Inspiration
As a mobile apps developer, I had built a small game during COVID. Back then, since I'm an app developer and not a game UX developer, it looked like an app, not a game, and so I didn't launch it anywhere. But whenever I played it with friends at parties, it was always a game any of us could participate in without any learning curve, and everyone had fun solving (yes, it was more a "puzzle" than a "game"). With AI UX tools, I realized that the UX I could develop now was good enough to give a feel of "a game" rather than "an app", which is an important distinction in the mobile world. Additionally I started seeing such mini-games on Reddit so I started reading up on it and found there's a developer's fund program. Recently while my mini-games were like a back-burner project, I found out about this hackathon and instantly got to searching the docs for how to make it.
What it does
The gamemaster thinks up a word. And the player has to guess what the word is. If the player's guess is after the gamemaster's word in the dictionary, it will just tell so. If the player's guess is before the gamemaster's word in the dictionary, it will tell so. Eventually the player will narrow down their hunt for the word and arrive at it. The lower the number of guesses, the better it is.
How we built it
Figma Make had been used to chalk out the UX for this for mobile (initially was looking at this as a mobile game). Code exported from it to react. Devvit allowed me to make the app in react so I started with that. I downloaded all the documentation linked from the reddit template app so that any AI agents I used can refer to those to identify the UX guidelines and specific features that can be enabled for various requirements, e.g. redis, scheduling, etc. Then it was just a process of iteration like how you build any product/software these days. Having a live link to test the game on the fly was very useful and made the iterations super quick.
Challenges we ran into
While creating the app on devvit, I realized later that GameMaker could've been used with extra hackathon incentives for using it. The template project that I checked out simply wouldn't open in GameMaker Studio for me. Who would want to be stuck at such a silly problem so I decided not to port the code to GameMaker but to use react which it was already exported to from Figma Make. Kept it simple.
Accomplishments that we're proud of
This is my first game that I'm proud of giving the look and feel of a game! I'm looking forward to incorporating a small company so as to be able to earn from this and 1-2 more small puzzles I have ideas for, if possible within the developer funds program timelines (Stripe expects a company to pay out to).
What we learned
I'm surprised at how easy devvit platform is! I haven't yet released the game out to public, so I'm not sure how easy production bugs are to fix, but developing mini-games on reddit can be fun and quick is what I learnt.
What's next for Word Radar
Being launched, hopefully adding to multiple subreddits, finalizing 1-2 other simple puzzles like this, and creating a collection of them along with Word Radar
