Typeers

Inspiration

We wanted a typing game that feels like it belongs on Reddit — where the community doesn't just play, but shapes the experience. The idea: what if the words you type came from the subreddits, posts, and comments you already love? Typeers blends fast-paced arcade gameplay with Reddit's endless user-generated content.

What It Does

Typeers is a retro-styled typing game that lives natively inside Reddit as a Devvit app. Words appear one at a time, and players race against a draining clock to type them correctly.

Core Mechanics

20-second clock that drains at 1.4x real time — constant pressure
Complete a word → gain time back (+2s base, +100ms per letter, +300ms combo bonus)
Wrong keystroke → lose 1 second, break your combo, lose 10 points, screen shakes
Scoring → 50 base + 15/letter + speed bonus (up to ~100 for sub-3s completions) + combo multiplier (up to 8x)
25-second cap — you can never bank too far ahead
Tracks accuracy, WPM, max combo, and total score

Game Modes

Daily Challenge — 10 words seeded by date, same for everyone, daily leaderboard reset
Category Levels — 5 themed packs: Reddit, Tech, Animals, Gaming, Space (10 random words each)
Community Words — Pulled from the subreddit's top posts, filtered and cached daily
User-Generated Levels — Create 3–15 word challenges via in-app editor, or instantly turn any post/comment into a level via context menu. Browse, play, rate (1–5 stars), and remix in the gallery
Weekly Tournaments — Auto-created every Monday, pinned by the bot, final results posted as a comment. Compete for the weekly crown
Golden Challenges — Premium community challenges with hidden rewards. Creators craft a custom message, attach secret rewards to specific words, and the community plays to discover them. Three tiers with escalating features. Mod-approved, once-per-user, with a personal reward vault

Golden Challenges — Community Reward Events

Golden Challenges are a way for community members, moderators, and creators to run interactive reward events inside their subreddit. Think of them as treasure hunts built into the typing game.

A creator writes a custom message — it could be a riddle, a community announcement, a fun fact, a trivia question, or anything they want the community to engage with. The message gets split into words that players type. Hidden among those words are rewards: secret codes, giveaway entries, exclusive messages, or coupon codes. Players discover rewards as they type, and each reward goes into their personal vault.

Every challenge is mod-approved before going live, enforced to one play per user, and rewards shuffle positions each play so no one can cheat by sharing positions.

Three tiers make each challenge unique:

	✨ Golden	💎 Diamond	🔥 Legendary
Message Length	Up to 15 words	Up to 25 words	Up to 30 words
Hidden Rewards	Up to 3	Up to 6	Up to 10
Community Reach	100 players	500 players	2,000 players
Duration	7 days	30 days	90 days
Creator Link	✗	✓	✓
Reward Links	✗	✗	✓
Mystery Mode	✗	✗	✓ (hides reward count)

Golden tier is perfect for quick community giveaways — a mod drops a 7-day challenge with 3 hidden discount codes. Diamond scales up for bigger events — longer messages, more rewards, a full month of engagement, and a link back to the creator's profile or project. Legendary is the full experience — up to 30 words, 10 rewards, 2,000 players, reward-specific links, and Mystery Mode where players see "??? rewards" instead of the count, driving curiosity and sharing.

Creators get a real-time analytics dashboard showing plays, completion rates, and reward claims. The weighted shuffle algorithm places ~70% of rewards in the latter half of the message, so players engage with the full content before finding treasures.

How We Built It

Client

Phaser 3 — single scene (FastTyperGame) handles word display, circular timer ring, HUD, countdown animations, particle bursts, and golden reward explosions. Lazy-loaded for fast initial splash
React 19 + TypeScript + Tailwind — all UI outside the canvas: menus, gallery, level creator, challenge creator, tournament dashboard, vault, results. Retro pixel aesthetic with "Press Start 2P" font
Mobile — hidden input field keeps virtual keyboard active; focus triggered during user gesture for reliable keyboard popup

Server

Hono + tRPC — type-safe API with Zod validation on every input. Score bounds enforced server-side (max 999,999 pts, 300 WPM, 100 combo)
Redis (Devvit built-in) — sorted sets for daily/weekly leaderboards with TTL, hashes for user stats, JSON blobs for UGC levels, gallery rankings, challenge data, claim tracking, token balances, and creator leaderboards
SuperJSON for serialization through the tRPC transformer layer

Reddit Integration

5 context menu actions: Create Typeers Post (mod), Create Level from Comment, Create Level from Post, Start Weekly Tournament (mod), Manage Golden Challenges (mod)
onAppInstall trigger — auto-creates first game post and tournament post
Weekly cron (Monday 00:00 UTC) — creates new tournament post, pins it, unstickies previous week, posts final results as a comment
Score sharing — post results as formatted Reddit comments from the results screen
Payments — Reddit Gold for challenge tokens with idempotent fulfillment/refund via order ID tracking

Audio

All sounds are procedurally generated via Web Audio API — zero audio files. Typing cycles through 5 key-click variations (bandpass-filtered noise at 1600–2200 Hz). Wrong keys get a harsh sawtooth buzz. Word completion triggers a multi-tone success sound. Golden rewards play an ascending C5→E5→G5→C6 chime. Everything degrades gracefully if audio is unavailable.

Challenges We Ran Into

Content filtering — extracting quality words from Reddit content meant stripping markdown, URLs, special chars, filtering stop words, and enforcing 2–14 char alphabetic constraints while keeping interesting vocabulary
Game balance — the drain rate, time rewards, penalties, and combo multipliers all interact tightly. Small tweaks shift the feel from impossible to too easy
Leaderboard management — daily boards with 7-day TTL, tournament boards with 14-day TTL, auto-creation via cron, and posting final results to previous week's thread
Challenge fairness — reward shuffling per play, once-per-user enforcement, claim limits, and mod approval all had to work together without race conditions
Procedural audio — learning noise buffers, bandpass filters, oscillator layering, and decay envelopes to get satisfying retro sounds from pure code
Mobile keyboards — getting virtual keyboards to reliably appear inside a Phaser canvas embedded in a Devvit webview required focus timing during user gestures and careful readOnly toggling

Accomplishments We're Proud Of

A complete, polished typing game with multiple modes running entirely on Devvit — no external servers or databases
A self-sustaining UGC ecosystem: create, rate, remix, and compete on creator leaderboards. Levels auto-feature at 10+ plays and 4+ avg rating
Smooth 60fps with pixel particle effects, screen shake, combo animations, and a color-shifting timer ring (green → orange → red)
One-click level creation from any post or comment via context menu
End-to-end type safety from React through tRPC to server with Zod validation
A tiered community challenge system with purchases, mod approval, reward shuffling, analytics dashboards, and a personal vault
Every sound generated in real-time from code — zero audio assets
Weekly tournaments that fully automate themselves — post creation, pinning, result posting, and rotation

What We Learned

Phaser + Devvit — lazy loading the engine, managing create/destroy cycles between React screens and the game canvas, handling mobile virtual keyboards through hidden inputs
Redis patterns — sorted sets with TTL resets, atomic hash increments, JSON blobs for complex data, careful key naming across daily/weekly/UGC/golden/creator namespaces
Content filtering — building a robust extraction pipeline for Reddit's diverse content while preserving fun community vocabulary
Game balance — every number (drain rate, time rewards, combo multipliers) went through multiple playtesting rounds
Bundle optimization — code-splitting Phaser from the splash screen keeps initial load instant while the engine loads in background
Payment flows — idempotent fulfillment, refund handling, and token balance management with Redis required careful atomic operations