Treasure Quest

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  Main background. Mostly viewable on desktop

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  Logo

Inspiration

The inspiration for this game came from a classic 1982 electronic board game called Lost Treasure. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lost_Treasure_(board_game)

What it does

I remade this as a simple puzzle game that randomly generates a new board daily. With a mix of land and water tiles, it's up to the user to explore the board to find all the treasure before their air runs out. The game ends when the user runs out of air or finds all of the treasure. A final score is then calculated with bonus points for how much air the user has left and if they indeed did find all of the treasure.

How we built it

This was built using the Devvit platform. Also utilized cursor for development and AI assistance to help optimize and document various features. Utilized gen AI for some graphics as well.

Utilized playtest to validate and see how it performs in both desktop and mobile environments. Had to go through a bit of iteration to fully understand how the Devvit platform works with Redis, etc. The logging feature was very useful for debugging in a "live" environment.

Challenges we ran into

Had some early challenges figuring out how the daily game board would be generated. I needed to be able to generate one unique gameboard every day that would then be saved and loaded the same for all players. Then, I had to figure out how the individual player's progress would be saved individually.

Scheduling the game was a bit challenging initially as I had to create a recurring job, but I didn't realize that when I added a menu item to run it, a new CRON job was created every time. Once I figured out how to log my jobs list and status, I was able to view the jobs through the Devvit logging tool, which helped a ton.

I spent a significant amount of time on design and ux, knowing that I wanted something that was simple to pick up and play but created a pleasant enough experience for the user to want to play continually.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

I think I have a fairly elegant solution for how we handle generating a random daily gameboard and how I the separately save users' progress. This will allow us to easily add a leaderboard and other cool features down the road utilizing the power of Redis.

I am proud of how the initial design and UX came out. I had to convey a decent amount of information in a way that was very easy to consume and understand. I feel like I struck a good balance with that so far.

What we learned

The nuances of the Devvit platform and interactive posts in general. There is a certain experience that you have to abide by within the Reddit ecosystem that users are used to interacting with. Also, the Devvit api's are powerful and robust. It took some time reading through the documentation to fully understand what they are capable of.

What's next for Treasure Quest

Plans include a global/daily leaderboard and real-time multiplayer to challenge friends on who can find all the treasure first. Also thinking about adding upgrades that the user can purchase with their found treasure to give them a better advantage throughout the game.

Built With

• cursor
• dali
• javascript
• redis
• typescript