Hurdle

A daily word game about sustainability

A daily habit is worth more to a platform than an occasional visit.

What we did CodeLeap designed and built the game and integrated it into the Hurd app, with dictionary validation, progress persistence, shareable results and an archive of past puzzles, and attached each word's definition to the moment of completion, which is where the learning actually lands.

Hurd is a sustainability app where employees rate their employer's environmental performance, share climate initiatives and work through learning content. CodeLeap designed and built Hurdle, the daily word puzzle inside it, using a game format people already understand to introduce sustainability vocabulary and concepts. It is a small product with a specific job, which is to make engagement with the app habitual rather than occasional.

Product features

Daily word challenge

Each day presents a new sustainability-related word to guess within a limited number of attempts. The daily cadence is what turns a one-off visit into a habit.
Dynamic feedback

Every guess produces instant visual feedback distinguishing correct letters, misplaced characters and incorrect entries. The responsiveness of that feedback is most of what makes the game feel good to play.
Intelligent input validation

Entries are validated against an English dictionary, with real-time feedback when an invalid word is submitted. This removes the frustration of losing an attempt on something the game was never going to accept.
Progress persistence

Game state is saved across sessions, so a user can leave a challenge unfinished and return to find their guesses and visual cues intact. That suits a game people play in a spare moment rather than in one sitting.
Completion and sharing

On completing a challenge, users see the correct word together with its meaning, and can share their result or subscribe to notifications for future puzzles. Attaching the definition to the moment of completion is where the educational payload actually lands.
Hurdle archive

An archive of past challenges lets users play puzzles they have missed. It extends engagement beyond the single daily word and gives new users a body of content to work through immediately.

Challenge

The client wanted to increase engagement on the Hurd app by adding something interactive that would educate users while remaining genuinely enjoyable. That balance is difficult to strike, because educational games tend to fail in one of two directions, either by being too didactic to be fun or too diverting to teach anything.

The format also had to sit comfortably inside an ESG product used by professionals in a serious context. The engineering, while contained, is less trivial than it looks: a word game of this kind depends on dictionary validation, reliable state persistence and feedback rendering that feels instantaneous, and any weakness in those areas is immediately obvious to the player.

Solution

CodeLeap designed and built a word puzzle around sustainability themes and integrated it into the Hurd app. The game uses mechanics players already know, so there is nothing to learn before the first attempt, and it pairs them with educational content delivered at the point of completion, where a definition is most likely to be read and remembered. Progress persistence, dictionary validation and shareable results make the daily challenge easy to fit into a routine, and the archive gives users a reason to keep playing beyond the current puzzle.

The result gives the app a habitual daily touchpoint and builds sustainability awareness through participation rather than instruction.

Tech stack

The tech chosen was our speciality, enabling fast development of performant user interfaces and a reliable infrastructure. Hurdle is available for iOS and Android.

Frontend: React Native (iOS & Android)
Backend: Python, Django, PostgreSQL
Hosting: AWS