ninelands-reddit/docs/submission.md

Einreichung – Texte und Checkliste

Sammelstelle für alle Texte und Assets rund um Devpost und das Developer Portal. Texte auf Englisch (Jam-Vorgabe), Erklärungen auf Deutsch. Stand: 2026-11-13.

Developer Portal – In-app catalog

App: developers.reddit.com → ninelands-game → Developer Settings → In-app catalog.

Feld	Text	Zeichen
Tile tagline	Claim the nine lands – a new map every day.	43
Featuring description	A fresh 9×9 map every day. Place your castle, farmers, knights and bishops, claim land and gold, earn three stars and climb today's leaderboard.	147
Description (15–200)	Daily strategy puzzle: one 9×9 map for everyone. Build your realm piece by piece, claim lands and gold, chase three stars and keep your streak alive.	151
Game category	Game → Strategy	–
App icon	Icon aus dem Hauptspiel (Ninelands)	–

Assets

Erzeugen mit npm run capture → dist/marketing/ (nicht im Repo). Vor der Einreichung neu aufnehmen (z. B. mit Winter-Brett).

Datei	Feld	Vorgabe Portal	Stand
featuring.mp4	Featuring asset	MP4, 3:2, 1000–1500 px breit, 6–15 s, ≤ 30 fps, ≤ 3 MB	1500×1000, 11,3 s, 1,7 MB
fallback.gif	Fallback (animiert)	3:2, 1000–1500 px, 3–10 s Schleife, Ziel ≤ 2 MB	1000×667, 6 s, 1,8 MB
fallback.png	Fallback (Standbild)	1500×1000 empfohlen, ≤ 800 KB	52 KB
tile.png	Tile image	560×256 empfohlen, ≤ 800 KB	58 KB

Nur die Spielfläche, keine Menüs (Wunsch Besitzer). Karte vom 2026-10-10 – läuft nie als Tageskarte (kein Spoiler).

Devpost – Project overview

Elevator pitch (≤ 200 Zeichen)

Empfehlung (176 Zeichen):

Ninelands is a daily strategy puzzle on Reddit: one 9×9 map for everyone, place castles, farmers and knights to claim lands and gold, earn three stars and climb the leaderboard.

Alternativen:

• (181) A daily port of the strategy game Ninelands: everyone gets the same 9×9 map each day – build your realm, chase three stars, keep your streak and compare strategies in the comments.
• (141) One map. Nine lands. Every day. Build your realm piece by piece, chase three stars and climb today's leaderboard – right inside a Reddit post.

About the project (Markdown, LaTeX erlaubt)

Abschnitt „Inspiration“ bei Bedarf persönlicher machen (eigene Worte des Besitzers). Ob die KI-Unterstützung erwähnt wird, entscheidet der Besitzer (die Regeln erlauben technische Hilfe, solange Ideen und Rechte beim Teilnehmer liegen).

## Inspiration

Ninelands started as a strategy board game on a 9×9 board split into nine lands: you place a castle, farmers,
knights and bishops, every piece claims land, and the goal is to rule the nine lands. It runs on the web, desktop,
Android and itch.io – and its most popular mode has always been the **map of the day**, where everyone plays the same
map and compares results.

Reddit felt like the natural home for that mode. A daily map is a shared puzzle, and a shared puzzle wants a place to
talk about it: _Where did you put your castle? How did you get 9/9 lands?_ So we built **Ninelands for Reddit** – a
focused, bite-sized daily edition that lives inside a post, with the comment thread as the place to compare realms.

## What it does

- **One 9×9 map per day, the same for everyone.** A new post appears automatically every day.
- **Easy to start, hard to master.** Tap to preview what a piece would claim and how much gold it brings; tap again to
  place it. The line below the board explains why a cell fits or not – no wall of rules.
- **Three stars per map:** reach the gold target, rule the lands target, and both in one game. Targets come from
  computer games on that very map, so every day is fair.
- **Leaderboard and streaks.** Only your first game counts. More stars first, then more gold, then the earlier
  submission.
- **Your realm.** Unlock board themes with your streak and new banners and factions (orcs, pirates) with your stars.
- **Reddit-native.** Post your result to the comments with one tap, earn a 🔥 streak flair, and the best player of the
  day wears 👑 _Ruler of the day_ the next day.

## How we built it

- **Devvit Web** with plain TypeScript, bundled by esbuild; no UI framework. An inline start screen in the feed, the
  full board in expanded mode.
- **The original engine, untouched.** The Ninelands engine is pure TypeScript (seeded RNG, `legalMoves`,
  `applyMove`, replay). A sync script copies it – plus the SVG board renderer – from a tagged release, so the Reddit
  edition plays exactly like the original and fixes flow in one direction only.
- **A server that trusts nothing.** The client sends only its moves. The server replays them with the same engine and
  computes gold, lands and stars itself, so results cannot be faked.
- **Redis leaderboards.** Each day is a sorted set. To rank by stars, then gold, then submission time in a single
  score, we use

  $$\text{score} = 100\,000 \cdot \text{stars} + \text{gold} + \frac{1}{\text{seq} + 1}$$

  where $\text{seq}$ is the running number of the submission. The fraction lies in $(0, \tfrac12]$, so it only breaks
  ties – and it makes every score unique, which turns a player's rank into a simple
  $\text{rank} = \text{count} - \text{zRank}$.
- **First attempt only**, enforced atomically with `hSetNX` – two parallel submissions can never both count.
- **Daily posts** via the Devvit scheduler, **Devvit Journeys** for analytics (journey starts when the castle is
  placed, a progress event per star, the end carries the gold as score).
- **Privacy by design:** all user data expires 30 days after a player's last game.

## Challenges we ran into

- **Making the daily map unspoilable.** The website has a map of the day too – including a replay of the best game.
  The Reddit edition therefore uses its own seed, so its daily map can never be looked up elsewhere.
- **Knowing when to stop.** In the original, a game ends when no move is left. On a phone that can drag on, especially
  under the law _One farm per land_, where only costly knights remain. We added an _End game_ button, and the game now
  detects when no remaining move earns gold and suggests ending.
- **Fitting a strategy board into a post.** The board, the goals and nine piece costs have to be readable on a phone in
  portrait mode. Container queries keep the board as large as possible without pushing the hint line away.
- **Platform details:** a template workflow our CI runner didn't understand, Redis commands that are not enabled for
  every app, `localStorage` that is cleared on every app update (so all choices live in Redis), and an analytics router
  that expects Express while our server has no framework – we rebuilt its five endpoints by hand.

## What we learned

- A daily game lives from **one shared moment**: same map, same day, one first attempt. Every feature we kept serves
  that moment; menus and settings did not make the cut.
- Contextual hints beat tutorials. Showing _why_ a move doesn't fit teaches the rules faster than any rules screen.
- Porting is easiest when the game logic is pure: the engine moved to a new platform without a single change.

## What's next

- Seasonal events beyond the winter festival, and more unlockable banners and boards.
- A weekly challenge with a twist (fog of war, bandit camps) – both already exist in the original engine.
- An optional duel against the computer after the daily map.

Built with (Tags, max. 25)

typescript, javascript, html5, css3, svg, node.js, devvit, devvit-web, reddit, reddit-api, redis, devvit-scheduler, devvit-journeys, esbuild, biome, playwright, ffmpeg, pixel-art

„Try it out“-Links

• App: https://developers.reddit.com/apps/ninelands-game
• Spielen: https://www.reddit.com/r/Ninelands/ (angelegt 2026-11-13, Restricted; erst eintragen, wenn der erste Post steht)
• Original-Spiel: https://ninelands.stackteam.at
• Code: Repo ist privat – nur eintragen, wenn es öffentlich wird (optional)

Devpost – Project media und Video

Erzeugen mit npm run capture:trailer → dist/marketing/ (nicht im Repo, ≈ 2 min). Das echte Spiel läuft in einer Bühne (links Untertitel, rechts Handy), API als Attrappe, ein Bot spielt die Karte vom 2026-10-10 (3 Sterne, beendet per „End game“). Leaderboard-Namen sind erfunden.

Datei	Wofür	Vorgabe	Stand
trailer.mp4	Video (Vimeo/YouTube, Devpost-Link)	< 1 min, öffentlich	1920×1080, ≈ 47 s, ≈ 9 MB
vimeo-cover.png	Vorschaubild (Thumbnail) auf Vimeo	16:9, 1920×1080	Logo + Brett mit 3 Sternen
gallery/00…06-*.png	Devpost „Image gallery“ (Reihenfolge = Name)	JPG/PNG/GIF, ≤ 5 MB, 3:2 empfohlen, ≤ 15	7 Bilder, 1800×1200, ≤ 150 KB

Galerie: 00 Titel, 01 Tagespost, 02 Land beanspruchen (Vorschau), 03 drei Sterne, 04 Ergebniskarte mit Bestenliste und Freischaltung, 05 Realm, 06 Schluss. Ergänzen lassen sich echte Reddit-Screenshots (Kommentar im Thread, Flair).

Bildunterschriften (Devpost-Caption je Bild, Englisch):

Bild	Caption
00-cover.png	Ninelands – a daily strategy game on Reddit. One 9×9 map a day, the same for everyone.
01-daily-post.png	The daily post: today's map, its law, three goals, your streak and today's best – one tap to play.
02-claim-land.png	Place castle, knights, farmers and bishops to mine gold. A live preview shows what each move earns.
03-three-stars.png	One star each for the gold goal, for ruling all nine lands, and for doing both in one game.
04-result.png	The result card: stars, rank, streak and new unlocks. Post your result to the comments with one tap.
05-realm.png	Your realm: colours, factions, boards and banners, unlocked by stars and streaks. Same rules for everyone.
06-outro.png	A new map every day at 00:01 UTC on r/Ninelands. A port of Ninelands (ninelands.stackteam.at).

Eigene Reddit-Aufnahmen (optional): hochkant (Handy oder Handy-Ansicht im Browser) als dist/trailer/input/feed.mp4 (Tagespost im Feed, ≤ 8 s) und dist/trailer/input/comment.mp4 (der Ergebnis-Kommentar im Thread, ≤ 8 s) ablegen (auch .mov/.webm), dann npm run capture:trailer neu laufen lassen – sie erscheinen im Handy an passender Stelle. Keine aktuelle Tageskarte zeigen (Spoiler) und keine fremden Nutzernamen.

Vimeo-Beschreibung (Musik ist CC BY-SA 4.0, Nennung nötig):

Ninelands – a daily strategy game on Reddit (Devvit Web). A new 9×9 map every day, one shared leaderboard per
subreddit, streaks, unlockable realms and your result in the comments. Port of Ninelands (ninelands.stackteam.at).

Music: "Dreamscape (part I)" by Vee Ray, CC BY-SA 4.0 (re-encoded).
Graphics: "Mini World Sprites" by Shade and octoshrimpy, CC0. Font: Pixelify Sans, SIL OFL 1.1.

Noch zu schreiben

• Portierung angeben (Kategorie „Best Ported Daily Game“): Ninelands gehört StackTeam; erklären, was seit dem 11. Nov. neu entstanden ist (Pflicht für bestehende Projekte): neue Codebasis auf Devvit Web, neuer Tagesmodus mit eigenem Seed, serverseitig nachgespielte Bestenliste in Redis, Streak, Realm-Freischaltungen, Flair, Ergebnis als Kommentar, Devvit Journeys. Übernommen: Engine und Brett-Darstellung (Kopie mit festem Stand v0.11.0), Sprites, Musik.
• Testanleitung für die Jury (kurz, Englisch).

Checkliste Einreichung (Abgabe 9. Dez. 2026, 03:00 MEZ)

Pflicht laut offiziellen Regeln:

• Devpost: Text-Beschreibung (Funktionen)
• App-Link: https://developers.reddit.com/apps/ninelands-game (entsteht beim Upload)
• README.md im Repo-Wurzelverzeichnis (Spiel und Anleitung) – vorhanden, vor Abgabe prüfen
• Demo: Link zum Subreddit (r/Ninelands, öffentlich, < 200 Mitglieder) und zu einem Post mit dem Spiel
• Angabe „Portierung“ + was im Jam-Zeitraum neu entstanden ist

Optional:

• Video < 1 min, öffentlich auf YouTube/Vimeo (die Jury darf allein danach urteilen)
• Öffentliches Repo (Repo ist derzeit privat)
• Developer-Platform-Feedback-Umfrage (eigener Preis)

Nicht tun:

• Kein devvit publish – hochladen und playtesten reicht, die App darf privat bleiben.
• Während der Bewertung (9.–16. Dez.) keine riskanten Uploads; Tagesposts müssen weiterlaufen.

Besitzer entscheidet bei der Anmeldung: Einzelperson oder Organisation (StackTeam) – betrifft Preisgeld und Steuerformulare (W-8BEN).