Codebrew Hackathon

Inspiration

Aboriginal Australian culture spans 65,000+ years yet remains largely invisible to most people. We wanted to create an experience where players could walk through Country and discover these stories themselves, rather than reading them in a textbook. Challenges we ran into We initially integrated ElevenLabs for high-quality voice narration, but hit a paywall where free-tier API keys couldn't access library voices, forcing us to pivot to the browser's native Web Speech API. Balancing cultural accuracy with engaging gameplay was also a constant challenge — we wanted to respect the source material without making it feel like a lecture. Accomplishments that we're proud of We built a fully playable, visually rich exploration game that runs entirely in the browser with zero backend dependencies. Every landmark tells a real story grounded in publicly available Aboriginal educational resources, and the seasonal chapter system gives each playthrough a different feel. What we learned We gained a deep appreciation for Aboriginal land management and engineering — systems like Budj Bim challenge everything most people assume about pre-colonial Australia. On the technical side, we learned how much can be achieved with procedural generation and how browser-native APIs like Web Speech can be reliable fallbacks when third-party services fall short. What's next for Indigenous Australia: The Journey We plan to expand beyond Victoria to cover cultural landmarks across all of Australia and add pre-recorded voice narration from Aboriginal community members. We'd also like to add a quiz mode and multiplayer elements so the game can be used as an interactive teaching tool in classrooms.

What it does

Players explore a 2D landscape of Victoria/NSW, discovering 20 real Aboriginal cultural landmarks with rich story cards and voice narration. An Elder guide leads them through seasonal chapters that shift the world's lighting and atmosphere, reflecting the deep connection between Country and seasons.

How we built it

We used Phaser 3 with TypeScript for the game engine, Vite for development and bundling, and the Web Speech API for text-to-speech narration. The entire world landscape, landmarks, player sprites is procedurally generated with no external image assets required.

Challenges we ran into

We initially integrated ElevenLabs for high-quality voice narration, but hit a paywall where free-tier API keys couldn't access library voices, forcing us to pivot to the browser's native Web Speech API. Balancing cultural accuracy with engaging gameplay was also a constant challenge we wanted to respect the source material without making it feel like a lecture.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

We built a fully playable, visually rich exploration game that runs entirely in the browser with zero backend dependencies. Every landmark tells a real story grounded in publicly available Aboriginal educational resources, and the seasonal chapter system gives each playthrough a different feel.

What we learned

We gained a deep appreciation for Aboriginal land management and engineering systems like Budj Bim challenge everything most people assume about pre-colonial Australia. On the technical side, we learned how much can be achieved with procedural generation and how browser native APIs like Web Speech can be reliable fallbacks when third-party services fall short.

What's next for Codebrew Hackathon

We plan to expand beyond Victoria/NSW to cover cultural landmarks across all of Australia and add pre recorded voice narration from Aboriginal community members. We would also like to add a quiz mode and multiplayer elements so the game can be used as an interactive teaching tool in classrooms.

Built With

• css3
• phaser.js
• terser
• typescript
• vite