I've aways been jealous of those people who seem to have such a smorgasbord of vocabuary, and are able to articulate their thoughts, opinions, feelings, and reasoning so well. In a bid to improve my own vocabulary, I started writing down, in my notes app, any obscure word I came across in my daily life. My list quickly started filling up, but I had a problem... whilst I had a great bank of obscure words, I had no real way of learning what they meant. It was at this point when I knew I had to create a webgame to help me learn new vocabulary...
I taught myself HTML & CSS (the markup and styling languages of the web) in the covid lockdowns of 2020, using online tutorials, youtube courses, and the mimo app. More recently, I've been learning Javascript. Using my skills in these languages, I knew that I could create some form of vocabulary memorisation game. After completing my GCSEs not that long ago, I know that repetition, while tedious, is an effective way of memorising things. So, I knew that I wanted to create something which incorporates repition. I also knew that I wanted to create something fast-paced, mostly due to the fact that I have a rather low attention span, and would get bored of something slow...
This is how I came up with the original concept of Obscura... a definition is selected from an array at random, shown on the screen, and asks a user to select the word it defines from four given options. It was a simple idea, and I had a prototype up and running fairly quickly.
After playing around with my prototype, I came to a realisation. If someone doesn't know which word is being defined already, the game is useless. So, I decided to add the options for hints. I decided to give five hints, ordered in a way from least-giving-away of the word, to most-giving-away of the word. But giving away hints, especially ones that made the game incredibly easy, didn't seem entirely just. And as such, I decided the need for a points scoring system. If a user selected the correct word, they get 100 points. If they used 1 hint, they get 80 points, 2 hints: 60 points, 3 hints: 40 points, etc.