Daily word puzzle game based on polysemy

Details

External ID

48221356

Source

HN

Company

—

Product

Daily word puzzle game based on polysemy

Website domain

omitten.com

Launched

May 21, 2026

Cohort

—

Upvotes

6

Upvotes percentile

0.3053311793214863

Tags

—

Fetched at

Sept. 7, 2026, 9:26 p.m.

Updated at

Sept. 7, 2026, 9:26 p.m.

Description

I built this daily puzzle game called "Omitten".The idea came from a compulsive habit I got from reading books on an e-reader and constantly looking up definitions (iykyk). Quite often you'd see a single word with 20 different meanings in different contexts, and I wanted to build a game around that.In the game you get a maximum of 4 clues. The first one will generally be an archaic form or an unusual context. The second and third pivot into entirely different domains to try and trick your brain, and by the fourth, it should be fairly obvious. You start with only the first clue, and as you make guesses or skip, the next clues unlock, but you lose 25 points per clue.Today is only Day 5 of the project, and it is currently a slaughterhouse. The win rate is sitting at 24% (you can see this yourself after completing) because today's word is a sneaky one. Typically the win rate sits at the 90-99% area, so yeah.The tech stack itself is fairly simple, it uses a fairly minimal svelte frontend — relies on their motion and transition APIs for most of the animations (combined with some simple CSS animations). On the backend it's a Go monolith running a [Connect RPC server](https://connectrpc.com/), which was a super fun learning experience and using what is almost exactly GRPC directly on frontend feels magical. I tried to follow Google's AIP as closely as I could for the rpc methods, and I quite like the way it turned out. The backend is a simple pg database that's interacted with via sqlc and atlas for migrations. By day 3 people started asking about accounts so they could play across devices and keep their streak, so it was a fun chance to use PASETO for tokens and argon2 for password hashing.I'm excited to hear what people think and any feedback is much appreciated!

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