GIF Enigma

Every GIF Holds a Secret, Can You Uncover It?

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Inspiration

GIF Enigma transforms passive GIF consumption on Reddit into active engagement by using GIFs as visual riddles. We created a game that challenges users to decode meaning from popular visual content while exercising creative thinking.

What it does

GIF Enigma is a word/phrase-guessing game where players interpret a sequence of GIFs to uncover a hidden word or phrase. Players start with 100 points and can reveal up to 4 progressive GIF hints, with each hint becoming more direct about the answer. Each hint reduces your score, creating a strategic balance between getting more information and maintaining a high score. For longer words or phrases, players can also request letter hints with varying penalties based on the answer's length. The game features a Creator Mode where users can craft their own puzzles by selecting secret words, curating GIF hints from suggestions, and posting directly to our dedicated subreddit for others to solve.

How we built it

We built GIF Enigma using Devvit, Reddit's app development platform, allowing us to create an experience native to Reddit. The application's backend relies on Redis for data persistence, user scores, and caching GIF search results.

For GIF selection, we integrated with the Tenor API to provide a wide variety of visual hints from categories such as Movies, Games, Books, and General. Each puzzle follows a carefully designed progression from abstract connections to more direct clues, guided by suggestions from Google's Gemini API to help creators select appropriate search terms.

The frontend was built with React, focusing on a clean, intuitive interface that works seamlessly within Reddit's ecosystem. We used Redis Sorted Sets to maintain leaderboards and track active games, creating a persistent community experience.

Challenges we ran into

We brainstormed numerous ideas and faced the challenge of narrowing down to an interactive, simple, and engaging concept suitable for the Reddit community. We encountered storage constraints when trying to cache large GIFs in Redis, which led us to restrict our selection to nano, tiny, and medium-sized GIFs only. As React developers, we initially faced challenges acclimatizing to Devvit's platform, but eventually overcame these obstacles after thoroughly reviewing the documentation. Designing a balanced scoring system required multiple iterations to find the right penalty structure for different hint types and word lengths.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

We're particularly proud of creating a two-way engagement platform where users can be both players and creators. The progressive hint design system enables creators to craft puzzles that gradually reveal information which makes users feel simple and interactive in an engaging way.

What we learned

Through this project, we gained valuable experience with Devvit and learned how to create engaging Reddit-native applications. We deepened our understanding of Redis as a versatile data store beyond simple key-value caching. The process of designing the progressive hint system taught us about the psychology of visual puzzle solving and how people make connections between images and words/phrases. Also, it led us to think objectively from a user's perspective in creating an interactive platform.

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