The D. Casefiles

A Reddit Hackathon 2025 Submission

Introduction: A Mysterious Opportunity

Reddit’s Devvit hackathon was an invitation to create something wild, interactive, and massively multiplayer.

Naturally, I thought, What if I made a game where thousands of internet strangers pretended to be detectives while simultaneously proving that democracy is, in fact, a questionable way to solve murders?

Thus, the D. Casefiles was born— a project designed to let redditors truly shape the mystery together. With scheduled content releases designed to spark discussion, a voting system for narrative branches, collective deduction mechanics, a leaderboard the game wasn’t just about solving a case— it was about experiencing a mystery as a community.

This isn’t just a murder mystery; it’s an interactive social experiment. A collaborative storytelling adventure where players argue theories, interpret evidence, and work together (or against each other) to uncover the truth.

The Idea

The "Totally Democratic" Gameplay Loop

The Setup: A dastardly crime is committed. Suspects are introduced.
Investigation Phase: Clues are "discovered" (a.k.a. drip-fed on a schedule, but shh, they don’t need to know that).
Community Polls: Users vote on which leads to follow, and in what order
Evidence Collection: Clues are added to an evidence notebook
Deduction Puzzle: The game features an actual logic-based deduction puzzle to solve the case, ensuring this isn’t just a popularity contest (I learned from Reddit’s r/place that democracy has limits).
The Big Reveal: The truth comes out. Players cheer, cry, or realize they've just spent hours accusing a lampshade.

A leaderboard for the fastest solvers, and a paid hint system for those require assistance with the puzzles

Execution

The Tech Stack (a.k.a. How I Made This Monstrosity Work)

Godot → For the glorious interactive visual novel experience.
Devvit → For polls, scheduled posts, and community engagement features.
Redis → For state management, because nobody wants their sleuthing progress erased by a rogue refresh. And for Leaderboards through sorted sets.
Web View Component → To embed the Godot game directly in Reddit posts, so users never have to leave their sacred feed.

Challenges

1. The Curse of Scheduling

The original app relied on scheduled content releases every two hours with narrative direction decided by community polls, allowing discussion between updates. Unfortunately, this required people to wait—and in a hackathon setting, nobody has time for that. So, for the proof of concept, I removed the scheduled uploads mechanic but kept the polls framework intact. In production, though, the real fun will be in the community engagement, discussions and theory-crafting regarding the mysteries in the time between content releases, and through interactive polling.

2. Balancing Handholding with Actual Player Impact

Redditors love democracy, but as history has proven, letting the internet make decisions is a dicey proposition. The challenge was ensuring that their votes felt meaningful without derailing the narrative into absolute absurdity. The solution? Curated choices that always push the story forward, but in different directions depending on community decisions.

3. Making It Actually Engaging

A murder mystery without stakes is just an elaborate game of Clue. I wanted a real puzzle-solving experience—something more Sherlock than "Among Us in text form." That’s why I implemented an evidence-elimination deduction system, so solving the mystery isn’t just about spam-voting the most suspicious name in a poll.

4. Integrating Godot with Reddit

This was arguably the most technically challenging aspect of the project. WebView lacks native support for Godot, which meant I spent hours debugging phantom errors which did not have proper logs. From seemingly simple things like message passing, fixing WebAssembly (WASM) uploads to Devvit through source-building custom export templates, to restructuring inline CSS/JS to bypass Content Security Policy (CSP) restrictions, and resolving issues related to SharedArrayBuffers and Cross-Origin Resource Sharing (CORS)—it was a relentless battle.

Do I regret choosing Godot?

Not at all. The challenges were significant, but the advantages were undeniable. With Godot, I have access to one of the most powerful open-source game engines available, and I’ve only barely scratched the surface of its full potential in this project.

5. Every Asset, Drawn by Hand

Instead of using pre-made asset packs or AI-generated visuals, I hand-drew every single game asset— from character portraits to UI elements. This ensured a consistent art style that fit the game's tone and atmosphere.

Using custom illustrations also gave me more control over visual storytelling, letting small details in character expressions and environments serve as extra clues. It took time, but the result was a game that felt more cohesive and intentional and also paid homage to this genre of whimsical-noir storytelling that I love.

Final Thoughts (and What’s Next?)

This is only the beginning. The full version will:

Include the original scheduled release mechanic, so the mystery unfolds in real time.
Feature more complex community-driven decisions, leading to multiple possible endings.
Introduce dynamic discussions where players argue over theories, creating Reddit’s most sophisticated detective squad (or biggest hive-mind disaster—either works).

Reddit’s Devvit hackathon gave me a perfect opportunity to blend storytelling, art, social engagement, and puzzle-solving into something truly unique. And if it all goes horribly wrong, well, at least we’ll have a very funny post-mortem.

TL;DR

A murder mystery game on Reddit, where the community pretends to solve the case via polls, while a structured narrative ensures it all makes sense.
Built with Godot, Devvit, and Redis, featuring scheduled content releases, and soon a leaderboard, and a paid hint system.
Challenges included balancing democracy with coherence, removing scheduled content for the hackathon but keeping it for production, and making sure the puzzle felt rewarding to solve.
Future plans include real-time community engagement, branching endings, and an even more elaborate detective experience.
Will the Reddit community solve the case? Probably. Will they accidentally convict a broomstick? Also probable.