For the 2024 Reddit Games and Puzzles Hackathon, I submitted 575, a daily word game where you compose a haiku using the words of the day.
How to Play 575
Each day, a new set of words is posted. Players can add any words from this bank to their poem. Your poem is limited, however, to three lines with 5, 7, and 7 syllables in the traditional haiku format. The challenge is to pen something beautiful or witty within these constraints.
After you’ve finalized your poem, you can give it a title and post it as a comment in the thread. Other Redditors can view and upvote your creation.
Try 575 out for yourself on the r/575game subreddit.
Or watch the video trailer:
Inspirations
The unique design challenges of a Reddit game are that it needs to be social, short and sweet, but replayable.
One of my inspirations were magnetic poetry tiles you combine to create unique messages. Using these, you can express yourself and be creative by simply selecting and arranging individual words on your fridge.
I settled on the 5-7-5 format of Japanese haikus to provide additional constraints, which makes it a more game-like experience. It also puts a ceiling on the playtime required.
The idea of having the word bank that changes daily came from popular word games like Wordle and Spelling Bee which give players a reason to keep coming back.
Implementing on Devvit
Until this hackathon, I didn’t realize the rich support for interactive posts that Reddit’s Developer Platform (playfully called Devvit) provides.
The Devvit boilerplate gets you up and running with a basic app, and supports block posts and a newer webview option. I opted for the latter.
There were a few technical issues I ran into that were unique to developing for Reddit.
First is that the space you have to work with is limited. Not only can the viewport be small, as in the case of mobile, but you have to account for the additional “chrome” of Reddit’s own interface. Not easy to squeeze 100 words in the remaining space.
For now, interactions on Devvit are limited to clicks — more advanced gestures like dragging aren’t well-supported. Fortunately, the click-only approach turned out to mesh with 575 just fine.
In webview, I found no way to detect whether the user was in light and dark mode. This meant a single set of styles had to look decent in both. Something for the API to support down the line.
Future Plans
575 could be improved by refining the pool of words the daily word bank draws from to strike a balance in terms of fun and usable words.
The word bank could run with themes, for example holiday words this time of year, or silly or provocative or timely themes for other occasions.
Lastly, there’s potential to add 575 to an established subreddit like r/Poetry as a weekly challenge.
Hackathon Results
Back to the hackathon, I’m pleased to say 575 was recognized with the UGC Award for best use of user-generated content (i.e. Reddit posts or comments) in a game.
The hackathon attracted nearly 2000 entrants, with many, many impressive entries. My favorites were Emoji Charades, Pixel Together, and Laddergram.