Vorb

Wordplay that Vibes!

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Inspiration

The inspiration for Vorb comes from our love of classic word games like Scrabble, Hangman, and Word Search which we enjoyed during childhood. I wanted to recreate that sense of fun, challenge, and nostalgia while modernizing it for the Reddit community. By leveraging the Reddit Devvit platform, we could bring word games directly to users' favorite subreddits and create a collaborative, community-based gaming experience.

What it does

Vorb is a collection of three word-based puzzle games:

  1. Wordle: A game where players guess a hidden word within a set number of attempts using feedback for each guess.
  2. Word Rail: A word-chaining game where each word starts with the last letter of the previous word.
  3. Word Ladder: A challenge to form a chain of words by changing one letter at a time.

Each game offers a unique experience that combines vocabulary skills, creativity, and strategy.

How we built it

We built Vorb using Reddit's Devvit platform. Key steps included:

  1. Designing Game Logic: Using typescript and Devvit Blocks, I created the basic game logic and UI.
  2. Dictionary Validation: I hashed the entire dictionary to Redis to validate whether a word is in English dictionary.
  3. Integrating Leaderboard: Using redis I stored the scores of all players for different games separately.
  4. Fixing errors and debugging: This was a continued process and took most of my time.

Challenges we ran into

Building Vorb wasn't without its challenges:

  • Word Validation: Validating a word is in dictionary or not was the biggest challenge I faced. I wanted to do it in the most optimized way possible. Tried out many ways starting from API calls to implementing a Trie and storing the entire dictionary. Finally used redis and cached the entire dictionary. That too had many problems I couldn't store it at one chunk had to break it into chunks and store it.
  • State updates/ Async await block: Well I faced a lot of errors and bugs while updating states and using async await in different places.
  • Recording the video: Recording the video for submission was a pretty challenging task I faced.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

Just completing building the game and submitting the application makes me happy. Well there were lots of moments were I received satisfaction after debugging and fixing the bugs(after hours of stress of course). Successfully validating English words (without making the game lag too much) was one of the tasks that seemed like an accomplishment to me.

What we learned

I learned building with Devvit. Also this was the first time I used typescript so I gained some knowledge about that as well.

What's next for Vorb

There are somethings I have planned as upcoming features except fixing the bugs that will occur when testing. I am planning of integrating gemini into the game to make new and better features come like I want the word ladder to have a final word to which the user should reach in minimum number of steps.

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