Review Detective

Review Detective is an immersive gaming experience where players must guess which game is being described based on reviews. There's a daily challenge mode along with an infinite mode!

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Inspiration

The inspiration for Review Detective came from the passion and love for both gaming, coding, and puzzle games. It's really fascinating to see how people can identify games from just a few words or phrases in reviews. Also, the viral success of wordle like games shows that simple games can create massive engagement.

What it does

Review Detective is a thrilling guessing game that tests players gaming knowledge by challenging them to identify games from authentic player reviews. The game features multiple modes:

  1. Single player mode: Players get a review and 3 game choices, and within a 30 second timer they need to guess the correct game. this mode has unlimited tries.
  2. Daily Challenge mode: A special daily puzzle with progressive clues, with up to 6 attempts per day, where the review is the same for all player for that day. These reviews are hand-picked and created manually via an Admin dashboard challenge creator.

There are additional features in the game like a leaderboard system, global rankings across different categories like top scores, best streaks, accuracy rates, etc... Also, there's a personal profile view with unique achievements, stats, and game history tracking.

How we built it

I built Review Detective using Reddit's Devvit platform, which allowed me to create a native Reddit post experience. This is the stack:

  • React
  • Tailwind CSS
  • Framer Motion
  • Tabler Icons
  • Express.js
  • Redis
  • Reddit API

Challenges we ran into

The biggest challenge was handling the massive dataset of games and reviews. I had those in a Supabase DB, I had to implement a chunked data migration, efficient Redis indexing for fast game/review retrieval, and also a prefetch caching system in the singleplayer mode.

The second challenge was Devvit's learning curve. This is the first time I used the platform and API's, and it looks like it's also a relatively new platform, that also has 2 types of integrations: Devvit Web and Devvit Blocks. I had to learn the authentication flow, working with API limitations and debugging issues with the serverless enviroment.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

Im proud of:

  1. The UI interface, it's seamless and nice looking.
  2. Using Redis - this is my first time using Redis and it was cool to learn.
  3. Participating in a hackathon - this is my first time participating in one and it was a great experience.

What we learned

  1. Using the Devvit platform
  2. That devpost is a great source to find hackathons
  3. Using Redis

What's next for Review Detective

  1. Realtime multiplayer mode for players to compete against each other.
  2. Review Curation - currently Admin challenge creator is pretty basic, can make it more robust.
  3. Custom Challanges - Let users create challenges.
  4. Cross platform - expand beyond Reddit
  5. Data expansion - Due to using Redis I currently have 1k games and 3k games, while in Supabase I have 85k games and 10k reviews, I want to have more data in Redis.
  6. Involve AI in the process - maybe a workflow to curate and create challenges automatically.

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