The Fourth Scale

Inspiration

The Fourth Scale is a fantasy-styled math puzzle game designed to test your wits. This game was inspired by the extremely difficult and rigorous interview games played at top-paying quantitative trading firms. For this hackathon, we decided to bring these quirky but extremely competitive games to the masses - with no PHD and 4.0 gpa required!

What it does

After clicking Play, the game begins and the countdown starts. It may seem intimidating at first, but your task is to balance the Fourth Scale. You are allowed to use any combination of gems besides the combination on the other side of the Fourth Scale. But think fast! You only have 30 seconds to balance the scale. There are three rounds, see if you can pass all three!

How we built it

This app was built using Devvit and Reddit Blocks. The gem combinations are stored in Redis, and each user is only allowed to attempt each puzzle once. The combinations for each puzzle are also stored in Redis so that all players will experience the same puzzle and can converse about it afterwards.

Challenges we ran into

Although Reddit Blocks was new to us as we have very little front end experience, we were able to get everything going due to the good documentation. The AI assistant was especially helpful, it was able to get the correct documentation for all of the questions, however sometimes it would give advice that was out of date. The built-in Redis key-value store was incredibly useful for completing the project, and helped us solve problems with keeping the same puzzle across all users and keeping a leaderboard.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

We are very proud of how far this game has come from the concept. Originally, the idea was just an image of the scales and have people put their answers in the comments. However, now there are levels and time pressure which makes the game truly fun to play and not feel like an exercise. The leaderboard also adds an element of community and the comments are a great place to discuss what you thought of the problem.

What we learned

We learned that game development is difficult but rewarding. Figuring out what is fun and what is not is a long process of trial and error, iteration over iteration. We also learned Devvit and Reddit blocks. We found it easy to use, rewarding, and pretty well documented.

What's next for The Fourth Scale

There is so much more that can be added, and we will probably never be satisfied. Our biggest objective is to try to make the game more community focused, and centered around Reddit. As for how we could do that, we are always open to ideas. Making the levels the same across all users was a great start.