The Grove

Inspiration

Most retention games boil down to the same loop: tap something, watch a number go up, come back tomorrow because a timer said so. We wanted a hook that felt earned instead of manufactured a game where the "come back tomorrow" pull comes from genuine uncertainty, not just a cooldown clock. The idea we landed on: a single garden the whole subreddit tends together, where the thing that changes it overnight isn't just other players' clicks it's real weather, pulled live from an actual city. Nobody controls the weather. That unpredictability is the hook.

We also wanted to avoid the trap the brief calls out directly: "on the nose" Reddit theming. So The Grove isn't about Reddit, karma, or Snoo it's Reddit-y because it uses Reddit's actual primitives (a single shared post, user flair, comments) to run real game logic, not as decoration.

What it does

The Grove is one shared, persistent garden living inside a single Reddit post. Every visitor sees the same garden and can nudge it forward no separate instances, no solo play. Taps accumulate into a shared growth total, and the garden visibly advances through growth stages as the community acts together. The vision beyond the current build (see "What's next") layers in a live weather feed that shapes each day's growth differently, streak-based Reddit flair for regular tenders, and a community vote run entirely through Reddit comments and upvotes where players propose new plant types and the winning idea gets permanently added to the garden.

How we built it

Built on Devvit Web, Reddit's own developer platform, using Phaser 3 for the garden's visual rendering and Redis (via @devvit/web/server) for shared state one growth counter per post, read and incremented through a small server route. The rendering layer maps the stored growth value to one of several visual stages, so the garden's appearance is always a direct, honest reflection of what the community has actually done, not a client-side illusion.

Challenges we ran into

[One or two lines e.g. did devvit playtest give you a confusing error at any point? Any permission/config setting that wasn't obvious from the docs?]

Accomplishments that we're proud of

Getting a genuinely shared, single-source-of-truth game state working inside a Reddit post where every viewer is looking at and affecting the same object in real time rather than falling back to the much easier per-user-only pattern most casual games use.

What we learned

[One line on something about Devvit, Phaser, or Redis that surprised you or that you'd tell another builder before they start.]

What's next for The Grove

• A live weather feed (via a free public API) driving daily growth/decay, so the garden's condition each morning reflects real-world weather in a chosen city rather than only community taps.
• Daily action budgets and streak tracking, tied to real Reddit user flair so regular tenders are visibly recognized in the subreddit itself.
• A weekly community vote, run through Reddit comments and upvotes, where the top-proposed plant mutation gets permanently unlocked in the garden.
• A mobile polish pass and Phaser particle effects (rain, bloom, drought) tied to the weather condition of the day.

Built With

• devvit
• devvit-web
• html5
• phaser.js
• realtime
• redis
• typescript