Trapmakers takes the create-and-share spirit of Mario Maker and mashes it up with the developer's childhood favourite, Dangerous Dave, around one question: what if a Reddit post was not a screenshot of a game, but the game itself? Built by Rahul Shaw (u/bite_za_dust) for Reddit's Games with a Hook hackathon in nine days, it runs on Phaser 3, Hono, and Redis, natively inside Reddit.
Build a Trap, Prove It's Fair, Publish It
Every level in Trapmakers starts the same way: you design a deadly platformer stage, then you have to beat it yourself before you can publish it. No unbeatable garbage gets through. Once it passes that test, it becomes a real Reddit post, and every post in the subreddit is playable. Not a screenshot, not a link out. Tap it and you are playing, right there in the feed.
The economy runs on failure. Every time a stranger dies in your trap, you get paid in coins, which you spend to build something nastier. The more efficient the trap at generating deaths, the better it performs.
Death Heatmaps and the Community Loop
- Death heatmaps — if you built a level, you can see exactly where everyone died in it
- Clear times and worst deaths — brag about your best runs or share the ghost block nobody saw coming
- Level recommendations — surface the genuinely evil ones for others to try
- Instant restart on death — no lives, no punishment, just go again
Controls are simple: arrow keys or A/D to move, Space to jump, with on-screen buttons for mobile in landscape. The community guideline is straightforward too: be brutal in the levels, decent in the comments. A level should be beatable by design, not just difficult for the sake of it.
Built in Nine Days with Phaser, Hono and Redis
Rahul had never worked with Reddit's API before and was not fully comfortable with TypeScript going in. What made the difference, in his own words, was writing a proper Game Design Document and sticking to it, which kept scope creep under control across the nine-day build. The hardest trap published so far lets only 5% of players survive.
Trapmakers was built for Reddit's Games with a Hook hackathon, the same event that produced five Phaser prize winners, including Cattack!, this year's Best Use of Phaser award recipient.
Play Trapmakers on Reddit
Build a level, beat it, publish it, and start collecting coins.