The Chain

One link a day, together, or the chain breaks for everyone.

The Chain is a Devvit game where an entire subreddit shares one streak.

Every day, N distinct keepers must each place their single link. If enough distinct people show up, the chain holds and a new ring is added to a growing monument. If the community falls short before the day ends, the chain shatters back to zero — for everyone — and a new Chain begins on the gold-veined rubble of the old one.

The rule is what makes it Reddit-native: distinctness is enforced server-side with a Redis sorted set (zAdd to record a keeper, zCard to count distinct keepers). One person tapping a hundred times still counts as one. So at N ≥ 2 a solo clear is structurally impossible — the crowd is not decoration, it is the mechanic. This is a game only a community can play.

1. Open the post. The monument shows the current Chain number, how many days it has held (DAY 9), and today's progress (4 / 6 LINKS TODAY) over a live countdown to the day's end.
2. Tap POUR YOUR LINK. You may place exactly one link per day — your ring drops molten onto the monument and cools into place, and your username is etched into it in gold. Tapping again does nothing; the count only moves for new keepers.
3. Watch the count climb toward the goal N as other keepers arrive. As the clock runs down and the chain is still short, the monument cools toward ash and the countdown starts to blink — the community has to rally.
4. Come back before the countdown ends.
   • Reach N distinct keepers → the chain holds, streak +1, a ring is added.
   • Fall short → the chain shatters to zero and Chain N+1 rises from the rubble.

That's the whole loop: five seconds of play, then a full day of "did we hold?"

• A daily rollover resolves each day as HOLD or SHATTER.
• A daily auto-post (via Devvit's Scheduler) drops the chain back into every keeper's feed with the same liturgical title — Day 23. The chain holds. — so the streak is always one scroll away and the "did we hold overnight?" vigil is the retention loop.
• The shared stake. Your streak is everyone's streak. Missing a day doesn't cost you points — it breaks the chain for the whole community. Absence is the threat.

Every ring on the monument is etched with the username of the keeper who placed it, in Kintsugi gold. A judge (or any new visitor) opening the post alone sees strangers' names carved into the object — and then their own name join them. The community is visible even in a one-person session; the crowd is made of names, not numbers. (There are deliberately no leaderboards or per-user scores — ranking individuals would collapse the communal stake into a personal one. Presence, yes; competition, no.)

The monument is a cairn of volcanic glass, poured one molten ring per surviving day, cooling to black. When it shatters, the community rebuilds on the rubble with the old breaks healed in gold — the gold remembers. Breakage is history, not deletion: that is the thesis, and it turns the game's harshest mechanic (total reset) into its lore. One-heat palette only — Void #0B0B10, Basalt #1A1A22, Ember #FF6A00 → #FFB454, Kintsugi gold #C9A227, Ash #55606E, candlelit text #EDE6DA. See ../DESIGN.md for the full point of view.

• Devvit Web (@devvit/web 0.13.6) — Reddit's Interactive Posts platform.
• Phaser 4.2 — the client renderer (monument, tweens, particles, screen-shake, the place / cool / etch / shatter beats).
• Hono — the server routes (/api/init, /api/contribute, the scheduler and menu internals).
• Redis — the shared-streak engine: a per-day sorted set (chain:d:<day>) gives zAdd/zScore dedup and zCard distinct-keeper counts; chain number, streak, goal and deadline are plain keys. Day boundaries roll over lazily on any read/write, with the Scheduler cron as the guaranteed backup.
• Scheduler — one daily cron (0 0 * * *) that resolves the day and posts the liturgy.

The whole app is switched by a single constant, PLAYTEST, at the top of src/server/core/chain.ts:

• PLAYTEST = false (the submission build) → a "day" is a real 24 hours and every dev surface is stripped from the build.
• PLAYTEST = true → a "day" is compressed to 5 minutes so a week of The Chain playtests in ~35 minutes, and in-game DEV: rollover / reset controls plus the /api/dev/* routes are re-exposed for fast iteration.

npm install
npm run login      # devvit login (once)
npm run dev        # devvit playtest — set PLAYTEST=true first for 5-minute days

Other scripts: npm run build (client + server), npm run type-check, npm run lint, npm run deploy (upload), npm run launch (upload + publish).

Before publishing the submission build, make sure PLAYTEST is false and point dev.subreddit in devvit.json at your real playtest subreddit.

Built for the Reddit "Games with a Hook" hackathon (Devvit + Phaser).