Thai Pirates Attack
Fall of Saigon
Refuge Camp
Work in America
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Inspiration

Our main inspiration for creating this game was a mixture of a passion for retro games like Oregon Trail and a love for our Vietnamese community. All three collaborators on this project were first-generation Vietnamese, so we decided to create a project to raise awareness of the hardships our community faced while fleeing the Vietnam War, in a format that would appeal to younger people.

What it does

It is an educational single-player story mode game that takes place after the Fall of Saigon in 1975. Essentially, you must flee the country because of political persecution and economic instability. 1/3 of all Vietnamese refugees died fleeing the country, so it is not an easy task to immigrate to America. By playing this game, we hope to shed light on how much hardship Vietnamese immigrants endured, especially since most history taught in America on the Vietnamese people focuses on the Americans losing to the Viet Cong and withdrawing from the Vietnam War.

How we built it

We used Vite + React 19 + TypeScript + shadcn/ui + Tailwind, backed by Supabase for auth, game state persistence, and edge functions. The main setup for the stack came from enter.pro. Enter.pro hosts our game with a custom domain name from godaddy, and is responsible for allowing three rookies to build an extensive app in 36 hours. We also have usage of Gemma 4 and ElevenLabs for AI in our interviewer NPC and narration, respectively.

Challenges we ran into

We ran into challenges deciding how we wanted to progress our story. Originally, we wanted to shed light on many different Vietnamese refugee experiences, but we realized we should do the most generic one because of time constraints and complexity. Another challenge was gamifying the Vietnamese refugee experience without disrespecting their plight. Therefore, we did not include badges or a leaderboard because it would defeat the educational aspect of our game and disrespect the people who actually died fleeing Vietnam. We also could not use AI to create the story and art all on its own because we did not want to risk creating a strawman fallacy toward the Vietnamese refugees, such as our parents. Also, at the end, our usage of ElevenLabs broke, and our dialogue boxes did as well during the merging process.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

We are extremely proud of the animated pixel art that many cut scenes and events utilized. It turned out beautifully, even though none of us are artists. We are also proud to have implemented a working Gemma 4 model as an interviewer for a visa to help people understand the process better.

What we learned

We learned that building a game from scratch is extremely hard, but rewarding. We also learned to use enter.pro and how easy it is to create a tech stack. We also learned to finish hackathons ahead of time, so any serious debugging can be done. There are still some minor bugs in our game, but it does not interfere with actual gameplay (more so with visual and audio).

What's next for Vietnam Trail

We are going to expand the number of paths you can take in the game to truly put the Vietnamese refugee in perspective. We understand that not every Vietnamese refugee had the same process, and not all of them ended up in America, so we will be expanding to other countries as well. We also plan to patch any bugs that we accidentally created at the end of the Hackathon timeframe.