Story Arcade

Daily emotional story-game inside a Reddit post. Tell your story, see the community mood, build streaks.

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Inspiration

Reddit is the world's largest diary — millions confess, vent, and celebrate daily. The hook? Turn those emotions into a game you come back to every day.

What it does

Story Arcade is a daily emotional story-game embedded in a Reddit post. Users complete 5 sections fed by real Reddit content. Every interaction reveals community results instantly, creating a feedback loop that drives daily returns.

Retention Mechanics (Best Retention Mechanics sub-prize)

Four interlocking retention layers: daily rotation (fresh content from Reddit API every midnight), streak tracking (3/7/30-day badges with milestone toasts), weekly personality profiles (23 unique labels computed from 7 days of play), and dynamic post titles (each day's post shows "Yesterday was 72% fired up energy..."). Users can share formatted receipts to comments, turning every session into discoverable content in Reddit's feed.

User Contributions (Best User Contributions sub-prize)

UGC drives the content flywheel: Live Confessions Feed (submit text → appears instantly → others engage), Hall of Fame (top 10 contributors with medals), Community Pixel Canvas (one pixel per user per day, collaborative artwork), and Prompt Submissions (users submit future content that feeds tomorrow's pipeline). Every contribution creates more content.

How we built it

React 19 + Tailwind CSS 4 for the client, Hono + TypeScript for the server, Redis for state — all on Reddit's Devvit Web. Content sourced from r/Showerthoughts, r/AskReddit, r/confession, r/unpopularopinion with rate-limit backoff. 18 API endpoints with per-user replay protection, 15 React components, 13 unit tests.

Challenges we ran into

Reddit API rate limiting during content bank fetches — solved with sequential subreddit calls, exponential backoff, and curated fallback pools. Devvit's 30s endpoint timeout meant weekly recap (43 sequential Redis calls) needed parallelization. GitHub push protection flagged API keys in early commits — scrubbed with clean repo rebuild.

Accomplishments we're proud of

The live confessions feed creates a genuine UGC flywheel. Dynamic post titles make every day unique. 9 replay locks across all endpoints. 23 personality labels from "The Hype Architect" to "The Gremlin." Full autonomous loop engineering — 3 sessions, 0 human input.

What's next

Production deployment, developer funds eligibility, expanded content sources (r/TrueOffMyChest, r/AmItheAsshole), and shareable image receipt cards for viral distribution. The retention engine that powers Story Arcade can drive any daily game on Reddit.

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