Six Blind Sumo

Six Blind Sumo game board

Inspiration

Thinking up new and exciting game ideas is such a challenge, especially finding the right balance one you do. I discovered this hackathon a bit late (started 1/31) and knew that I needed a simple concept. So I drew inspiration from two classic games, tic tac toe and battleship. The sumo concept was completely random - it fit well as a theme and was more interesting than X's and O's

What it does

Six Blind Sumo is a two player game where each player has their own grid, six sumos, and five hearts. You can't see each other's grids, but your choices affect each other's sumos. The goal of the game is either reduce your opponents hearts to zero by knocking off sumos, or by getting all six of your sumo onto the grid. Choosing a space that your opponent has a sumo on knocks off their sumo, removes a heart and you continue your turn.

How we built it

I used Google's Antigravity IDE and AI agents (both Gemini and Claude) to develop a large part of the codebase. I used Gemini Nano Banana Pro to create the Sumo mascot.

Challenges we ran into

The amount of complexity that goes into building the multiplayer components, the daily play logic, etc is wild. I'm sure I haven't thought of everything and that bugs will inevitably be found.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

Just actually deploying a game is my accomplishment. I've been interested in game dev for a bit now and this feels like a good step in the right direction

What we learned

I didn't know there was a whole development ecosystem within Reddit so it was cool to learn about the tools, use Reddit APIs to incorporate Snoo's and see what other's have made.

I learned Redis. I'd never used Redis before and never thought I would, but seeing as it's recommended in Reddit apps I had to try it. It works pretty seamlessly.

I learned that using AI significantly reduces the number of items in the above challenges section.