Inspiration
I wanted to bring a fun, interactive Emoji guessing game on Reddit, that we all are very familiar with and have seen it on many known TV shows as well. Me and my friends used to play this game in our chat group everyday during our school time and it was so fun. Emoji has been a core part of Social media, I wanted to bring that to Reddit as well.
What it does
Guess That Word is an interactive emoji based puzzle game playable right inside a Reddit post. Players are presented with a sequence of clues made entirely of emojis and have to guess the hidden word, phrase, or pop culture reference. The game features daily posts to build streaks, a global leaderboard to compete with other Redditors, and a hint system powered by an in game currency called Smileys. The best part is that anyone can create their own custom puzzles and post them to the r/GuessThatWord subreddit for others to solve, complete with easy, medium, and hard difficulty modes.
How we built it
The interactive user interface was crafted using React and Vite, which ensured a smooth and responsive experience for players. For the backend routing and API logic, utilized Hono. I Relied heavily on Redis for state management, keeping track of the global leaderboards, saving custom player generated levels, and managing the economy of Smileys and daily player streaks.
Challenges we ran into
Building a fully interactive game within the Reddit post constraints and the max screen size the game can use and making sure the Game components are completely visible for every screen (Be it Iphone, Android or any Browser). Getting Snoo avatars of the users and showing them on their custom posts, fitting it inside its component and resizing the whole game components based on the screen was some of the most challenging part to be honest.
I had to ensure the game state remained perfectly synchronized for users while keeping the user interface snappy and intuitive. Since its my second game, I was familiar with the certain errors or difficulty I was going to face and also took help from Devvit AI.
Accomplishments that we're proud of
I was incredibly proud of, to be able to get an Emoji Guessing game here on Reddit and able to build an engaging system where players can play as well as make their own game posts by unleashing their Creativity.
Community Post is one of the part of my game where Players can see Puzzle Posts created by Other players and it gets sorted by the max number of plays to the lowest.
What we learned
Learned a lot about developing inline based games that players can play directly from the post and no need to open a whole new screen. Learned a lot about Redis for managing complex game states. Tried my best to make the game rewarding by using hint, letter reveal, daily reward on the Pinned Hub Post.
Considering different types of players, I also introduced a level based Guessing Puzzles,
- Easy mode reveals a word after every wrong guess and gives you a hint after 2 wrong guesses.
- Medium mode lets you use hint with the help of smileys you earned and reveals a letter.
- Hard mode is just straight up guessing the word and it doesnt even show you the placeholders of the letters, so no one knows how many letters there are. It tests the pure puzzle solving ability of the players.
What's next for GuessThatWord
I want to introduce theme based guessing, where Players already know what this word is related to, like a fruit, animal or Hollywood etc. Want to introduce Weekly Puzzles as well and a tournament as well to make the game more enjoyable.
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