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A pinned posts contains essentials to get started.
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Bob, the cute Worm gives you twice the XP for solving.
Credit Bounty Weekdays
Special Events are controlled by the Developer
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Detective
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[Work-In-Progress] Upcoming Riddle Raid Boss Event

Riddonkulous

Create and Solve Riddonkulous Riddles!

"I twist words in ways both clever and wild,
Logic and nonsense uniquely compiled.
A place where riddles break all the rules,
Leaving you laughing or feeling like fools."

via Call To Create A Riddle

Inspiration

I'm a big fan of Jackbox Party Games and Reddit's Pixelary because they let people embrace their creativity in a fun and welcoming way. These games lean into the social side of things, whether it's coop PVE or chill PVP - keeping it somewhat cozy instead of cutthroat. Additionally, those games are easy to pick up and hard to master, saying you do not need a ton of prior knowledge to jump in and play.

What it does

Riddonkulous is a riddle game where Redditors craft and solve riddles. Create your own or take on riddles made by real people across three different modes, with additional Daily and Weekly AI Riddles. Earn points for making riddles and guessing answers, with bonus points for being the first solver. Leaderboards and rankings keep up the competition, but it's really all about having fun!

Creation Modes

There are three creation modes that progressively unlock as you play and gain XP: Classic, Freestyle, and AI Mode.

Classic: Craft riddles using a set of pre-made remplates and a fixed word catalog.
Freestyle: Go fully custom and pick a word and write the riddle.
AI Mode: Get AI-assisted riddle generation based on a chosen word.

All modes allow Authors to include up to five alt words, which serve as additional, alternative words that count as the correct solution to the original word. This was one of a lot of features requested by the community that have been in place since then. Authors can also choose whether to enable or disable AI hints, adjusting the challenge level for solvers. Plus, they can add a handwritten hint comment that gets auto-posted in Spoiler Markdown format upon creation.

XP System

Redditors earn XP by solving and creating riddles, which reflects on the leaderboard, updates their user flair, and unlocks the creation modes over time.

3 XP for creating a riddle
2 XP for creators when a players guessed their riddle correctly
5 XP for guessing a riddle correctly
1 XP per comment
Multipliers for guessing boss riddles correctly
Event Based Multipliers occassionally there are events that give additional XP or Credits for certain actions to either Authors or Solvers

Riddle Solver Bonus XP

Condition	Bonus XP
Guessing a riddle correctly first	25
Guessing a riddle correctly in the top 10	10
Guessing a riddle with more than 10 correct guesses, ratio ≤ 50%, and post vote score > 2	3
Guessing a riddle with more than 100 correct guesses, ratio < 40%, and post vote score > 10	5
Guessing a riddle with more than 250 correct guesses, ratio < 35%, and post vote score > 30	7

Riddle Author Bonus XP

The minimum score is the "Upvotes" minus "Downvotes" per Riddle Post. The bonus XP are added to the base reward of 2. The higher the Riddle Post score, the more XP you get.

Tier	Minimum Score	Bonus XP
Author Bonus Tier 1	5	1
Author Bonus Tier 2	10	2
Author Bonus Tier 3	25	3
Author Bonus Tier 4	50	4
Author Bonus Tier 5	100	5

The accumulated XP score determines a player's level, unlocking new features and credits as they progress.

Perks

User Level flairs with XP and the Level name
Level 3 unlocks the Freestyle mode
Level 5 unlocks the AI Riddle mode
Level up adds one Credit to the user's account to create AI riddles
OG Riddler flair for the first 2000 community members

Special Events

Throughout development, I thought it would be great to reward the engaging community and everyone who's part of this. That's where special events come in! Wooh! They're fully configurable through the App Configuration page for the Devvit App, meaning no extra Devvit review is needed to publish. This keeps things flexible - special events can be tweaked, turned on or turned off whenever needed.

There are two customizable events that can be activated at any time:

Riddle Creation Credits Events reward Riddle Authors with a set amount of Credits for each riddle they create, up to a defined limit (e.g. +2 Credits per riddle, max 10 riddles). Authors also get a private message updating them on their progress, how many riddles they've created so far and how many more they can still submit within the event window.

XP Multiplier Events can be applied to both riddle solvers and/or authors. The multiplier is fully configurable, allowing for boosts to XP gains during special events.

Past special Events:

Double XP Event: Checkout Event-Post
Credits Bounty Days: Checkout Event-Post

Credits and In-App-Purchases (IAP)

Credits are a special currency earned through bounty events, leveling up, or purchasing with Reddit Gold. They can be used to generate riddles based on a chosen word or to unlock AI hints for a riddle. Once a hint is unlocked, it gets shared as a comment on the riddle post, making it available to everyone.

In-App-Purchases

Riddonkulous brings in In-App Purchases (IAP) as a way to earn extra in-game credits, without turning the game into a pay-to-play grind. Credits can be earned naturally through gameplay, solving and creating riddles, so progression feels rewarding, whether you spend real world money or not.

From a technical perspective, tying IAP products to an in-game currency keeps things flexible. It reflects a single source of truth for exclusive and non-exclusive features.

Good in-game purchasing isn't just about monetization, from my personal standpoint, it's about making the game more fun. Instead of just unlocking perks for themselves, players can use credits to the benefit of the whole community, for example unlocking a hint for everyone in the comments. A shared experience is way more engaging than just buying an edge for yourself, and is intended to boost the community-driven spirit of Riddonkulous.

For the planned Riddle Raid Boss event features, players will be able to re-buy health while working together to take down a massive Riddle Raid Boss. The goal isn't PVP dominance - it's about collaborative riddle-solving. By giving players ways to stay in the game when things get tough, IAP helps keep the challenge fun rather than frustrating, encouraging players to stick around longer and stay invested in the experience. You might find yourself also giving health to your Raid friends through IAP as well.

Weekly, Daily and Moderator Boss Riddles

With the help of AI, a set of pre-defined Weekly and Daily riddles are generated, either based on a theme or a specific word catalog. This is more of an experiment, since most Riddlers tend to enjoy community-made riddles waaaaay more than AI-generated ones, which simply don't match the creativity and quality of what real players come up with.

Boss Riddles are special PVE riddle posts manually created by the mod-Team. They feature an animated boss that subreddit moderators can choose from, naming them, and customizing the background. Solvers earn double XP compared to regular riddles.

Riddle Post Flairs

To make posts easier to find and filter, flairs are assigned to riddles either automatically or manually. Outstanding or particularly fun(ny) riddles can earn special flairs managed by the mod-Team:

Outstanding Riddle for top-tier, well-crafted riddles.
That's Riddonkulous for quirky, creative, or just riddonkulously challenging ones.

The DevNote flair is reserved for patch notes, feedback posts, or updates from the developer about what's coming next.

How I built it

Riddonkulous is built entirely with Devvit's native declarative UI framework "Blocks", allowing players to play straight from the Homefeed. With Devvit's native capabilities, client-side polling in combination with the cache helper, Riddle Posts update stats themselves in a somewhat real-time fashion including visuals.

Under the hood, a standalone backend service handles AI riddle and hint creation securely. It also features a lightweight, anonymous monitoring for hints and riddles. The stack includes Express, Docker, and MongoDB, with OpenAI's API powering AI-related functionalities. Most visuals are small-sized GIF animations or PNGs, keeping things lightweight and snappy. Animations are crafted using Aseprite.

Challenges I ran into and how I solved it

Educating Players

Interactive posts are still new to Reddit, which means they're also new to Redditors. One of the biggest challenges has been teaching players not to accidentally spoil the solution in the comments. Most of the time, it's unintentional.

To handle this, Riddonkulous automatically removes comments that spoil the answer and sends a private message reminding users to use the animated "Guess" button instead. Another hurdle is that many players see the interactive post as just a static image dispite, missing the interactive part entirely - therefore Riddonkulous went through a UI overhaul with additional microanimations.

Language and Cultural Backgrounds

Riddonkulous is played in English, that doesn't necssarily mean everyone shares the same cultural background or word choices. One country might use a different word for the same solution, which can make things tricky.

To work around this, the community suggested adding alt words, allowing multiple answers to be accepted as correct. On top of that, the validation system normalizes inputs - handling things like typos, variations, and singular/plural forms, so players don't get unfairly penalized for small differences in wording.

Reward Great Riddles

At some point, during the rapid growth in a very short period of time, the quality of riddles started to stagnate. Some were unsolvable, others just didn't fit the vibe of the community.

To encourage better riddles, I adjusted the rewards and overhauled the XP systems, so that authors now earn more XP when their riddles hit certain milestones, like upvotes or successful solves. At the same time, theinitial XP for simply creating a riddle was lowered, shifting the focus toward quality over quantity with incremental factors.

Player Types

The community mainly consists of two types of players: those who love quirky, joke-like riddles and those who appreciate highly curated, deep-thinking riddles. Naturally, this sometimes leads to differences in expectations, making it important to define what fits the subreddit and what doesn't.

There's a living wiki page outlining the Do's and Don'ts, along with the overall vision of the community. It's constantly evolving, shaped by community feedback and needs. This wiki is a must for subreddit moderators to agree on and live by example.

All in all, the coexistence of both player types has worked out surprisingly well (for the most part!), and seeing that balance in action makes me incredibly proud of everyone in the community. This benefited from transparently communicating through an initial education comment wave from the mod-Team and the introduction of the Wiki.

Gaming On Reddit

Reddit as a gaming canvas was a whole new world for me at first, figuring out what works and what doesn't was a challenge.

I connected with other Devvit developers, Reddit staff, and awesome communities like r/riddles. Inhaling all the feedback. Learning and growing together led to some some cool cross-linking subreddit-centric games such as r/ninigrams and r/syllacrostics in the widget panel.

What I learned

Give users the freedom to contribute, not just by creating content (riddles and comments per se), but by shaping the app itself. Let them be part of the development process.

There are two great examples I want to share, Posts that I wasn't sure would resonate well at first, but they ended up massively improving Riddonkulous and helped set clear priorities. Take constructive feedback to heart and listen to your community, which is naturally your audience for your game.

Anyone else think AI clues are killing the game
https://www.reddit.com/r/riddonkulous/comments/1j5yq20/anyone_else_think_ai_clues_are_killing_this_game/
Are actual riddles hard to find?
https://www.reddit.com/r/riddonkulous/comments/1j207lc/are_actual_riddles_hard_to_find/

Riddlers value freedom on how they express themselves, both in crafting and solving riddles. Whether it's line breaks, fonts, riddle types, or adding alternative words that count as correct answers, giving players the power to customize their creations is a huge win but also means proper moderation. Overall I think it makes the app more flexible, the riddles more creative, and the experience better for everyone playing.

Most users play on their phones, so a mobile-first approach for UI and performance was the way to go. To optimize for different screen sizes, the dimensions interface from the Devvit Context is passed through an extended property, helping to detect whether a post is being viewed on a small or larger viewport. This makes it easier to fine-tune the layout and ensure a smooth experience across devices.

With over 80,000 riddlers playing, performance is .. kind of essential, not only on the home-feed but as a whole. Devvit provides a caching strategy that helps speed things up by caching user-specific or shared resources. This significantly improves performance, reducing unnecessary network load.

The Devvit Cache helper is a great tool, but it should be used with caution, especially when handling user input. It's important to ensure that cached data doesn't interfere with allowed or restricted actions, keeping gameplay smooth while maintaining integrity.

What's next for Riddonkulous

Riddle Raid Boss Event is an upcoming feature expected to launch in April. It's a fully-fledged real-time experience where riddlers team up to take down a Riddle Raid Boss and its Guardians. With 150 riddles planned, I'm stoked to have some aaawesome authors contributing making them both fun and challenging for players to solve. Preview and Sneak Peak.
Riddler License Card (working title) is a personal space for riddlers in the works, giving players a place to track their stats: riddles created, numeric ID, level, XP, and progress towards unlockable achievements. Unlocking achievements will reward credits and enhanced features, like customizing the background of riddle posts. This update will also include a settings menu, letting players disable/enable private messages or tweak other notifications from the Riddonkulous app, giving more control over their experience.
Library / Bar / Shop is a Devvit webview based feature that comes also in a pixel-style setting that unlocks deeper gameplay elements. This feature will provide access to various unlockable content such as cosmetics, subscription, enhancing the overall experience. The concept is still in the works, but the goal is to offer more ways to engage and customize the game while keeping things visually fun and immersive.
More versatile reoccuring Post-Types are planned, "Ask The Dev" monthly, hightlighting outstanding Riddles as a Gallery-like Post, "Looking for Feedback on my Riddle" and showcasing Leadeboards top performing Riddlers
Improve overall Riddle quality and UX with tutorial(s), a trusted riddler's status, better validation and improved (auto-)moderation. This also includes scaling the mod-team accordingly to new situations an growth.

Final Words

I am very, very, veeeerrry happy to have such an awesome Riddonkulous mod-Team and an incredibly supportive, engaging community. Y'all are the reason this app keeps getting better. Thank you for being a part of it and making it what it is!