Stacky Stacker

A daily tower-stacking game for Reddit: everyone plays the same tower each day, races the day's top redditor, shares their run to the comments, and adds to a subreddit-wide community tower and goal.

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🧱 What it is

Stacky Stacker is a daily block-stacking game that lives inside a Reddit post. Every day the whole community gets the same tower (a deterministic daily seed), so everyone is playing the exact same challenge and scores are directly comparable. You play your own run, and it's a real skill game. A block swings back and forth, you tap to drop it, and the part that overlaps the block below stays while the overhang trims off (so a sloppy drop leaves you a narrower block next time). A near-perfect landing keeps full width and builds a combo. Miss the stack entirely and the block tumbles off, run over. Land all 10 to clear the day's tower.

🤝 The Reddit layer

Around that daily run, Stacky Stacker is built to be social and competitive on Reddit: Same tower for everyone creates real competition. A daily leaderboard of top scores, plus day-streaks and streak/podium user flair. Race the day's top redditor. During your run a live target line marks the height their tower reached, and results gives the verdict: "🏆 You beat u/name by 120!" Share your tower to the comments. One tap posts your finished run to the daily thread as a colored-emoji-block tower, turning the comment section into a gallery of the day's attempts. A shared community tower + goal. Each player's run drops one block onto a subreddit-wide tower for the day, so it grows as more people play, and the results screen tells you whose block yours landed on ("🏗️ You stacked on u/so-and-so's block!"). Every run also feeds a collective daily block goal shown on the post. Recurring by design. A scheduler drops a fresh post into the feed every day.

🎮 Game feel

Stacky Stacker is heavily "juiced". It includes combo multipliers, landing squash, shattering trim, a failed block that tumbles off the tower and explodes on the platform, an animated score count-up, performance-scaled fireworks, and a letter-by-letter "TOWER COMPLETE" finale. Endings adapt to the run. A 2/10 gets an encouraging "KEEP GOING!", and a perfect 10 gets a full fireworks show.

🛠️ How we built it

Phaser 4 for the game, running in a Devvit Web expanded webview, with a lightweight inline splash webview that shows the live community tower and goal right in the feed. Hono server plus Redis for the daily challenge, leaderboard (sorted sets), streaks, the community tower (one block per user per day), and the collective goal counter. 100% procedural, with zero external art or audio assets. Every block and platform texture, the canvas-gradient buttons, particles, fireworks, and all sound effects (a small WebAudio synthesizer) are generated at runtime. The only external dependency is a Google font. Hand-rolled physics: the swing, overlap and trim math, and a custom tumble-and-explode simulation for missed blocks. The same swing and trim code drives the in-app tutorial, so it's a faithful mini-game.

🧗 Challenges we ran into

Making the tutorial demo match real gameplay exactly (it runs off the same sine swing and trim math as the real game, not a separate animation). Rendering a vertical tower in a Reddit comment (Reddit markdown collapses single newlines, so we solved it with hard line breaks and emoji blocks). Keeping the experience playable when the backend hiccups (offline fallbacks so the game never soft-locks, and every route degrades gracefully instead of returning a 500).

🏆 Accomplishments we're proud of

A polished, fully-juiced daily skill game with no asset dependencies, wrapped in a genuinely Reddit-native competition and community layer. Same-tower leaderboard, a rival to chase, comment-thread sharing, and a shared community tower that grows as the subreddit plays.

🔮 What's next

Potentially explore comment-as-a-move (replying places the next block on the community tower, making the thread the game board), subreddit-vs-subreddit weekly team goals, and community-voted daily modifiers.

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