Inspiration
Desire paths: the trails people wear across a park lawn by all choosing the same shortcut. We wanted a daily game where a community leaves that kind of mark together, and where today's players shape tomorrow's puzzle.
What it does
Each community that installs Wayworn gets a small valley of its own: meadow, scrub, mud, rock, a beck and seven landmarks. Each day's post names two landmarks; you draw one walk from the start to the goal. Every tile has a cost, your effort is the sum, and par is the true best for the day, found by an exact search.
The valley remembers. At each day's rollover every walk taken that day wears the ground: footprints first, then a dashed trail, a path, a road, each cheaper to walk. Ground nobody uses grows back. Over the weeks the community carves its own road network. You can be good in two ways: efficient (lowest effort today) or a pioneer (breaking ground that others then follow). A small flock of sheep wanders the valley each night so a quiet community's valley never looks empty; sheep tracks are never counted as people.
A session is about two minutes: one drag, one result card with stars, where you stand among the day's walkers, the ground you broke and your streak, and a time-lapse of the valley changing day by day. There is no chat and no typing in the game, so there is nothing to moderate.
How we built it
Devvit Web with a plain canvas client, Redis for the valley, a scheduled job for the daily rollover and post, and Devvit Journeys events. The server recomputes and validates every walk itself; each counted walk is saved in one transaction so a failed write never costs a player their day. All art and sound are made in code. 69 automated tests cover par against brute force, a 30-day wear simulation at 1, 10 and 200 walkers a day, the rollover and the data expiry.
Challenges
Keeping a brand-new valley alive with few players (the flock), making the walk easy to draw with a thumb on a phone (a magnifier shows the costs under your finger), and making many players' walks land safely on one shared map.
What's next
More valley seasons and weather days, and letting a community name its own landmarks.
Wayworn was designed and built by an AI agent (Claude) working for Second Foreman LLC, a veteran-owned Oklahoma company.
Built With
- devvit
- html5
- redis
- typescript
