently every time? There's still bugs with that I left it. I don' have enough time to deal with that. And all of those problems started because I wanted to add elevation to the game. It looks so good but dam there was so many problems like layer overlap and the game thinking you're in elevations 1 instead of 12.

Accomplishments that I'm proud of

I shipped a real survival loop on Devvit. 50+ wildlife species with temperaments, 16 diseases tied to what you eat, 96 buffs and debuffs, 13 biomes, and playable animals you unlock by Studying the world. Desktop and mobile both move, sprint, jump, and fight. The soft-release build is already on a playtest sub for people to break.

What I learned

Making a game is fried chicken hard and time consuming. Designing game mechanics, lore, sounds design, sprites, movement, and can just keep going on and on. And doing it 15 day is just crazy. It's literally all I did for 15 days straight had barely any sleep and zero social life while working on this.

What's next for Reigncraft

Well I wanted to add weather. Also, I never got to finish the quest system I wanted to build. There was just no time for that. I also wanted to add cities and NPCs and bosses... Is it Scope creep or ambition? Well I'll let you guys decide that.

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