Back in June, we announced the hackathon we ran jointly with Reddit: build a game for Reddit's communities with Devvit, make it something people return to daily, and compete for a share of $40,000. Among the categories was a $5,000 Best Use of Phaser award, with a Phaser panel judging alongside Reddit's own. Submissions closed on 15 July. Reddit had 3,071 people registered and received more than 700 games, which it describes as a record entry count for one of its hackathons.
What follows are the five Phaser games that took a prize, and what their makers say about making them. Several had never used Phaser before, and one team had never met in person.
Which Phaser Games Won the Reddit Hackathon?
Fourteen games took a prize: one overall winner, three category awards, and ten honourable mentions. Reddit also handed out Devvit Helper and Feedback awards, which went to people rather than games. Five of the fourteen winning games were built with Phaser. That's the Phaser category, plus four of the ten honourable mentions. Reddit's own announcement has the full list, and every entry is browsable in the Devpost project gallery.
| Game | Award | Developer(s) |
|---|---|---|
| Cattack! | Best Use of Phaser ($5,000) | u/derppherppp |
| Myndrot | Honourable Mention ($1,000) | u/SaintFlow, u/External-Morning-973 |
| Hearthvale | Honourable Mention ($1,000) | u/Romario--_-- |
| Delta-V Racing | Honourable Mention ($1,000) | u/MaxDoor |
| Gradient Descent | Honourable Mention ($1,000) | u/___ayaan___, u/spottylawyer |
Myndrot, Hearthvale and Delta-V Racing were all built on Phaser 4, which had only just arrived when the hackathon opened. If you're starting something now, Phaser 4.2 has since landed.
Cattack!: Winner of the $5,000 Best Use of Phaser Award
u/derppherppp · r/cattack
Cattack! is a card game about collecting cats in space. You explore hand-drawn planet maps, and encounters are settled with short poker-style duels in which your cat companions quietly bend the scoring in your favour. There's a collection to complete and a new pack of cards every day.
Its author tells the rest of the story themselves. They drew every cat card and every planet map by hand, and had never built a tile-based map before, which they call a huge undertaking. The game began as something else entirely, a space runner, and they let it turn into this across the month. Their summary of the experience is that one month to define a concept and bring it fully to life was "an extremely challenging test of my endurance".
What they name as their proudest achievement is the scoring. Cat companions retrigger cards, hands are scored in unusual combinations, and multipliers stack on multipliers, all of which has to agree with itself, and they say balancing it taught them more than anything else on the project.
What they want to add next: live player-versus-player duels, planets that generate themselves so exploring stays fresh, and more ways for players to contribute their own content rather than only consume it.
Myndrot: Two Strangers, One Month
u/SaintFlow (code) and u/External-Morning-973 (art) · r/Myndrot
In Myndrot, every enemy you defeat joins you: cure three dizzy rats, and they follow you; beat a sheep, and the sheep comes too, until you're leading a ragtag army against a boss. Other players share the map, and when a World Boss appears, anyone nearby can join the fight.
Flow writes the code, Nemo draws, and the pair tell their own origin story with some relish. They entered on a whim after the hackathon had already started, when Flow asked whether Nemo fancied teaming up, fully expected a no, and got an instant yes. By their own account, they are twenty years apart in age and five thousand miles apart, an unlikely pairing of a dreamer and a pragmatist.
Their stated ambition was to put pixel art on screen well enough that a player would wonder whether Reddit is really allowed to do this. Grass bends as animals walk through it, roughly 470,000 blades by their own count, and the map can shift into a nighttime version that changes a run's rules.
The problem they name as hardest was making the animals behave. Flow's point is that you always know exactly what you want a follower to be doing, and that a fight changing every second is a demanding place to teach it. What they ended up with, in their own words, is animals that "feel alive and only occasionally stupid".
The lesson they both single out is about each other: Nemo learned how much compromise game development involves, and Flow that the dreaming half of it is part of the work. More areas, animals, and bosses are planned, including befriending the bosses.
Hearthvale: One Village Per Subreddit
u/Romario--_-- · r/hearthvale_dev
Its developer starts from a nice observation: a subreddit already behaves a bit like a village. So Hearthvale gives each community a literal one, a shared map where everybody farms a plot, sells into a common market, and feeds a castle that only grows when the whole village pitches in.
By their own telling, most of the development went on subtraction. The problem they set themselves was making a shared economy make sense to somebody who gives it thirty seconds while scrolling past, and anything in the way went. They cut two finished features, a wandering trader and a voting system for festivals, once playtests showed the pair added complication rather than fun. They rebuilt the tutorial three times. And they turned the village's goal into one big visible castle, they say, because players otherwise couldn't tell what everybody was building towards.
Their own conclusion from all that: "every retention hook worked better shown than explained".
What they're proudest of is that the economy genuinely depends on other people while remaining enjoyable for someone who never notices, and that no two communities' villages look the same. They note that all of it was built from scratch inside the four weeks. Planned next: a shared jobs board where villagers can post requests, seasonal events, and visits between one community's village and another's.
Delta-V Racing: A Graph Paper Game, Rebuilt
u/MaxDoor · r/delta_v_racing
Its developer points straight at the source: Racetrack, the game people played on squared paper long before computers, where you draw a circuit then move around it one mark at a time without carrying too much speed into a corner. Delta-V Racing is that in neon. You take turns rather than steer, you race recordings of other players, and most circuits are made by players.
They say this was their first hackathon and the biggest thing they had built in the language they wrote it in. Asked what they're proudest of, the answer is "just getting it done", and they explain why: there is a run of earlier games that reached ninety per cent and stopped there, and this is the one that got over the line, because the deadline left no room to keep adding things.
They took the brief about hooks seriously. The daily listing shows tracks that aren't playable yet with the dates they unlock; each track carries a leaderboard, and there's an overall table modelled on a Formula One season. The editor closes the loop: once you have built a circuit, has anybody beaten your ghost on it yet?
They found the Reddit side of it the smoothest part of the experience, and say writing the game and its server side by side worked out better than expected. Car and trail customisation are next.
Gradient Descent: Solve the Level by Writing an Equation
u/___ayaan___ and u/spottylawyer · r/gradient_desc_dev
A spaceship on one side of the screen, a target on the other, obstacles in between. You don't fly it. You write the equation whose curve it will follow, then launch and watch what your maths actually does. Clip an obstacle, adjust, try again.
There are thirty levels in the campaign, a new official one every day to keep a streak going, and an editor for building your own and sharing them. Every level has its own leaderboard, ranked on the stars you collected and the time you took, so a level you have already solved still has something left in it. You can also post your solution as a short animation of the path your ship flew, which means two people who finished the same level can compare how they thought about it rather than who was faster.
The idea came out of a shared love of maths, by way of GraphWar, and neither of its authors had used Phaser or Devvit before. They describe taking on both at once as daunting, which did not stop them finishing a complete game inside the four weeks. They are treating the release as a soft one, and say they want community feedback from Reddit before calling it finished. After that: more complex functions, more levels, and user flair on the subreddit.
What the Five Have in Common
- All five shipped something finished. In a four-week contest that is the rare part, and more than one of these developers says the hard deadline is exactly what carried a project over a line they had stalled at before.
- They tested, then recut. Hearthvale dropped two completed features and rebuilt its onboarding three times. Cattack! grew out of a different game altogether. In both cases the changes came from watching people play rather than from guessing, which is why the final versions hold together.
- Thirty seconds is the unit of design. These games are opened mid-scroll, on a phone, by somebody who has read nothing about them. All five address that in some form, from loading fast on mobile to making a shared economy legible at a glance.
- Something new every day. A daily card pack, a daily level, a track that unlocks tomorrow, a village where the weather changed overnight. On Reddit the thing that brings players back is also the thing that puts a game in front of new ones.
- Two teams learned Phaser on the job. Gradient Descent's authors had used neither Phaser nor Devvit before entering, and Cattack!'s had never built a tile-based map. Both finished inside the four weeks, and both convinced the judges.
How to Build a Reddit Game With Phaser and Devvit
If any of those five stories made you want to try this, the barrier is lower than it looks. Nobody here had special access. Everything these teams used is public, free, and linked below.
- Devvit Phaser template on GitHub, the same starting point the entrants used. Clone it and you can have a game running inside a Reddit post in an afternoon.
- Devvit Web documentation for everything Reddit handles on its side, which is more than you would expect.
- Phaser's Discord for engine questions and Reddit's Discord for platform ones. Both are friendly, and both are quick.
And it doesn't stop at the game. Titles that do well can qualify for Reddit Developer Funds, which pays out against engagement milestones, and for the Reddit Featuring Program, which puts a game in front of Reddit's own user base. A game inside a Reddit post isn't a demo hunting for players. The players are already in the room.
Don't Miss the Next One
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Congratulations to every team, and to u/derppherppp for taking the $5,000 Best Use of Phaser award with Cattack!.