Scary Adventures

Inspiration

I’ve always loved adventure games and short, immersive stories — the kind that draw you in with just a few words and leave you wondering what happens next. Reddit felt like the perfect home for that. It’s already a space for reading, sharing, and discovering new ideas, so I wanted to build something that fits naturally within that experience.

That’s how Scary Adventures began — a collection of bite-sized, AI-crafted adventures where every choice shapes the outcome.

What it does

Scary Adventures is an AI-powered interactive storytelling experience built entirely on Reddit’s Devvit platform. Each playthrough generates a unique, branching narrative — complete with AI-created imagery and decisions that lead to different endings.

Players simply start a post, make their choices, and watch the story unfold in real time. Every session is new, unpredictable, and designed to be completed in just a few minutes.

How we built it

The project was built using:

• Devvit for Reddit integration and hosting
• Next.js + Phaser for the story rendering and interactivity
• Gemini & xAI APIs for dynamic story and image generation
• Redis for lightweight analytics and player tracking

A key part of the process was using Kiro, the AI Editor, which acted as a co-creator throughout the build. Kiro understood how to structure for Devvit, helped build both the story engine and the player interface, and allowed me to work faster and more iteratively.

Even though I started just ten days before the deadline, Kiro made it possible to build, test, and polish the experience in time.

Challenges we ran into

• Image generation inconsistencies — sometimes the visuals didn’t match the scene or tone, requiring multiple refinements and manual curation.
• Devvit platform learning curve — since it’s still evolving, I had to explore how menus, analytics, and user events worked from the ground up.
• Balancing speed and coherence — generating short stories that still felt consistent and emotionally engaging required careful prompt design and testing.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

• Built a fully functional, AI-generated interactive story experience that runs inside Reddit.
• Created a reusable story engine that produces branching adventures in structured JSON.
• Integrated analytics through Devvit and Redis to track user interactions.
• Combined text, imagery, and choice-making into a seamless in-feed experience.
• Learned to collaborate with Kiro as both a coding and design assistant to accelerate creative development.

What we learned

I learned how powerful Reddit’s Devvit ecosystem can be — how to add custom menus, gather analytics, and deliver immersive experiences that fit naturally within Reddit posts.

I also learned a lot about collaborating with AI tools — how to treat Kiro as an active creative partner that helps design, structure, and refine ideas while staying true to the vision.

What’s next for Scary Adventures

The next step is expanding the Story Engine into a creation platform. Players will soon be able to:

• Write, edit, and publish their own AI-assisted stories directly on Reddit
• Curate and remix AI-generated adventures
• Feature top stories through a community leaderboard and recommendations

Ultimately, the goal is to make Scary Adventures a living anthology of community-generated interactive tales — powered by imagination, AI, and the spirit of exploration.

Built With

• devvit
• gemini
• nextjs
• react
• typescript
• xai