I’ve always been just a little envious of those people with a buffet of vocabulary at their fingertips — the kind who can effortlessly express their thoughts, feelings, and opinions with precision and flair. Determined to sharpen my own word arsenal, I started jotting down every obscure word I stumbled across in my daily life. My notes app soon became a treasure chest of unusual terms… but there was a catch. I’d collected all these wonderful words, yet I couldn’t actually remember what half of them meant. That’s when it hit me: I needed to turn learning them into a game.
My journey into coding began during the lockdowns of 2020, when I taught myself HTML and CSS (the skeleton and style of the web) through online tutorials, YouTube rabbit holes, and the Mimo app. More recently, I’ve been diving into JavaScript. With those tools in my belt, I knew I could build a vocabulary memorisation game. Having just battled through my GCSEs, I was all too aware that repetition — as boring as it sounds — really does work. The trick, though, was making it fun… and fast-paced. I have the attention span of a goldfish, so anything slow was out of the question.
That’s how Obscura was born: a definition pops up at random, and you have to choose the correct word from four options. Simple. I had a prototype running in no time.
But after playing around with it, I realised a flaw — if you didn’t already know the answer, you were basically guessing. So I added hints. Five of them, in fact, arranged from the most cryptic to the most obvious. But handing out easy hints for free didn’t feel quite right… so I introduced a points system. Get the answer without hints? That’s 100 points. Use one hint? 80 points. Two hints? 60. And so on.
Obscura became more than just a vocabulary tool — it became a challenge, a test of memory, and a little dopamine hit every time you got it right.