Inspiration
WCIBA started as a mashup of things we love: the strange, high-stakes storytelling of Blaseball, the dramatic “save the world through sports” energy of Space Jam, and the unpredictable chaos of Reddit communities.
The premise is simple. Aliens were about to destroy Earth when they accidentally picked up an NBA playoff broadcast. They became obsessed. Instead of wiping us out, they created the Way Cooler Intergalactic Basketball Association and made a deal: as long as humanity treats this league like the center of culture, the planet is safe. It’s now the first season, and the fate of Earth is basically riding on a box score.
What it does
WCIBA is a community-run basketball simulation where Reddit users act as general managers and scouts.
Every Sunday at midnight ET, a Draft Day post goes live. Anyone can comment a name to enter them into the draft pool. By 5pm ET, the most upvoted entries have the highest odds of being selected for a 10-player, two-team roster.
Once teams are set, a full seven-game series plays out over the week. Each day at 6pm ET, a complete game is simulated live through a fast play-by-play feed that runs for about 16 minutes. The system blends traditional basketball stats with a D&D-style twist, giving players both standard attributes and randomized “Chaos Stats.” At the end of the week, standings and career stats are posted, and a new season begins.
How we built it
We first tried building the experience in GameMaker, but quickly hit limitations handling large datasets. We pivoted to Devvit and React, which were much better suited for a text-heavy simulation. Curesed: (https://github.com/jeronartest/wcibasketball).
The simulation itself runs server-side and acts as the source of truth for every possession and stat. The front end was designed in AI Studio, then rebuilt in React and connected to Reddit through Devvit’s APIs. We also carefully wireframed the system to ensure hundreds of plays could render smoothly inside a single Reddit post.
Challenges
The biggest challenge was the tech pivot. After spending several days trying to force GameMaker to handle the scale of the data, we realized it wasn’t viable. With only about a day left, we scrapped most of the work and rebuilt the interface in React from scratch.
On top of that, working with Devvit was tricky since many features were still in beta. Designing a simulation that felt believable as basketball while still leaving room for unpredictable “chaos” also required significant iteration and balancing.
What we’re proud of
The biggest win was making the pivot when it mattered most. Walking away from days of work was difficult, but it ultimately saved the project. Our backend held up through the transition, and we were able to deliver a fully functioning, data-heavy simulation on Reddit in a very short timeframe.
What we learned
We gained deep experience working within the Devvit ecosystem and saw how powerful Reddit can be as a platform for interactive experiences. We also learned a clear lesson about tooling: GameMaker is great for many things, but for data-dense simulations, a web-based stack like React is far more practical.
What’s next
Our goal is to grow WCIBA into a persistent universe.
Planned features include roster cuts and new drafts each season, expansion to a larger league, richer narrative elements like AI-generated commentary and user-submitted player art, long-term career tracking to build rivalries, and eventually adapting the engine to provide live simulations for real-world sports communities on Reddit.
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