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A game inside a Reddit post

A game inside a Reddit post

What if you did not have to leave the feed to play? We put Gull Chorus, our seagull flock game, inside a Reddit post: one post is one beach, with a leaderboard under it.

Reddit lets developers build apps that live inside posts. Most are small web toys. We wanted to know whether a whole Godot game could sit there, load fast enough that nobody scrolls past, and use what a post already has: a community, a comment thread, a new one every day.

How a post becomes a game

In the feed the post is a light page with no game engine in it: the colours of today's beach, the top five on the board, and Play. Press it and the post opens full screen and starts the real game.

Every day at nine in the morning Sydney time the app posts the next beach. The leaderboard belongs to the post: most stars first, then fewest gulls. You can play without an account. Log in and you get a place on the board and a save that follows you between devices. "Comment my best" posts your score to the thread, once, and only when you tap it.

What got in the way

  • Reddit's pages forbid inline scripts, so the game needed its own loading page and a single-threaded build.
  • The game may talk only to its own small server, and each request is capped in size and time. The whole flock's recorded steering has to fit in one save.
  • The engine files ship compressed and the page unpacks them as they arrive. On the live site Reddit already unpacks them for you, which we found out when the game tried to unpack them twice.
  • Every change goes through review again, a day or two each time.

Where it is

It plays on Reddit in our test community, saves and all. The first load takes about twelve seconds, about two and a half after that. The version for everyone is in Reddit's review as we write this. When it passes, r/GullChorus opens with a beach a day.

Twelve seconds is too long for a feed. That is the next thing to fix.

Play Gull Chorus in the browser

Pictures

The post as it sits in the feed: the beach of the day, the board and a Play button. Rendered from the app's own page, not a screenshot of Reddit.
The post as it sits in the feed: the beach of the day, the board and a Play button. Rendered from the app's own page, not a screenshot of Reddit.
The game itself, here from the browser build: gull forty-two at Tokarevsky Lighthouse.
The game itself, here from the browser build: gull forty-two at Tokarevsky Lighthouse.
Six beaches, three in Sydney and three in Vladivostok. On Reddit each one is a post.
Six beaches, three in Sydney and three in Vladivostok. On Reddit each one is a post.

Talk about this one

Questions, ideas, “you should try this instead”: the thread for this experiment is open to anyone.

Open the thread

The forum runs on GitHub Discussions. Reading is open to all; posting needs a free GitHub account.

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