About SpellCity
I’m Jared, the creator of SpellCity. I’m building a spelling game for people who want the words they use to come a little more easily. The idea grew out of my own experience with spelling, long before I started watching my children learn it.
A reason to care about spelling
As a kid, I wanted to get out of spelling bees as quickly as possible. Spelling wasn’t something I felt good at, and I didn’t want to stay up there trying in front of everyone. Getting out meant I didn’t have to keep doing it.
Years later, spelling mattered in a way I hadn’t expected.
I found a job I was excited about. I knew I had technical skills to develop, and I hoped I’d have the opportunity to learn. Three or four days into the job, I was let go after making a spelling mistake in an email to a client.
That experience stayed with me. Ever since, I’ve been trying to figure out how to get better at spelling. It also gave me a reason to want to build something that could help other people avoid a similar experience.
Practice worth coming back to
Watching my own children learn to spell brought those questions into our homeschool. As we worked through spelling words and different ways to practice, I kept thinking there should be another way to approach it.
Learning takes repetition. Working toward mastery means coming back to something and trying to recall it again. But remembering how I felt during spelling bees, I wanted to make something people would choose to come back to.
That’s where casual games came into the picture. People spend time building little worlds, making progress, and returning to see what they can do next. I wondered what it would look like to bring that kind of experience together with spelling practice.
Giving words a place
The other piece was the idea of a memory palace: connecting things you want to remember with places you can picture.
SpellCity brings that idea into a spelling game. In Memory Street, buildings correspond to letter positions in a word. The street gives those letters places to belong, alongside opportunities to practice recalling and spelling the word. Building and decorating a city gives learners something to return to as they continue practicing.
My goal is to make that repetition feel like a worthwhile part of spending time in a little world.
For the words you want to use
When I have to stop and think about how to spell a word, some of my attention gets pulled away from what I’m trying to say. I want those words to come more readily, so I can keep thinking about the idea, the email, or the work in front of me.
That’s what I’m building toward with SpellCity.
Homeschooling is part of my story, and homeschool families are an important audience for the game. But spelling practice can matter at any age. I’m building for children learning new words and adults who still have words they hesitate over, myself included.
SpellCity is in open alpha. There’s more to build and learn, but the purpose is clear to me: create a place people want to return to, where they can keep practicing the words they want to know.
— Jared