Tower of Power

What is This?

It’s chaos; it’s silly. Build, ruin, get confused, and enjoy. And beware of the chests - not all of them contain good stuff.

Tower of Power is a daily 3D physics stacking game where everyone gets the same set of objects each day and competes to build the tallest, most creative tower in 5 minutes. Stack, open chests, strategise, and reach the moon (literally). Compare scores on the leaderboard, screenshot your masterpiece, and tell your pals about it in the comments.

The inspiration landed the moment I saw the challenge - my immediate thought was to do a small, sweet tribute to that brief Katamari Damacy-quirks period of the PS2 era. The perfect opportunity to indulge and combine my love for all things funky and a bit of coding. So that's what you got, a lil' colorful escapism for the queue at the dentist's.

How I built it

Started with basic frontend sketchwork in VS Code - React, Three.js, cannon-es - just to get a sense of what's feasible and nail down the core stacking loop. Then came the big part: redoing and adapting it all for Devvit's Custom Post / WebView system, working around its Content Security Policy restrictions (no Web Workers allowed, so the physics engine runs on the main thread), wiring up Redis for leaderboards and daily streaks, and making the whole thing feel good on mobile. Lots of Cursor action throughout.

Challenges I ran into

The main challenge was working with unfamiliar frameworks and loosely familiar languages - my daily routine sees me operating mainly with Python and some very limited frontend, so this is where vibe-coding indeed helped. Beyond that, Devvit's CSP blocking Web Workers meant the standard physics libraries just wouldn't run, so we had to build a custom main-thread physics wrapper around cannon-es. Getting the collision shapes to match the visual geometry was its own rabbit hole.

Accomplishments that I'm proud of

Just the sheer fact it resembles what I had in mind when I decided to participate. A working 3D physics game running inside a Reddit post, with daily seeded challenges so every player gets the same puzzle, per-post and global leaderboards, streak tracking, a creativity scoring system, and a retro PS2-flavored aesthetic - all inside an iframe. It works, it's fun, and it looks like what was in my head.

What I learned

Physics are fun and frustrating to build and control. Also: browser security policies will humble you fast, responsive design on a 3D game is a different beast than responsive web, and sometimes the simplest-sounding feature (like making a screenshot save button work inside a sandboxed iframe) is the one that fights you the hardest.

What's next for Tower of Power

Air defence block to fend off the plane and super freeze bonuses. Hopefully - more shapes, more shape morphing features, more diverse and interesting daily challenges, more cosmic weather phenomena challenging the tower building process (wind gusts, meteor showers, gravity shifts), and maybe a bit more variety in the soundtrack too. I'd love building to be a shared chaos. Plus polish passes on the creativity scoring, a proper daily recap showing the community's best towers, and whatever else the community asks for.

Built With

• cannon-es
• devvit-reddit-api
• devvit-redis
• html
• react
• react-three-fiber
• reddit-devvit
• tailwind-css
• three.js
• typescript
• vite
• web-audio-api