WordCityDE

Inspiration

Word game + city builder = <3

What it does

In bidaily rounds you can play words out of a number of letters you get, Scrabble style. These words transform into buildings, that you place in your city. Over time your city grows and you need to manage different aspects of your residents' life, like housing space or greenery.

Every post lists fun stats from users, updated live. For example you might see your own avatar being displayed with a long word you played today after finishing the round.

Reaching milestones provides you with special user flairs to showcase the progress of your city. You can also create a share post that allows others to visit your city.

How we built it

I developed the game in GameMaker. When the Devvit app mounts the webview, it shows an HTML5 canvas that was exported from GameMaker. All the backend features have been built with the Devvit framework in TypeScript using Redis, channels etc.

I used AI to categorize (almost) all English words into the ingame categories like public services or environment. So when you type in "CLUB", it will automatically give you an entertainment building for your city.

The actual game only contains the finished word lists, so no live calls to an AI model are necessary. A lot of care went into the word lists, they are also sorted by length and word popularity, which is utilized by the hints the game offers you. The word list curation was mostly done in a separate Python project.

Challenges we ran into

Lots of technical stuff, which is expected when using a young feature like webviews. Particularly getting the game to run smoothly on mobile was quite a challenge, with the Android and iOS Reddit apps having various quirks.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

Getting everything in such a polished state.

What we learned

The 90% rule in software development also applies to Reddit games ;). Just a lot of work getting the game to run smoothly on different devices and with the reddit integration.

History

I submitted the original WordCity for the first Devvit Hackathon last year. That version was a prototype and took about a week of work. Since then I spent months working on a really polished version and also created a standalone German offshoot - WordCityDE. Todays r/WordCityDE and r/WordCity have little in common with the original prototype, everything from graphics, gameplay, concept and Reddit integration has been reworked completely or newly added. Submitting the separate app WordCityDE hopefully fulfills the "No resubmissions" rule in both technicality and spirit.

What's next for WordCityDE

Hopefully lots of players will discover the game!

Built With

• devvit
• gamemaker
• gml
• typescript