Flamingo Journey
A Bilingual Game About Flamingo Habitats & Conservation
Designed and developed by Kathryn Kong
Design Question
How might a game turn factual knowledge about an endangered species into a personal stake, while teaching vocabulary in two languages at once?
Flamingo Journey is a small, self-contained web game: players hatch as a flamingo chick, discover which of five real flamingo species they are, and travel between that species’ actual homelands — learning its diet, habitat, and behavior, and making a conservation choice at each stop.
Player Experience
Hatch
Choose which of five real flamingo species you are — Chilean, Lesser, Greater, Andean, or James's — and read a short self-discovery passage about your species' body and diet.
Migrate
Travel a map of your species' real-world homelands, each with its own habitat, behavior, and life-cycle content.
Protect
At each homeland, respond to a real conservation pressure — habitat loss, water diversion, disturbance — and take a short bilingual knowledge check.
Design Decisions
Play First, No Account Needed
The game opens straight into a "Play as guest" option — progress saves to the browser automatically. Signing in is only needed for players who want their progress synced across devices, so the barrier to trying it is zero.
Bilingual by Design
Every piece of content — species facts, homeland descriptions, conservation choices — can be read in one or two languages at once, so the game can be used for language learning as well as conservation education.
Habitat Health as Feedback
Conservation choices at each homeland aggregate into a habitat-health score the player can review on their profile — turning an abstract issue (species decline) into a visible, cumulative consequence of in-game choices.
Making the Game
Flamingo Journey is built with React and Vite, and ships as an installable PWA — it can be added to a phone’s home screen or a desktop like a native app, and works offline after the first visit.
Reflection
Flamingo Journey started from a simple question: what does it take for a factual, conservation-minded game to actually get played? The answer shaped most of the design — no sign-up wall, an offline-capable installable build, and content structured so the same game doubles as a light bilingual-vocabulary exercise.