Word shooter

Inspiration

Reddit feeds move fast with comments, posts, and replies scroll by in seconds. I wanted to turn that constant stream of text into something playful, ideally a game that challenges you to read and react before content disappears, right inside the platform where that scrolling happens every day. FeedBlaster was born from the idea of gamifying the reflexes every Reddit user already has.

What it does

FeedBlaster drops players into a live, scrolling feed of words and challenges them to type each one before it scrolls out of view. It's simple to pick up, fast-paced, and built to live natively inside a Reddit post — no external app or download required.

How I built it

The game built (FeedBlaster) on Reddit's Devvit platform, using @devvit/web to bridge a custom game client with Reddit's post and server infrastructure. The stack includes:

• React + TypeScript for the game UI and logic
• Vite for building and bundling the client
• Tailwind CSS for styling
• Hono running on @hono/node-server for lightweight server-side endpoints (like handling post creation and app install triggers)
• Devvit's post/menu/trigger system to let moderators create a new FeedBlaster post directly from the subreddit menu

The app defines two entrypoints a lightweight inline splash.html and the full game.html experience so the game loads fast and expands into full gameplay when a player engages.

Challenges we ran into

Getting from "code that builds locally" to "an app actually running on Reddit" turned out to be its own project. We hit a string of environment issues along the way:

• Setting up a Reddit developer account through the CLI's account-linking flow
• Realizing devvit playtest deploys live to a real subreddit rather than running purely on localhost
• Debugging a confusing state where devvit init reported the app as "already initialized" with no devvit.yaml present — it turned out the newer Devvit architecture uses devvit.json instead, and the copied app name in it wasn't registered to our account
• Working through app-slug collisions during devvit upload, since app names must be globally unique across Reddit's Devvit platform
• Diagnosing a blank white screen on the first successful deploy, tracing it back to the client build output

Each of these took some digging through CLI output and Devvit's config format, but they gave us a much clearer picture of how Devvit apps are structured under the hood.

What we learned

We came away with a solid understanding of Devvit's app lifecycle, the difference between init (local scaffolding), upload (registering and deploying to Reddit's servers), and playtest (live-reloading development against a real subreddit) and how the platform's newer @devvit/web architecture organizes client and server code around a single devvit.json config.

What's next for FeedBlaster

• Difficulty scaling and combo scoring
• Leaderboards per subreddit
• Themed word feeds tied to trending subreddit topics

Built With

• devvit
• posts
• tailwind
• typescript
• vite