Why I Built My First Game – Creating Lionfish Hunt
Intro
In February, I set off on a hackathon journey with my friend for Hack for Humanity 2026 and created Lionfish Hunt. This year, Hack for Humanity was dedicated to bringing people together to design solutions that solve environmental issues. We wanted to create a game that made learning fun while promoting awareness about Lionfish as an invasive species. And while I personally value environmentalism, this hackathon really fulfilled three of my interests.
Mindful Creation
Leading up to this hackathon, I had been struggling with living in a world of mindless consumption. I spent hours consuming what I considered educational content, convincing myself that it was “productive”, but I literally had nothing to show for it other than copious amounts of notes and a mountain of unfinished projects. To prove to myself that this content could be productive and actually lead to “production”, I wanted to start working on projects that could apply my skills and knowledge to producing a product. This hackathon, like this blog post, was my commitment to move towards mindful creation.
Unity & Game Development
On the technical side, I wanted to learn more about game development because as an avid gamer and Industrial Engineer, I had worked on a podcast series about the business of video games, one of my many unfinished projects. From my research, game engines stood out as an enigmatic but large component of the value chain, with Unity and Unreal Engine dominating the industry. Additionally, when my friend and I were deciding on a project for the hackathon, we both realized this would be a great opportunity to explore our interest in game development and personally for me to learn more about game engines, specifically Unity.
My friend took the lead on the gameplay development and created an action-based game where the player is a conservation diver hunting invasive Lionfish (also beyond the mechanics, she is an incredible artist who drew all the art for the game). I found development in Unity pretty challenging. Because I was working with a new interface, I needed to leverage online tutorials and reframe my mindset with Unity’s object-oriented nature. While I still have a lot to learn, it feels good to know that I could deliberately sit down with a tutorial and apply the basics to design basic UI and user flows in Unity. Most of all though, instead of my typical half-finished apps, this project had a concrete deadline, so I was able to complete that chain and feel the satisfaction of creating a product beyond the initial steps of learning and applying.
GreenPT & AI Integration
GreenPT, an AI model powered by renewable energy, thematically sponsored Hack for Humanity. We integrated it into Lionfish Hunt as an in-game learning agent, letting players ask questions about Lionfish and their ecological impact mid-gameplay. My job was getting the AI to actually behave like a helpful, focused educator rather than a generic chatbot. I experimented with different system prompts — adjusting persona, tone, and specificity — and was surprised by how much a few deliberate constraints changed the quality of responses. It was the first time I’d shipped an LLM integration in a real product, and it made all the time I’d spent reading about prompt engineering finally feel tangible.
Conclusion
This project wasn’t groundbreaking, but that was never the point. The point was to finish something, and we did. Building Lionfish Hunt taught me that the gap between consuming and creating isn’t as wide as it feels; it just requires showing up and shipping even if it’s not perfect. I’m carrying that lesson forward into the projects still sitting in my drafts folder. And to my friend, thank you for jumping into the deep end with me!
Check Out Lionfish Hunt Here!
- Game: https://alux-lin.itch.io/lionfish-hunt
- Devpost (Hackathon): https://devpost.com/software/lionfish-hunt (We got 6th!)
- GitHub Repo: https://github.com/LunarOpal/lionfish-hunt