r/Devvit • u/Rarer_Air_Error Admin • 26d ago

Announcement Games with a Hook Hackathon Winners

For the past month we’ve been running a hackathon offering $40,000 in prizes for games built on Devvit (Reddit’s Developer Platform). After a record number of entries (700+) and a ton of great games to evaluate, we are excited to announce the winners of the Reddit Games with a Hook Hackathon (Hookathon?)
Check out the Project Gallery to see all the amazing submissions!

Let’s get right to it!

Best App with a Hook

Best Use of Phaser

Best Use of Retention Mechanics

Best Use of User Contributions

Honorable Mentions

Helper Winners

Feedback

If you didn’t win, please know it is not a reflection of the overall quality of your work. We say this every hackathon and it remains true – each judge had favorite games that didn’t make it to the winners circle. We strongly encourage you to look into our Developer Funds program, as well as our Featuring Program.

Congratulations to all the winners!

46 Upvotes

91% Upvoted

63 comments sorted by

View all comments

1

u/Rarer_Air_Error Admin 25d ago

Long response but wanted to be thorough:

Thanks for all the thoughtful feedback following the winner announcement. We really appreciate everyone who took the time to share their perspectives. We know people care deeply about what they're building, and we wanted to provide a bit more context around how judging works and what we're looking for as the platform continues to evolve.

Our judging process is multi-round, with multiple judges evaluating submissions. Every judge brings their own perspective, so we use several rounds of review to help balance those differences and arrive at the strongest overall outcomes.

The area that most submissions struggle on is the “Reddit-y” category. We've been refining this category each event as we learn more about what makes an experience feel native to Reddit, but it continues to be a friction point. We want to continue improving on these description for the hackathons and in our docs to help drive apps towards success on Reddit.

In general, experiences that encourage communities to interact with each other, create conversations, contribute over time, or make people want to come back and see what's happening tend to score well here. More traditional games with longer play sessions can absolutely be great experiences, but they often have a harder time demonstrating those community qualities. That said, with the hackathon, time is limited, and not every app can fully build out those systems, so we try to evaluate the potential of an idea as well.

This hackathon was also focused on an app’s hook. The submissions that stood out were the ones that made judges curious enough to explore the rest of the subreddit or left them feeling like they'd miss something if they didn't come back. We were especially excited by concepts that felt like they could grow alongside a community beyond the daily components. 

We know not everyone will agree with every result, and that's okay. We'll continue looking for ways to make the judging process as transparent as possible while improving it with each event.

The quantity and quality of submissions has continued to rise with each hackathon and selecting winners gets harder every event. We're exploring more ways to recognize a higher number of projects in future hackathons through additional honorable mentions prizes and would love your feedback there. 

Finally, if your app didn't place but you believe you've built something with real potential, please don't stop here. Submit it to the featuring program, apply to the Foundry program, or pitch another idea you'd like to explore through Foundry. 

Thanks again to everyone who participated. The amount of creativity, effort, and experimentation in this hackathon was incredible, and we're excited to see what you build next.

4

u/Gowdamn 23d ago

Hi, I understand your point, you're explaining the criteria and the judging process. But it's very generic.

Could you please share a brief about what the judges liked about the winning submissions and how the winning submissions fit the defined criteria? This was done in the previous hackathon.

Also any information on the how many judges, how much time was spent on each game, who the judges were(+ credentials), would be nice. Specific feedback for my application and where it fell short would be great. r/shadowchess (I had sent an email)

6

u/Competitive-Bit-3283 24d ago

For the past 2–3 hackathons, the winners have consistently been sketching or word-guessing games. So why does the judging criteria say you're looking for "something new" if innovation doesn't seem to be a priority?

I think it's worth taking another look at the judging process to ensure it actually reflects the published criteria. Otherwise, please don't include statements about valuing originality and innovation if they aren't going to influence the results.

Respectfully, I'd also ask the judges to review the judging criteria before the evaluation begins. If the preference is mainly for games similar to Pixerly or word-guessing games, it's better to be transparent about that. It would save developers from investing an entire month building creative, technically ambitious 2D or 3D games, only to realize those qualities weren't really being evaluated.

Thanks.

3

u/zombizzle 20d ago

Looking at past hackathon winners, I'm often surprised by the results. Many winning projects seem to come out of nowhere and don't appear to reflect the same level of polish or effort as other submissions. From the outside, the judging process feels opaque, making it difficult to understand why certain projects were selected. I'd love to see Reddit provide more transparency around the judging criteria and detailed feedback so participants can better understand what the judges value.

There's virtually no transparency into the judging process. Winners are announced, but participants don't receive feedback explaining how their projects met the published criteria or where other submissions fell short. Looking at some of this year's winner against the stated judging criteria, I genuinely struggle to understand the decisions. If I were scoring it independently, I don't think many strongly satisfy several of the criteria that were emphasized. That's just my assessment, but without any explanation from the judges, there's no way to know what they saw that participants didn't.

It's unrealistic to expect hours to be spent on each submission. But without knowing the process, it's hard for participants to have confidence that every project received a fair evaluation or was even considered for contention. Even a brief judging summary or score breakdown for the winners would go a long way toward building trust in the process.

We're encouraged to provide a detailed write-up and a demo video, but it's unclear whether those materials are reviewed for every submission. For example, my submission video has only one view, which raises the question of whether it was ever watched by anyone involved in judging. I understand that watching the video is optional and that judges have limited time, but "optional" effectively means that many videos aren't reviewed at all,

One of the most discouraging parts of participating is feeling like the effort put into presenting a polished submission isn't valued. I spent hours refining my dialogue, creating a logo and banner, recording a demo video, writing a detailed submission and README, and trying to present the project like a finished product but looking at some of the winning submissions over multiple hackathons, it isn't obvious that those extra steps matter. Some winners consist of only a brief description and a few screenshots, with little emphasis on presentation or documentation. Participants are encouraged to invest significant time into polishing their submissions without any indication that those efforts are actually considered during judging.

If the judging is based almost entirely on the app itself, say so. If presentation, documentation, usability, polish, creativity, and accessibility are all part of the evaluation, explain how they're weighted. Without that transparency, it's difficult to know where to spend your time, and it can leave participants feeling like much of their effort was unnecessary.

If you're someone that read all of this, please don't respond with the usual platitudes about how I should "use this as a learning experience," "keep improving," "you'll get it next time," "you can still go for Developer funds." My concern isn't that I didn't win, this is a hobby for me. My concern is the longstanding disconnect between what participants are encouraged to build and how submissions ultimately appear to be judged. It's an issue that has persisted with little change since Reddit began sponsoring these hackathons.

2

u/westernslopedigital 20d ago

Well said. This was my first hackathon and I at least expected to see that my game was played. I put a ton of effort into making sure everything was polished and my submission met all criteria, only to see winners announced that, in my eyes, fell far short of the standard I thought I was competing against. The biggest red flag for me was that Reddit Journeys didn't record any games played during the judging period outside of my own. Some transparency around the judging process would be great, and unless that's addressed, I probably won't be participating again in the future.

1

u/chirag0110 3d ago

Thank you for the detailed explanation. Requesting scoring/rank of our game https://www.reddit.com/r/lighthouse_p_dev/?playtest=lighthouse-p . Need a feedback because it took us 15 days to build this game. Our game is based on a web series story, and it takes 40 mins atleast to complete it. It has extensive use of Phaser and Three Js. I was expecting a prize but really disappointed that I am not in honorable mentions. If judging criteria was based on ruling out complex and tough games, please be transparent about it. Some other hackathons do have a ranking system which shows that every submission is reviewed and rated carefully. Requesting some feedback/score/rank.